Washing Clothes Under Communism

Hand Soap Cheia, type superior

I remember vividly having to do laundry by hand in our heavy bathtub because it was the only container large enough to wash sheets in our tiny apartment. In summertime we used the tub to chill watermelons by running water over them and adding ice if available.

My hands and my mom's were raw from washing clothes with lye soap (see the photo). It sounds like we lived in Dickensian times but it was the same in many ways.

We had to boil enough water to do the wash and to actually boil white clothes in another cooking pot on the stove with lye soap in hopes that stains might come out and the whites will be brighter. No such thing as bleach. We used some blue dye cubes to restore the blue tint to men's shirts and our school uniforms when the shirts faded. Mom starched our shirts with a mixture of flour and water, when flour was available. But we had plenty of DDT to kill pests with in the garden and even vitriol.

Pesticide pump called Flit - it was often used to spray DDT

My grandmother had a small carved wood oval tub to wash things in by hand. The reason it was so small was because she only had so much soap and water available. She washed the sheets at the crystal clear river. I am not sure if the resident fish liked that very much.

Photo: Wikipedia

Copaie de lemn

The tub doubled as a dishwasher, face wash, and a place for newborns to be rocked in. I remember being rocked to sleep in such a tub when I was a toddler and my legs and arms were hanging over the sides, like a chunk of meat too large for the cooking pot.

In case you wonder what prompted these memories, I had to do a lot of laundry this week, no scrubbing, just a lazy American folding them and putting them away, washer and dryer did all the work, God bless the person who invented them. But, I’m old, the arthritis hurts, and climbing stairs with a laundry basket is not so much fun as it once was when the novelty of modernity was amazing. 

And we have abundant electricity and water thanks to the hard-working entrepreneurs and inventors who were allowed to be individual thinkers instead of serfs to the collective.

Living in the 20th Century Communist Paradise

My husband inquired one day if I would have preferred to have lived in the 19^th century America or 20^th century Romania when communists ruled. I gave him a ‘I’m glad you asked the question’ look and launched into a tirade of what it was like living with my grandparents continuously for the first six years of my life before I went to first grade and then every summer until I was eighteen and able to choose for myself.

Most young Americans, blinded by school indoctrination, don’t realize that, under the socialist republic controlled by the Communist Party, population control and submission to their whim were the most important goals. They did not care about the happiness and health of the citizenry despite the heavy rhetoric to that effect.

A family was not allowed to move from the village to the city without proper permit from the Communists. If caught living in the city, a person would be subjected to fines, imprisonment, or both.

Mom’s parents, like all villagers, did not have electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing in the tiny village six miles outside of the largest metropolitan area in the south.

Natural gas, compressed in small containers called “butelie,” was used for cooking in summer time. In winter most villagers used a wood burning stove with an iron cast top for heat and cooking. Ducts would carry hot air to the next room. The two tiny rooms did not have taper candles for illumination but oil lamps with clear glass fluted covers that gave us the ability to walk in the house without groping in the dark.

When night fell, the stars were brilliant on clear nights, surrounded by the pitch blackness devoid of any ambient light.  It was fun for kids to catch lightning bugs or creep up on older folk sitting on stoops outside the fenced yard and listen to their gossip and tales of old. Younger neighbors, walking in the dark from the latest bus after a long day’s work, would stop and chat before they dragged their tired bodies home to eat and fall asleep with their work clothes on.

The village was compact, demarcations of living space done by communist party organizers with their directives from the top - no waste of agricultural land which needed to be planted with corn and wheat for export and survival rations of food. There was little space between homes, just enough for a wooden fence to separate one small house from the next.

Like 19^th century inhabitants, women did not have much in the vein of health care, save for the village mid-wife who tended to births. Women made do with strips of old clothing or rags to protect themselves during menses.

