Cherries Were Sweet, Wormy, and Juicy

It is high season for cherries, and I find them every time I go to the grocery store. They are red, plump, juicy, and quite expensive. But none as expensive as we found them in June in Calgary, Canada, a farming town. I asked the locals why their cherries were 26 Canadian dollars a kilogram and was told that there was a shortage; the crop was smaller because the weather had been colder than usual, and cherries need heat to ripen.

So much for the non-stop global warming drivel and the need to eliminate CO2 from any human activity by 2030. Yet plants and trees need CO2 to grow, it is the gas of plant life. Nurseries add extra CO2 in their green houses in order to grow plants much faster. And we exhale CO2.

I did not purchase the expensive cherries in Calgary although I was tempted. I reached for their compostable grocery bags and then I decided against buying them and bought apples instead.

Our local Wegman’s carries cherries from California most days for $2.99 per pound and organic or yellow ones for $6.99 per pound. Even at the price of $12.99 per pound, they flew off the shelves in early June. Locals, government bureaucrats who inhabit this area, can afford to pay high prices for everything – apartments, gas, high-end EVs like Tesla, and very expensive homes.

I filled my bowl with red cherries and took them on the deck; they glistened in the sunlight in rich hues of ripened red. Within minutes a bee appeared out of the nowhere, attracted by the fruity fresh scent.

As I ate one and the fruit released its sweet juice, I was reminded of my childhood cherries, infested by fruit flies with their worms. They crawled inside the fruit and burrowed their eggs. We ate them anyway, we were so starved for fresh fruits and vegetables.

My friend Joe K., who served a while at the Embassy in Bucharest, told me the story of one Friday evening, when several friends gathered at his home to watch a VHS movie and he picked up a large bag of cherries which he placed on the kitchen table. As his wife went into the kitchen to bring the guests bowls of cherries, Joe heard a scream. He ran to the kitchen to check on his wife and found her staring grossed out at the kitchen table now crawling with hundreds of white worms which had emerged from the bag of cherries.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever eating a fruit, any fruit, during my childhood in communist Romania that was not burrowed inside by worms. Cherries in June and July were sweet, wormy, and juicy, and we ate them anyway.

I feel privileged and extremely lucky to live in this country where I can eat fruits free of fruit flies and their worms, especially cherries, apples, peaches, and prunes. 

Yet one day, I was in Shoppers in Fairfax, Virginia, and the cherry stand was buzzed by fruit flies and did not smell very well. I did not purchase any and left the store immediately, extremely disappointed. The abundance we used to experience once is no longer the same all over America.

Why is Gas so High?

For those Americans who are foolishly claiming that the skyrocketing price of oil is Putin's fault, here is some news for you - it is entirely the Biden administration's fault. When he took office, gasoline was $1.69 a gallon in my town, it is now $4.55 per gallon while Diesel is $5.55 per gallon. We need plenty of affordable gasoline and Diesel to run our complex and very large economy.

He closed oil leases, fracking, offshore drilling, and the XL pipeline which was delivering gas from Canada. He did this on day one and the price of gas started to escalate immediately. Crude oil is being transported by rail (powered with electricity created with Diesel and coal) instead of the much cheaper pipelines which crisscross our country from Alberta, Canada and other places.

It was Biden's plan all along to destroy the fossil fuel industry in order to replace it with the pie-in-the-sky green energy delivered by expensive, inadequate, and insufficient solar and wind power.

The U.S. became overnight an oil importer again instead of an oil exporter as it had been under the Trump administration.

OPEC took advantage of this situation of a weak and partisan president and refused to increase production, thus further escalating the price of crude oil per barrel.

Speculators entered the fray and affected the futures price as well on the Chicago Board of Trade. This often happens when the political climate is poor, people fear their incompetent government, and the future looks bleak.

The fact that Democrats and some Republicans have voted to print dollars without any backing of goods and services, creating high inflation, highest in forty years, and then spending trillions of dollars we don't have, like drunken sailors, has devalued our U.S. dollar which is the currency in which crude oil is priced and quoted around the globe.

Supply and demand for crude oil, gas, and Diesel are also out of whack due to the economic effects of the lockdowns and other labor and economic decisions made by U.S. corrupt politicians, further exacerbating the price increases.

One caller to the WMAL station in Washington, D.C. area, stated on Friday that she has 7 children and must fill up the van with gasoline every four days. Each time it cost $100. This translates into $750 a month just for gasoline. Middle class Americans must decide whether they eat, drive their cars, or pay their mortgages/rent.

This terrible economy is entirely Biden's fault and the fault of those who voted for him and thus for the destruction of our economy.

Your unwise vote is putting most of the middle class in a poor house filled with shortages and high inflation. The economic and energy situations are quite dire.

