The Technology of Yesteryear

1950 Leica IIIf-600 series

The world around us is changing vertiginously. It’s not that I am getting older and my perspective has slowed down; technology and the way we live are being fundamentally transformed under our own eyes, but we are too busy to notice.

We seldom ponder how far and how fast technology has forever altered our lives and who we are as people because of it. We have become the automatons we’ve been warned about decades ago when we thought it was just science fiction designed to entertain us. But here we are.

In my six decades on earth, my life went from riding a rickety, smoke-spewing Diesel bus with holes in the floorboard, a bus that took one hour to transport us six miles to grandma’s house, a wagon full of grain or hay pulled by oxen which took me and grandpa to the corn and wheat grinding mill, a pink Pegasus bicycle with a white banana-shaped seat and a basket, and a soot-smelling train that stopped in every little village and took all day to go 100 miles, to fast-speed trains, supersonic airplanes, fast boats, trucks, SUVs, eighteen-wheelers, and fast cars.

And Americans went from wagon trains in the American West, cowboys and settlers who made their slow and deliberate journey through the harsh landscape of the new world, to Ford’s Model T which helped eventually create the vast network of highways and interstates that crisscross America from “sea to shining sea.” With them came freedom, mobility, and a new way of life that cannot be matched anywhere else in history.

But the global elites are socially re-engineering this new-found culture of freedom into a controlled environment that would be given back to nature and re-wilded, while humans will be crowded into huge urban settlements, all with the idea to save humanity from itself, from climate change Armageddon.

From the humble communication beginnings of the telegraph and the beautiful gas-lit streets in Europe, we eventually got electrified, no more candles and oil lamps, but wood-burning stoves and charcoal-burning outdoor pits remained.

People bought rotary-dial phones but service was hard to get and expensive; often four customers were assigned to a line and we had to ask nicely the other three parties to get off the line if we wanted to make an emergency call or to call at all. And we had to listen for the clicks to make sure they were not listening in on our conversation.

The female operator, and it was always a female, would assist us in dialing an international line. We had to wait for hours before she would call with a connection to a number in a country across the Atlantic. And it sounded like the phone cable was swimming underwater and the voices were garbled as if they were drowning in the ocean. The call was very expensive, $10 the first three minutes and then $3 each additional minute, depending on the country called. A loved-one’s voice which did come across thousands of miles of underwater phone cable was very precious. And then one day phone connections were made via satellites deployed into space.

Now phone calls are cheap or free, but most of my relatives, the ones I really cared about, have passed away or are lingering in nursing homes. In 1989, I spent over $1,000 in a three-week period talking to strangers who were taking care of my dying father. I never got a chance to speak to my dad, but I was stuck with a phone bill from South Central Bell that was very hard to pay. As a college student, finishing my doctorate, it was way more than I was making in a month. And my babies needed that money for food and shelter. But, the bill was paid after my Dad passed away. I would give anything to be able to talk to him again.

When my children were small, I could not afford the very expensive camcorders, thousands of dollars, to film my precious babies. Today, a relatively inexpensive smart phone can videotape anything and everything and people take it so for granted. The social media is inundated with selfies and videos from wannabe photographers and videographers.

When the first cell phone came out in the 1990s, they were bulky, grey or black, expensive, often tethered to the car, and the minute-plans were very expensive. Only really well-to-do people could actually afford the luxury of owning one or the service. Within a decade, cell phones got smaller, more colorful, and minute-plans a bit cheaper. It was relatively easy to run up hundreds of dollars in phone bills each month and many people did get in trouble. And then cell phones became smart phones.

In high school, we were taken to a data processing center in my hometown. One large computer occupied an entire building. And they literally got computer bugs, a moth to be exact. Later they sized it down to a very large room.

Desk top computers arrived but were very bulky, and the small screen was green or black and white. It was quite a step up from the Remington typewriters or the IBM Selectric typewriters from college. In a communist country, we had to have special permission from the security police in order to have a Remington typewriter in the home and few were so lucky. We had to give them a written sample so they can identify the specific way our typewriter printed, the strokes of each letter, so they can later isolate us if we published any kind of political materials they deemed unacceptable and anti-communist.

Computer users had to learn so many different computer commands just to do word-processing because nothing interfaced. And the large 8-inch floppy disks, which were used with the floppy drives invented at IBM by Alan Shugart in 1967, filled up fast. The smaller 5.25-inch disk was developed that was used on the first IBM personal computer in August 1981.