Toilet paper was either the communist newspaper, Scânteia (The Spark), or România liberă (Free Romania) attached to the wooden wall of the outhouse with a long nail. It gave us great pleasure to use the Communist Party’s propaganda to wipe our arses with. The newspaper, România liberă, communist propaganda rag from cover to cover, was a joke as nobody was free in Romania, we were prisoners of the totalitarian communist state. When far from any outhouse, we used the smooth side of any plant leaves we could find, especially corn ones.

Eventually the communists decided to modernize us and manufactured rough brown toilet paper with large and visible splinters in it. We were already used to splinters in our bums from sitting on the unfinished wood platform over the outhouse hole. But using toilet paper with splinters was a new experience. It would be surprising to learn what you can get used to in order to survive.

It never bothered us that we did not wash our hands or brush our teeth. We washed our faces before church but sported a neckline of dirt where the soap and water had stopped. It never occurred to us that hygiene was important to survival. We climbed in a fruit tree not far from the outhouse, buzzing with fat and hungry flies, and we ate with gusto the unwashed but ripen fruits called “dude.”

We played in the muddy ditches when it rained or when grandpa was watering his corn and garden and open the sluices of irrigation. We bathed in the creek or river when we went fishing. It was such a far walk that, when we came back after frolicking in the crystal-clear water, we were covered again in a serious layer of dust. Grandma told us to wash our feet and hands before we went to bed, but she was often tired and forgot to enforce the cleanliness rules. And nobody had a toothbrush or toothpaste.

Adults traveled to the city bathhouses once or twice a year for a good bath. Cleanliness is next to godliness but there was a shortage of bath soap and water was a precious commodity; we had to pump drinking water out of the ground. Taking a bath meant heating large amounts of water and a large enough tub which nobody owned nor could afford. Villagers who had relatives in the city with tiny cinder block apartments with running water traveled once a month or so to bathe if the water supply was running or was hot. As the 19^th century brethren would have said, they had a bath every so many months whether they needed it or not.

Grandpa had rigged a small tin tank near the outhouse, about five feet in the air. One person at a time could soap first and then rinse with the lukewarm water dripping from the tank; once empty, it had to be refilled; the sun would warm the water a little bit and the first person was the lucky bather. It was an amazing experience to get rid of the mud and dirt even if it was so short-lived.

We went barefoot most of the time in summer, the yard was a mess, covered with geese, chicken, and duck poop which squished between our toes. I have an icky feeling to this day when I go barefoot. I seldom go without shoes except in sand, and I refuse to go camping.

A few of my childhood friends died of untreated hookworms. Those who survived got treated with heavy and nasty-tasting medicinal syrup provided by my mom who made determined trips to the government polyclinic in town.

I suppose we lived a tad better than the 19^th century America as we at least had a rickety bus with holes on the floorboard for transportation or we had rusty trains with steam locomotives that covered us in a decent coating of dark and smelly coal soot. And we did have some drugs and vaccines which increased our chances of survival.

Water and the Climate Change Industry

“The water you drink today has likely been around in one form or another since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago.” – National Geographic

“Water which is too pure has no fish.” - Anonymous

Water is life and it is recyclable, covering 70 percent of our planet; 2.5 percent is fresh water and “only 1 percent is easily accessible, the rest is trapped in glaciers and snowfields.” National Geographic noted that freshwater is in crisis because levels have remained the same over millennia but the human population has exploded to seven billion and thus water use based on population size and animal use is unsustainable. http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/freshwater-crisis/

The climate change industry is growing exponentially, shaped and driven by U.N.’s Agenda 2030, relentlessly introduced, reintroduced, renamed, and first signed by 178 nations in 1992 as Agenda 21. This agenda is driven not by the “saving the planet” narrative, but by global social engineering control and redistribution of wealth to third world nations.

The lynchpin of the now globally-adopted Agenda 2030 is sustainability everything disguised as smart growth/green growth. Everything we do in the civilized world has been declared unsustainable by the global elites who control this climate change industry scam worth trillions of dollars.

To please elitist billionaires and environmentalists around the world, we must fundamentally change according to their plans of de-developing society and regressing to a more primitive lifestyle. They are now regulators of water use, electricity production and use, fossil fuel exploration and use, mining, agriculture, education, medical care, and land use, which will enable them to control the weather and the climate by taxing us into oblivion.