 

Interview Across Cyber Space with Mircea Brenciu - Part III Standard of Living

Life in general has improved for Romanians. They can now travel freely in the country and move across international borders with ease.  They have freedom of political and artistic expression, freedom of assembly, unlimited Internet access, plenty of trashy television but also good educational programming, public information, easier access to medical care and better quality care, the right to own private property, professional opportunities, the right to go to college, even private ones, and many other freedoms the West had taken for granted. The failed European style multiculturalism, sexual freedoms/perversions, and drug use have arrived as well.

Food is probably the most beneficial improvement in the lives of Romanians – it is available everywhere and there is no need to stand in endless lines to leave empty-handed as was the case during the communist regime. People are no longer faced with having to repair their shoes from year to year because they could not buy new ones. Grocery stores display an abundance of food, not just one solitaire salami in the window. Pharmacy shelves are no longer empty and drugs are available. Fast communication and modern transportation are now a breeze even in the most isolated corners of the country.

Brenciu described the standard of living and the buying power of the Romanian citizen who must live on a minimum net salary of $232 a month, about 1050 lei. According to economists, the median net salary for the country is 1,600 lei a month, $384. Yet prices for goods and services are 90 percent in line with prices across Europe. How are Romanians expected to survive under such conditions and unfair disparity? Even though Romania has joined the European Union in 2007, life is much harder than in the other EU members where salaries are much higher and in proportion to prices.

Not one political leader has succeeded in 26 years after the fall of communism, Brenciu added, to increase the Romanians’ standards of living to at least the minimum level of their European Union brethren.

The fact that people expect politicians to have solutions for their problems is quite telling. It is an indication that decades of communism have brainwashed the citizenry into believing that solutions to their problems come from big or bigger government’s intrusion into everyone’s lives.

What is to blame for the current unresolved economic disparity? Incompetence and corruption across the board at the state level are significant, however, even more important, in Brenciu’s view, are the politics of other foreign governments, of multinational corporations, and of strategies to undermine the interests of the Romanian people in order to subjugate a small country with yet unexploited natural resources. “Onerous patrimonial and business interests supersede the interests of the Romanian people.”

In his opinion, the Romanian population, after decades of tyrannical communism, has learned to survive in a harsh environment and to live with very little and quite poorly, but the younger generation does not seem so eager to be marginalized at the periphery of the globalized political system.

There are many foreign entities, Brenciu explained, who salivate at the prospect of dividing the country and claiming parts, they think, are rightfully theirs. “The Hungarians have exophthalmic eyes for Transylvania; Europe is thinking out-loud how they can round up all the gypsies into the Baragan Fields, and the Moldovans on the Russian side of the Prut River dream of an illusory Big Moldova. Even Bulgarians are not too relaxed about northern Dobrogea.”

The European Union has had to deal with Greece and its potential exodus from the EU called Grexit. The technocrats in Brussels “calmed the waters” with billions of euros in funds that are helping the Greeks continue their socialist spending. Brenciu thought that “Romania might follow the same path if EU does not take rapid measures to increase the average pay for Romanians, even though they would have to break the rules of economic development.”

Brenciu reminded us that Germany was the beneficiary of the Marshall Plan after WWII, which saved the Germans from an “existential impasse.”  He argued, “Romania was in a real war, longer and more criminal than Germany’s but nobody took this fact into account. What was communism if not a war of life and death of an entire nation? Why does EU not organize a system for Romanians, similar to the Marshall Plan, without so many conditions and strings attached?” He semi-answered his own question when he described how Holland opposed Romania’s entry into the Schengen Zone because Romania refused the indefinite concession of its main port, Constanta.

What seems to be Romania’s salvation at the moment, he said, is the fact that Romania is located strategically at the confluence of the Christian West and the Islamic Orient and the United States is taking a keen interest in this strategic location.

During the fifth decade of the 20^th century, heroic anti-communist, anti-Bolshevik resistance fighters hid in the Carpathian mountains, waiting for the American troops to save them. American soldiers never arrived but they are here now, strengthening the buffer zone between Christianity and Islam. It is a blessing, Brenciu added, that “American strategic interests are converging perfectly with Romanian interests” and the ties to Washington are stronger than ever.

Brenciu believed that Europe, with its culture and enlightenment, the center of human civilization on earth, owes a debt of gratitude to the “poor Romanians who never betrayed common European and Christian values and were satisfied with very little in order to survive as shields in the face of so many barbaric invasions.”

He concluded, “Europe should bow its head in respect and should produce urgently and with love, the fraternal and just reparations to a people who defended with their absolute poverty, the splendor of a narcissistic and profoundly selfish civilization.”

As a former Iron Curtain nation, Romania started its road to democracy and to a free market economy at a distinct disadvantage when compared to other former communist Soviet satellite nations. Ceausescu made it a point of pride that Romania should not owe money to foreign lenders; he saw himself as a ‘maverick’ president. He paid all loans quickly by taking away much needed food and funds earmarked for improving the lives of Romanians who were forced to survive in abject poverty, with no decent food, meager rations, no basic necessities, little heat, and intermittent water and electricity.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

 

The Climate Change Industry Changes the Energy Market

Countries and companies around the globe have spent trillions of dollars to stop the Earth from warming and the Earth did not get the message, it responded by cooling.  Not to worry, environmentalists who were blatantly wrong and tried to say that cooling is part of global warming, changed their golden goose agenda to climate change. Even though climate change is real, it is called seasons, critics of the climate change industry, of climatism, have been marginalized under the rubric of global warming heretic deniers.