I lost twenty pages of my dissertation because I ran out of computer space. Research was cumbersome, we actually did have to go to the library and paid the librarian to run one search at a time for about $28 which often did not yield much usable information, depending on what key words we used, but it sure printed hundreds of cards with perforated holes; if dropped, the cards would be out of order and unusable.

My first personal computer was an IBM and it cost $5,000. It was a gift from IBM since I was the first teacher in 1990 to impart knowledge to far-away high schools on a fiber-optic network that could communicate two-way instantaneously all over the country. It was called MS Fiber-optic 2000 and it prepared me for both radio and television as I was teaching from a room with half a million dollars-worth of equipment, no students, TV screens filled with classrooms far away, with whom I was instantaneously interacting, and only a technology person present. The companies that sponsored this effort thought that I needed my own computer at home. It was a good thing since I could not have afforded the price tag on my young teacher salary.

In the early 1980s through the 1990s we used VCRs to play movies rented from Blockbuster or Movie Gallery. Sony’s Betamax was in competition with VHS manufacturers such as JVC. The video cassette recorder had its down side as it was sensitive to humidity and temperature changes and could often damage tapes. Moisture or dryness could affect the magnetic tape.

The first cartoon that I taped for my children on our first VCR was “Stanley, the Ugly Duckling,” followed by hundreds of hours of Disney cartoons. Very expensive at first, upwards of $500-700, eventually the typical VCR model price dropped to $50. In time, the VHS blank tapes became rather inexpensive as well and could only record a set number of video hours. The DVD player took off and VCRs became obsolete. The movie rental places survived for a while but most have gone out of business as movies on DVDs became cheaper and cheaper.

There was a lady in Romania who used to translate through 1990 all the American movies smuggled into the country. She would translate the dialog on screen and write the subtitles in Romanian for later viewing in private homes. She did this for so many years because Romanians were not allowed to watch what movies they wanted, only what the communist party censors would allow.

During my teenage years in Romania, if a person owned a cassette recorder, they were really well-off. Prior to that, reel to reel expensive German players were available on the black market, usually smuggled on a cargo ship. When tape recorders/boom boxes became available, people paid huge amounts of money to own one. The audio cassettes made it easy to record music which was not available or forbidden by the communist government. Cassettes were eventually made obsolete by the Sony Walkman, portable radios, CD players, iPods, mp3 players, and the iPhone.

The phonograph, invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, called later the gramophone, and in the 1940s the record player, is still used today by people who love to collect vinyl records. I have a pretty good collection myself but no record player with the diamond needle to play it on.

My husband gave me a small boom box in 1977. I sold it for $150 so I could pay the tuition I owed to the communist government for high school and two years of college. A very cheap price to pay considering how expensive education was in the west. I should not have had to pay anything at all because all Romanians were guaranteed free education. But it was suddenly no longer free for me because I was marrying an American and somebody else was going to reap the benefits of my education. Some cassette recorders sold for upwards of $300. That is still a lot of money today for many Romanians who earn on the average about $400 a month.

During Ceausescu’s communist regime, people were forced to use strange things as commodity money, cigarettes, cassette players, cassette tapes, soap, shampoo, makeup, panty hose, and other things in short supply, better produced in the west, economically forbidden to the proletariat, or grossly mismanaged by the communist party.

In the late 1970s, I was shocked to find that there was such a thing as an eight-track tape. Very popular in the United States from mid-1960s to late 1970s, it was relatively unknown outside the U.S., U.K., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. Then it was replaced by the compact cassette tape.

My uncle Ion owned a manual Leica camera with Carl Zeiss lenses. It must have cost him a fortune back then or he traded rationed food for it. Nobody else in the family owned a camera. The photos were black and white, no color film was available. I am grateful because his camera captured a few moments in my early life in communism that otherwise would not have seen the light of day and the special moments would have been forgotten. I never owned a camera myself until I moved to the U.S. and bought a Kodak with disposable flashbulbs and an Instant Polaroid camera.

Today people take for granted the relatively inexpensive digital cameras that are so affordable. Smart phones have become our cameras, computers, compass, maps, weather bulletins, TVs, theaters, typewriters, VCRs, printers, and spying devices that liberate us but have also enslaved generations of young people more than the Bolsheviks of the former Iron Curtain could have ever dreamed of.

Most people now own a smart phone, sharing every snippet of their daily lives with the world on social media, while technology is charging full-speed ahead with Nano-technology that will further alter our lives in ways that even the sci-fi novels and thrillers of the last century could not have ever imagined.