U.N. declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation. They celebrated The World Water Day on March 22, 2014 and the world toilet day on November 19 to remind us that 2.5 billion people have no sanitation and 780 million people do not have access to clean water. http://www.unwater.org/water-cooperation-2013/en/

U.N. alleges that our civilization and standard of living pollute river basins and eating meat and dairy places undue stress on water because those industries use more water to operate.

Some African countries cannot provide clean water to their population yet they are discouraged to produce electricity with “dirty” fossil fuels. Without fossil fuels and electricity, clean water cannot be supplied in sufficient quantities thus water-borne diseases are rampant.

Desalination is frowned upon by environmentalists because it is much more expensive to produce than conventional ways of providing fresh water. Israel that is successfully and relatively inexpensively providing 40% of its water supply from desalination.

According to discovery.com, there are over 15,000 desalination plants around the world that convert ocean water into drinking water either by distillation or reverse osmosis. Environmentalists complain that both processes use too much electricity. Distillation involves boiling the sea water, capturing the steam, separating it into cooling tanks, which then condense the steam into fresh water. Reverse osmosis is filtration that removes the salt and minerals from the water. The brine left behind is usually piped back into the ocean.

Mike Mickley wrote in “US Municipal Desalination Plants: Number, Types, Location, Sizes, and Concentrate Management Practices” that 324 plants were built since 1971 in the United States, capable of producing 25,000 gallons of fresh water per day. The Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego, California is slated for completion in 2016 and will be capable of producing 50 million gallons of fresh water per day, providing 7 percent of the San Diego region’s supply needs.

United Nations bemoans the fact that “85% of the world’s population lives in the driest half of the planet.” The eventual U.N. planned solution will be social engineering in the form of massive population movement from these arid areas to places like Europe and the United States where the rural density per capita is quite low.

IPCC “predicts with high confidence that water stress will increase in central and southern Europe and, that by the 2070s, the number of people affected will rise from 28 million to 44 million. Summer flows are likely to drop by up to 80 % in southern Europe and some part of central and Eastern Europe. Europe’s hydropower potential is expected to drop by an average of 6%, but rise by 20-50% around the Mediterranean by 2070.” (Alcamo et al., 2007)

Data from the World Bank was cited in 2010 which estimated the cost of a yet to be seen 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures to be $70-100 billion per year between 2020 and 2050. Of this cost, anywhere from $13.7-19.2 billion will be water-related. http://www.unwater.org/water-cooperation-2013/water-cooperation/facts-and-figures/en/

Elitists say that, if global population would be allowed to reach the current lifestyle of the average European or North American, 3.5 planets Earth would be needed for sustainability.  That is why population control by any means is considered important. Projections predict 2-3 billion people over the next 40 years. This growth will certainly not come from the senescent white Europeans and North Americans but from third world countries.

As Tom DeWeese wrote in his report, “Sustainablists work to keep these nations from developing or increasing energy use, thereby keeping them poor. Green regulations stop the building of infrastructure. They panic at the idea of increased energy use in developing nations. Instead of working to solve the real problems – the root of poverty - they exploit the excuse of over population and advocate enforcing polices to drastically reduce populations. China’s brutal one child policy of forced abortions and sterilization has become their model.”

How many people does the United Nations believe should inhabit our planet? “A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At a more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.” United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment. https://deweesereport.com/2016/05/17/six-issues-that-are-agenda-21/?mc_cid=040d1ca29b&mc_eid=371fc3eeb1

The fact that we have periods of drought and rainy seasons escapes the “sustainablists” narrative. But, we must still use our water resources responsibly. Do we need to have daddy government control water consumption and recreation via smart water meters and other regulations?