The United Nations came up with a clever scheme to convince the world that the “Four Horsemen of Environmental Apocalypse, overpopulation, resource depletion, pollution, and climate devastation” will annihilate humanity as we know it. The Club of Rome, premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations, explained how they succeeded:

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

According to Dr. Steve Goreham, with the establishment of U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, “climatism was born and controlling carbon has become a bureaucrat’s dream.”

World’s leaders, politicians, corporations, universities, and NGOs have been captivated by the climate change industry even though the theory of global warming has failed miserably and all the climate models were proven wrong. They declared war on fossil fuels and waged it with a vengeance at the expense of taxpayers and electricity users.

Suddenly using too much energy derived from coal, oil, and natural gas became a sin even though energy is the driver of global prosperity. Environmentalists have decided to deny the same opportunity for prosperity from cheap fossil fuel energy to millions of citizens of third world nations, forcing them instead into expensive solar and wind energy they cannot afford. Hydrocarbons became the black sheep, and billions and billions in subsidies were spent to make room for renewables.

“It's in our interest - and we wouldn't be able to stop it anyway - for the poorer countries, which only are responsible for about 20 percent of the globe's pollution, to develop, but they should develop according to a different path, a different industrial prescription than we did.”  (Michael Oppenheimer on This Week with David Brinkley, 31 May 1992) http://www.princeton.edu/step/people/faculty/michael-oppenheimer/in-the-news/Correcting-Glenn-Beck-.pdf

Environmental NGOs lectured impressionable students that nobody should be drilling at all because fossil fuels destroy the planet, we should pay $10 per gallon like Europe, use renewables and learn to live modestly on solar and wind,  if we can afford them. If we must return to medieval living to save one of God’s creatures, then we should.  It is getting serious when even the oil producers have bought into climatism.

But environmentalists are not all equal. They want electricity to their smart devices that use more power than a refrigerator. They want tents, shoes, sunglasses, caps, and clothes made from hydrocarbons but they are protesting fossil fuels. They want their Priuses and electric cars but have no idea that the electricity to power them comes from hydrocarbons. Some enviro-denizens are Nimby (Not in My Back Yard) when it comes to unsightly wind turbines. Others are Banana (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). And yet others are Nope (Not On Planet Earth). There is too much oil, “enough to deep fry the planet.”

Dr. Steve Goreham, Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America, and author of Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, described the collateral damage from the war on hydrocarbons using Europe as an example of an “energy disaster unfolding.” He said, “there are 487 national climate change laws in 66 nations” and they are hurting the economies of those respective countries.

Europe is a basket case of subsidized and mandated renewables that has resulted in higher electricity rates for customers, causing electricity penury among some of the citizens of Germany. Giving renewables output priority, energy from other sources like nuclear, hydropower, and fossil fuels was scaled back.  Germany shut down nuclear power plants and Germany and France banned hydraulic fracturing. The market for electricity and wholesale prices became dependent on the mercy of weather and wind, regardless of demand.

There was a massive installation of solar panels in Germany even though Germany is not exactly the sunshine state.  Spain decided to use Diesel generation for its solar panels because the solar panel electricity was too expensive, 23 cents per kWh. The ugly wind turbines everywhere produced inefficient and undependable electricity.

Dr. Goreham also mentioned that some countries imported wood from Alabama to burn as electricity generator instead of dirty coal. The Green Revolution has been so expensive for Europeans that subsidies were dropping in every area, followed by layoffs in the renewable industry. The wind industry in the U.S. gets 2.3 cents per kWh in tax credit in order to compete.

Even though IPCC said that “burning biomass is carbon neutral,” the reality is that biofuels release as much or more carbon dioxide than coal does. And the trading of carbon on the carbon markets is failing. People can pay all the carbon footprint taxes in the world and it will not make a bit of difference in the actual CO2 in the atmosphere. It will just make the traders and the companies richer.

Dr. Fred Singer, physicist and emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, reminded us that the climate change industry does not take into account the CO2 emissions from operation and maintenance of renewables such as how often these devices must be replaced (solar panels, wind turbines, parts, lubricants), and the transmission costs. Wind and solar power does emit CO2 in the construction process, during the mining of the metals used, lubricants, etc.

Even the President blamed the low GDP on cold weather. Perhaps it is time for global warmists turned climatists to be exposed again.

Honest scientists say that we have enough fossil fuels reserves for centuries of use. In the world’s economy renewables should compete without subsidies, we should worry about the Smart Grid’s vulnerability from hackers, solar flares, and EMPs, we should conserve energy wisely, protect nature sensibly, and let the carbon credits scheme go into the trash bin of expensive hustles.