Household goods have made our lives infinitely better, freeing America’s chores and cooking time. Vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, convection ovens, dishwashers, washing machines, driers, coffee makers, refrigerators, and air conditioners have made life more enjoyable and shortened the time people spent in the kitchen or cleaning. Air conditioners made hot climates more bearable; refrigerators/freezers helped store food and reduced daily trips to the grocery stores significantly.

Push mowers created verdant and well-manicured neighborhoods to the frustration of the U.N.-driven globalists who think that suburbia represent “urban blight” and thus “unsustainable.” They say nothing of the third world slums. Instead of creating a better life and environment for those people, globalists are interested in destroying our middle class suburbia.

Despite all technology, we seem to have reached a paradox of technology affluence, the more gadgets we invent, the busier and more overwhelmed our lives appear to be; it is a paradox of invention overflow and information overload. What was meant to help us has turned into so many choices that people are turning back to the old adage, less is more.

People were afraid to use microwaves in the seventies. Large signs warned shoppers in stores and restaurants that microwaves were in use. Most people were so fearful of getting cancer that many potential buyers did not purchase them for years until they finally became conventional and prices dropped.

Not so long ago most people had only two television channels to choose from, in our case in black and white, and running mostly communist propaganda. No remote controls to change the channels, viewers had to get up and do it manually. And reception was achieved by rooftop antennas and rabbit ears, often adorned with aluminum foil to improve picture clarity. And TV sets with their huge tubes were encased in large boxes, made from plastic or nicely carved wood like Curtis Mathis sets. By midnight, all stations signed off with a patriotic song. But then color TVs became more affordable and cable companies started offering a variety of newly-minted channels which offered night-owls non-stop television choices. We now have 500 plus channels but we only watch about ten on a regular basis.

What will become yesteryear’s technology in the future?

In a Daze, Where is My Country?

There are days when I watch in a daze the slow motion transformation of America into the country I left 36 years ago. Change is good for America, I am told by those who decided in their ignorant collectivist minds that they know what’s best for the rest of the country, for the rest of the world.

It is good to invalidate and erase the southern border, eliminating sovereignty; it is good to allow a flood of illegal immigrants to overwhelm the country with their financial, economic, educational, and medical needs. It is good for the soul to be charitable against your will by government fiat. It is good to have your wealth stolen and given to those who did not earn it. It is good to ignore veterans’ needs, old people’s needs, and America’s poor. It is good for America to ignore all the legal immigrants who want to come to this country the right way.

I ask myself, where is my country? Can I have it back? Why must we destroy everything in order to satisfy the wishes of the ruling elite, the oligarchs in power, who are busy re-writing all our laws, inviting in corruption, lawlessness, and deceit. No matter what the regime says, those in power become more prosperous and acquire more power.

Why are Americans dissatisfied with their abundant lifestyle, their top-notch medical care, and generous welfare system, abundance of food, outstanding opportunity for education, advancement, promotion, and freedom of mobility?

What do they imagine that resides behind the tall green fence of egalitarian utopia with social justice for all? Is it a magical door that absorbs every illiterate wretch from around the globe and turns them into good global citizens?

Do Americans long for the adobe-style village dwellings made of mud bricks and without electricity where I spent the first seven years of my life?

Perhaps they enjoy standing in line for hours to get basic ingredients of food while fighting for the last loaf of fresh bread or kilo of flour? What a fine opportunity to get to know your entire neighborhood while waiting in food lines and engage in some competitive shoving.

Maybe they like when shelves are empty and the pharmacies never have the drugs they need because they are in short supply and are delivered first to the regime’s oligarchs. It might scale back the collective drug dependency.

Maybe they don’t mind the lines to get toilet paper, lines that wrap around for many blocks. Who needs toilet paper when nature has plenty of leaves?

Surely they must be envying the equality of low paying salaries and forced job assignments as far away from home as possible. Nobody should have to come home but once a week. Dormitories at the place of employment are just fine. Think about all the gas and electricity saved and the carbon credits earned.

Maybe they enjoy being spied upon for their own safety by the elites, and moved into crowded, densely populated, dirty, and noisy government-run apartments. They can build such a diverse community of like-minded neighbors who “meditate” together.

Are they envying the fuzzy feeling of equality and of saving nature for God knows what, while walking miles to the grocery store, work, the market, or the doctor?

Maybe they are envying the equality of waiting for hours to see a doctor and being told to come back the next day because the doctor has filled his government-quota of patients for the day.

Perhaps they are daring and wish to have their teeth extracted or drilled without anesthetics because it has not been delivered to doctors in years. Nobody needs toxic substances in their bodies.