Even though we’ve had 21 consecutive days of non-stop rain, our water bill contained a glossy which stated the necessity to control irrigation via a recommended irrigation schedule. Odd number addresses could water on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. Even number addresses could water on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. And businesses could water on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Installing rain sensors and soil moisture detectors to avoid unnecessary irrigation and further reduce stress on the water system was recommended so that our Service Authority could maintain adequate water pressure in our neighborhood.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) reported that 170,000 public drinking water systems in the country serve 264 million people, transporting 13 percent of the total water withdrawn from the U.S. surface and subterranean sources to residential and commercial buildings via 1 million miles of water main pipe that are deep in the ground and over 100 years old.” The cost of replacing these pipes is $1 trillion and will be passed on to the consumers. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30724-exclusive-dispatch-private-water-industry-says-water-bills-have-to-go-up

A USA Today survey of 100 municipalities found that “residential water bills in at least one in four places have doubled in the past 12 years.” http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2012/09/27/rising-water-rates/1595651/

Some states fine and jail homeowners who collect rainwater. Even a rain puddle is regulated in other places. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, protecting the delta smelt is more important than irrigating crops that feed millions of Americans.

The voters in Oregon tired of their government’s overt attempt to control their water and land and said no to Nestlé. They rallied and defeated Nestlé’s attempt to privatize their water.

“The issue that brought conservatives and progressives together in this way was clear-cut: keeping Nestlé Waters North America from building a water bottling plant and extracting over 118 million gallons annually from a spring in a small, rural community 45 miles east of Portland.”

Americans drink a lot of expensive bottled water, often just filtered tap water, over 10 billion gallons in 2013. With revenue of $12.3 billion in 2013 and Americans spending $18.2 billion on bottled water in 2014, there is a cash cow in that industry which the International Bottled Water Association is gladly representing. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36129-our-water-our-future-voters-in-oregon-defeat-nestle-s-attempt-to-privatize-their-water

Progressives and the U.N. are obsessed with water, among many other things, as a way to control what people do. Take for instance a golfing community in Texas that pumps water from the Brazos River running next to the golf course. After estimating the number of gallons of water needed to water their lawn, they paid the county for the water plus an additional amount in case they have underestimated their needs. After years of this business arrangement, the county wants to “renegotiate” the agreement because they feel that the course is not entitled to so much of “God’s water.”

Additionally, the residents cannot build cisterns to catch rainfall because “God’s water” would run on the property, seep into the ground, and run off into the river, thus polluting it.

As I described in my previous article, http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/58534 United Nations has a strong vested interest to control our water supply and our passage through the seas, oceans, our shipping, fishing, and mineral and oil exploration on the bottom of the ocean. They are controlling it through Agenda 21, chapters 17 and 18, and through the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) which has not yet been ratified by the Senate for lack of sufficient votes – for now.

Executive Order 13603 from March 16, 2012 gives the Department of Defense authority over all water resources. The order also covers all food, transportation, energy, construction materials, “health resources,” farm equipment, fertilizers, and all fuels that can be commandeered and controlled by our government both in peacetime and during national emergencies. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order-national-defense-resources-preparedness

Tombstone, Arizona, “the town too tough to die,” has been embroiled in expensive litigation with the USDA and the Forest Service over its ability to use water from the mountain springs that has provided the desert town with water since the 1880s, predating the Wilderness Act by 80 years.

A Monument Fire in 2011 destroyed the pipes in Huachuca Mountains that carried the water down from its source in the Miller Canyon Wilderness Area. Boulders the size of cars buried the pipes. The Forest Service denied residents the use of heavy machinery to unearth the pipes that were covered in some places by 12 feet of mud. Instead, they could only use wheelbarrows and hand tools because they were protecting an endangered species, a pair of nesting Mexican spotted owls. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/06/12/is-this-owl-forcing-historic-tombstone-az-to-fix-water-lines-with-horses-and-handtools/

The 10^th Amendment protects states and their subdivisions from federal regulations that impede their ability to fulfill essential health and safety functions. “Though the water may originate on National Forest lands, Bureau of Land Management lands, and other federally managed lands, the rights to that water belong to the farms and ranches and cities.” The lawyers for the federal government disagree.

In mid-June 2012, a group of citizens armed with shovels trekked 2 miles up the mountain in 100 degree heat to restore water by hand from the Gardner Spring to the historical Tombstone, Arizona. http://netrightdaily.com/2012/06/tombstone-az-residents-forced-to-use-shovels-and-hand-tools-to-fix-water-supply/

Mr. Gosar said in his one minute speech to the House of Representatives on December 12, 2012, “Our communities shouldn’t need their Congressman or a lawsuit to make basic repairs to infrastructure. The Federal Government should work with us, not against us, to preserve western water supplies.” http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H12DE2-0026:/

Progressives don’t like hydroelectric power generation because it is interfering with nature, aquatic habitats, and the natural flow of rivers. Many dams have been blown up for this very reason. The fact that nature itself causes rivers to flood, creating and destroying habitats at the same time, had been ignored by the progressive agenda.

We now have to suffer the ill-effects of low flush “enviro-friendly” toilets that don’t really save any water since people have to flush them 4-5 times in order to get rid of human waste. To make matters worse, city sewers get stopped up because of low-flush toilets, costing them millions and millions of dollars a year to fix huge clogs. The much touted flushable wipes also choke the small residential pipes and cost homeowners millions of dollars a year to dig them out and replace. Yet there is sufficient water, save for cyclical periods of drought.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2016

 

 

Interview Across Cyber Space with Mircea Brenciu Part VI Infrastructure

Rapsa Village, children going to school  (Photo: digi24.ro)

The sixth installment of my interview across cyberspace with Mircea Brenciu, famous author and editor, adamantly anti-communist, and the founder of many publications in Romania, is coming to a close. A few questions remained to explain the transformation that occurred in Romania since the “collapse” of Ceausescu’s socialist dictatorship in 1989 when the much-touted “workers’ paradise” crashed and burned on the ashes of millions of victims who died needlessly at the reckless hands of Bolsheviks who were experimenting with people’s lives as dreamed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

As I watched videos from remote villages where people still live and die without electricity, paved roads, gravel roads, running water and sewer systems, trudging through ankle deep mud during rains, I wondered what happened to their standard of living in the twenty-seven years since communism “fell.”

Even though Romania became an EU member in 2007, the journey to modernization and progress is still very slow in some regions as it was evident during my visits. Romanians are smart, enterprising, and hard-working people, often making do with so much less than the rest of the developed world, but their journey is hampered by decades of brutal socialist centralized planning and the endemic corruption born by such a system and the need to survive.

On the question of roads, Brenciu explained that highways under the care of the Transportation Ministry are usually well maintained but county roads are not paved or are often neglected because they don’t have the know-how or the funds necessary to fix them.  

Interstate 1 or DN1 between the capital Bucharest and the northern ski resort city of Brasov, a distance of only 170 km, in Brenciu’s opinion, will never be an Autobahn in the near future. On the much sought route Sibiu-Pitesti, the government is just now taking public bids. And the Sibiu-Arad/Timisoara highway was built with “exaggerated efforts and mistakes which came to light as soon as it was inaugurated.”

Former president Traian Basescu raised eyebrows when he declared that “Romania does not need superhighways.” A 2012 referendum of 8 million Romanians indicated the opposite. As Romanians’ standard of living has improved, they bought hundreds of thousands of cars which now crowd the narrow roads. Parking is so inadequate, like in many other European cities, that people park everywhere, including sidewalks, sometimes blocking or slowing down traffic and endangering pedestrians.

The former Minister of Finance under President Emil Constantinescu, professor analyst Ilie Serbanescu, explained that both in Romania and in the European Union (EU), there is interest in only one route, Arad-Pitesti, to the exclusion of all others.  It seems easier to drive to the capital of Hungary, Budapest, in the west, where the infrastructure provides ease of transportation, than to go south to the capital of Romania, Bucharest.

I also asked Brenciu about running water and sewer systems. Surely Romania could easily provide for its citizens! Their former colonizers, the Romans, had an elaborate sewer and water system almost two millennia ago! Using European Union grants and loans, there are now fewer areas without connection to water pipes except in distant and isolated villages.