Maybe they welcome the communist indoctrination in schools and the rounding up of parents weekly to be humiliated in front of the entire parent body because their children are not marching obediently-enough in lock-step with the “dictatura” of the regime.

Conceivably they must enjoy gawking at the one-sausage hanging in the window while the elites shop at their own stores and visit their own hospitals.

Possibly they enjoy staying at home, waiting for the government check and other unearned “entitlements” to arrive, hopefully on time, and the coupons for food rationing, delivered by an approved mailman who is too tired and haggard to care that all mail has been opened and read before delivery.

Feasibly they may enjoy taking virtual vacations vicariously through the television broadcasted vacations of the elites. Who needs to leave the safety of their crowded abode to travel on trains and buses to faraway places where nobody can afford the gas, the food, and the hotel?

Conceivably they may enjoy staying in the dark on a regular basis when power is cut off, shivering when heat does not reach their apartments, and sweltering in summer because air conditioning is not allowed or too expensive.

Americans may learn to enjoy the freedom of not bathing because water is rationed. Who needs to smell good or wash clothes when it is so much easier to go dirty and with matted hair? Shampoo and soap are overrated, we are told by Europeans, we bathe too much and our skin dries out. Think how soft and smooth your skin will be from lack of bathing. We would be saving Mother Nature. We are not sure what we would be saving the planet for, but we are saving it to thrive back to wilderness. That would make environmentalists really happy.

Why would Americans protest when a vet who had three strokes is denied nursing home care? Neither Medicare nor Tricare would pay for his care because he has no visible wounds and he has plenty of resources saved up to pay $6,000 a month for nursing care. After all, it’s only fair; he has to exhaust all his earthly possessions before Medicaid kicks in. Everybody else, who did not pay their dues to society like our vets had, gets all services free.

The government needs money to care for these poor illegal alien “children” who showed up on our southern border from Central America, by no fault of their own, some with awful tattoos, their parents just let them out of the house and someone unfairly bussed them and flew them to our border patrols where they were met with open arms, scabies and all. They need free housing, free health care, free education, 42,000 pairs of grown men’s underwear, formula, bottles, babysitters, etc. - it is expensive to alter practically overnight, relatively speaking, the demographics of our “unfair and insufficiently diverse” society.

The Democrat Party is seeking this transformational change with dizzying speed, cheered on the sidelines by Republican brethren. But we are not transforming fast enough into the “social justice,” “environmental justice,” and “coexist” Tower of Babel heaven they’ve promised their American followers and constituents. We must be nudged. A suggestion has been floated that they should change their name to the Communist Party since they are so neatly aligned with Marxism.

I can hardly wait for this American majority and the illegal aliens they support to attain the communist utopia they’ve escaped from but so richly deserve. The oligarchs, the liberal rich, the political class, and Hollywood elites can then hang around with the former middle class they’ve impoverished with their policies and their activism.

 

Do Not Underestimate the Value of Culture as a Power of Change

Hope and Change, Hope and Change, Hope and Change… Millions of Americans were chanting totally mesmerized. Change at the speed of light is here and accelerating. Hope is fading away. How did we get here so fast? It did not happen overnight. We just failed to pay attention.

We underestimated the value of culture as a power of change, irreversible change. We were too busy building nations and democracy in countries living by seventh century rules written in one book to notice that our culture was being changed from within and without, partly by theocratic and totalitarian cultures, partly by globalists, and their human tools and institutions, and partly by illegally-domiciled cultures.

You cannot change “hearts and minds” in a culture that values death more than life; you cannot absorb a banana republic culture with “family values” of God and the pursuit of happiness in which happiness is not self-generated but expected from a benevolent government.

Changing “hearts and minds” of nations requires time and arduous indoctrination. It is a process similar to underground water burrowing through stone, shaping magnificent rocks, tunnels, caves, stalactites and stalagmites.

“Cultura animi” as Cicero described it in “Tusculan Disputations” is the cultivation of the soul and mind. (“Animus” is Latin for soul or mind.) The American soul and mind have been cultivated in the direction of socialism for a long time. We are noticing the change now because it has finally come to fruition after more than a century of constant scholastic, moral, social, and political programming.

Culture encompasses the material culture of a nation and the non-material culture such as language, customs, traditions, and its unique identity. A culture exhibits a group-specific acquired behavior which can be changed over time with the right tools. A culture is multifaceted; it includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by humans as members of society.

W. C. McGrew defined culture as a six-step process:

1. A new pattern of behavior is invented, or an existing one is modified.
2. The innovator transmits this pattern to another person.
3. The form of the pattern is consistent.
4. The one who acquires the pattern retains the ability to perform it long after having acquired it.
5. The pattern spreads across a population: families, clans, troops, or bands.
6. The pattern endures across generations.