The fact, that the government is still addressing problems with water and sewer service in the 21^st century, is a direct reflection of the forced industrialization during the 20^th century socialist regime at the expense of the minimal needs of the forgotten Romanian citizens. Such a centralized socialist economy produced one social catastrophe after another that regional and local governments are still trying to overcome and resolve today.

I asked Mircea Brenciu if he believed that political corruption, so endemic in Romania now, can be eradicated.  He mentioned a “traffic of influence” called lobby that pushes issues to the limit of legality. The end of Ceausescu’s dictatorial regime encouraged and launched “the great national competition of personal financial gain” which led to today’s lobby-driven competition for political power and control.

Brenciu believes that the country is going in the direction of a police state again, of the socialist type he thought was dead and buried in 1989. Many Romanians are no longer placing their trust in political leadership or in people in general, but only in God. They realized that “it does not matter who votes, it only matters who counts the votes.”

Brenciu was referring to the shenanigans of the two presidential voting rounds that elected the current President Johannis over his competitor, Prime Minister Ponta, who had personal counsel and advice from Gen. Wesley Clark.  The web of global politics is difficult to untangle.

On the Schengen Agreement, Brenciu explained that, even though he is a “chronic European, Russo-phobe, and anti-communist,” he is becoming a “Euro-skeptic” because of EU’s politics towards Romanians. Even though Romania fulfills all conditions to be integrated into the Schengen Agreement, some of the member-states are reluctant to accept it into their fold while throwing their borders wide-open to the Muslim invasion from Africa and the Middle East.

It appears that Europeans are offended by Romanian gypsies but turn a blind eye to the violence and rapes by Muslims, going to great lengths to cover their crimes.  What do Romanian gypsies do in Europe that is so offensive? Apparently pick-pocketing and begging are “serious problems” for Europeans.

“Our gypsies are academicians compared to the savages coming from Africa and Asia,” stated Brenciu.  What is the point of having the Schengen Agreement if “Europe will continue on such an enormous and irresponsible scale the policy of allowing into their countries the largest exodus of humanity in modern history?”

Paradoxically, the states that have the highest Muslim penetration in Europe are the ones that are refusing Romania’s entrance into the Schengen Agreement. There are currently 26 European countries, covering 400 million people, who can travel in the Schengen Area like a single state with external border controls for travelers entering and exiting the area, but with no internal border controls. Romanians have not been admitted to this agreement, and they feel, rightfully so, as the black sheep of the European Union.

Now that Romanians are members of the European Union, they are no longer in control of their fate and their future, Brenciu concluded our interview.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2016

 

The Continuing Saga of Smart Meters

For those of you who have just heard of smart meters, or  have had one placed on your home knowingly or unknowingly, or for those who think that said smart meters are a new development around the world to make it cheaper and easier for you to get electricity, gas and water via the smart grid, think again.

Rationing and control of your usage of electricity, water, and gas,  and a constant incursion into your privacy, are better descriptors of what smart meters are intended to do. A good friend sent me this story about her bizarre problem with experimental smart meters of long ago.

Dominion Virginia Power started a program in the late 1980s. Carol signed their home onto a package which installed a device in their hot water heater. It was promoted as an electricity-saving gadget and it did not cost them anything, on the contrary, they received a $4 a month credit. The device turned the water heater off during peak usage, usually during summer months when demand for air conditioning was highest. This was implemented in order to save the electric company the trouble of having more electricity stored in excess-capacity facilities which are expensive to build.

The Dominion Virginia Power cancelled the program in 1997 because, according to Carol, the device caused innumerable problems and, when these gadgets broke, a regular plumber or electrician could not fix them.  Although the program was terminated long ago, she still received that $4 credit per month because, “if they eliminated said credit, it would be like they were raising our rates because their technology didn’t work. Crazy!”