Language, a very important element of culture, is the direct expression of a people’s national character. Johann Gottfried Herder said, "Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache" (Because every people is a People, it has its own national culture expressed through its language). We do not have our own official language – the government and necessity have forced the use of two languages.

Immigrants, who have entered other cultures through time, have formed their own sub-cultures within the primary culture:

-         Core culture (Leitkultur or “lead culture” as the Germans termed it) - minorities had an identity of their own, but they supported the core concepts of the culture on which society was based

-         Melting pot – immigrant cultures mixed willingly without state intervention; such was the case of the United States until liberals intervened and changed it into “tossed salad bowl”

-         Monoculturalism – was adopted initially by some European states as a government policy to assimilate immigrants; it was deemed racist and nationalistic by ruling elites

-         Multiculturalism – immigrants preserved their cultures while interacting “peacefully” within one nation; France, Germany, and U.K. admitted recently that multiculturalism failed miserably in their countries; other European nations are struggling to survive as they are losing their identity, culture, and their countries to the “peaceful” immigrants

United Kingdom’s sociologists developed cultural studies influenced by Marxism. These studies, models, and lessons were incorporated and adopted by universities around the world and preached in thousands of classes every year. The core message was the same – socialism and Marxism are the wave of the future if society is to attain utopia and happiness. The entrepreneurial work ethic of capitalism was disdained and maligned.

We are in a globally-accelerated culture change period driven by these educational models, international trade, the socialist mass media, and the population explosion. Many inside and outside forces encourage and promote change through thinly veiled environmentalist and globalist propaganda indoctrination, economic, and political measures. Other forces resist change coming from cultural ideas and practices favoring socialism and Marxism, but they are outnumbered. New technologies and social conflicts also produce change by promoting new and peculiar cultural models that alter social dynamics in the utopian vein.

The feminist movement deeply affected gender relations and economic structures in the American culture, often in negative ways. Environmental conditions and groups caused cultural change through global warming brainwashing. War and competition over resources such as oil greatly impacted social dynamics and culture.

Cultural ideas were transmitted through diffusion (fast food across the globe, innovations, direct borrowing) and acculturation (acquiring traits). Individual like me who learned the language, history, customs, and traditions became assimilated into the new culture. Likewise, over many generations of students, trained College of Education teachers indoctrinated their pupils into the socialist mindset without much interference from the clueless parents who were often themselves products of the public school cultural modification curricula.

People who were born, raised, and grew old under oppressive communism, did not culturally understand any other way of living. They felt alienated when capitalism replaced communism. They did not know how to make a living, how to survive on their own and provide for themselves, they were still waiting for the communist regime to hand them their meager rations – it was not much, but it did not require having to think, having to provide for themselves a daily subsistence, or having to work. These elders wanted communist enslavement back because it was a certainty they recognized.

People who fled communism were not shocked that the Russians celebrated by the thousands Stalin’s birthday recently, in worship to his dubious and murderous achievements, having starved and killed 20 million innocents during his reign of terror in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). We know that a dependent and hopeless culture breeds helplessness.

The French are so unwilling to give up their culture of “welfareship” as Sylvain Charat calls it, that they have fallen hard into the “poverty trap.” France is going to allow doctors to “accelerate the coming of death” of French patients in the socialized medical care system, in order to fund their cradle to grave lavish welfare. What caused such a harsh change in the values of their culture?

Why are Americans allowing the dreaded 15-member “death panel” of Obamacare instead of trimming the government’s lavish spending and offering healthcare insurance to the uninsured in some other form? If some Americans want universal healthcare and gun control, why don’t they move to Cuba?

Why would a culture run household budgets in such a way that citizens are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of their children in the future and the grandparents through euthanasia driven by medical care rationing in order that the parents live better in the present?

It should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans prefer a lazy lifestyle, dependent on government welfare for their every need as the only viable solution to daily living; they want a secular society devoid of faith, a society that does not think twice about killing the unborn as a form of contraception but builds crossing bridges for turtles, a society that does not seek justice for the murder of innocents but demonstrates to release infamous terrorists and criminals.

Americans who no longer share the values of the culture that was established long time ago, adhere to the culture of socialism/Marxism. The low-information Americans, who chanted for the promised hope and change, aspire for a culture of government dependency and entitlements in perpetuity.

Entrepreneurship is slowly replaced in the American psyche by “assistance-ship” through a barrage of constant cultural indoctrination by the academia, the media, and the government.