Carol’s water heater finally broke in October 2015. After a plumber and electrician were called to their home and neither one could fix the problem, her household was out $220 just to have the plumber step in the door. The plumber did come twice, did not charge for the second visit but cautioned that, if he had to come back, the regular $110 service call would apply.

Left with the only option, Carol called the Dominion Virginia Power expert but he could not fix the problem either. The only Dominion Virginia Power repairman who is the expert at fixing this particular gadget issue was busy in Virginia Beach, three and half hours away. By the end of the week, he did make a service call to their house and now Carol and her family have hot water again.

In spite of their ordeal, having to do without hot water for a few days pales by comparison with my experience under the inept communism of my childhood and young adult years when we did not have hot water all summer long and only a couple of hours in the very early morning every day for the rest of the year.  You had to get up at 4 a.m. if you wanted to bathe or wash your clothes or dishes. Worse yet, we did not have any water at all during the day whenever the government decided that we could have it and they could not deliver it. And we did pay our bills on time, we had to, everything was withheld from the paycheck before the working class received meager wages for their labor. But then again, village folks or suburbia did not have any plumbing and running water and many still don’t have it to this day.

Given the trouble and the cost they had to incur, Carol’s family believes that “most of the Virginia power credit $$$ we’ve saved over the years, we spent this weekend to fix the problem this device caused.” The only ray of sunshine for Carol was finding out from the expert that they did not have the new-style smart meter, just its less controllable cousin. Just imagine what other problems the far more sophisticated and expensive new-style smart meter could have caused!

Many people have willingly accepted the smart meter installation because of the sign-on bonuses of $40-$100 offered and the promise of cheaper electricity. As the promises soured, electricity costs skyrocketed even though consumption in many cases declined, and smart meters caused home fires, customers in California have turned to class action lawsuits.

Of course, there is always the “opt-out” option which is available in most states. Utilities are obligated to offer customers this choice. However, it can be expensive in many states, should one decide to keep traditional meters in order to preserve health, privacy, and the ability to purchase truly cheaper electricity.

 

Benevolent Masters and Controllers of Water

A lot of Americans take water for granted because it is relatively cheap and readily available in most areas. They count on turning on the water spigot and the water flows. They also take for granted their water heaters – few people had to do without hot water in recent memory. Perhaps those who were the victims of tornadoes and hurricanes can better understand having to do without water, hot water, heat, and electricity for days and weeks at a time.

If you ask any Americans like me who grew up under communism and deprivation, we know what it’s like to go the entire summer, every summer, without any hot water and scheduled cold water because that is when the communist leadership decided that it was the best time to clean the cisterns of mineral deposits. At least that is what they told us. We had a few hours of hot water during winter time, 5-7 a.m. and 5-7 p.m. Cold water was also regulated in summer time. During the day, when everyone was assumed to be at work or school, there was no cold water for eight hours. I am not sure they did it out of incompetence, spite, or to make us as miserable as possible.

Anemic heat was delivered by steam heaters. The fact that we lived on the fifth floor of a decrepit high-density concrete apartment did not help with the heat. By the time the steam got to our level, it was approaching lukewarm.  As a child, I would put my hands on the coils to warm my frozen hands. Once in a while, it was hot enough and we would hang clothes to dry over the radiator coils.

The gas oven would help warm the kitchen and we utilized the top stove to boil water to do dishes or bathe in the tub. At least we had a tub. The country folks had it much worse; they got their water from a well, using a chain and bucket to hoist water out. Villages in flat areas could afford iron hand-cranked water pumps; they did not have to dig through rock, making wells more affordable and water easier to find.

I have walked as far as two miles one way to bring back two buckets of water at a time for drinking, cooking, and to flush the commode. Do Americans believe that these are scenarios out of a Depression area movie? Of course, they’ve lived in abundance and luxury their entire lives. Is that likely to change? I am most certainly sure that it is and it will.

Bring in the liberals with their control agenda; water is already tightly controlled in some areas and it will continue to be more restrictive to use, and more expensive. The EPA controlling rain water, Executive Order 13603 of March 16, 2012 giving the Department of Defense control over all of our water resources in both peace and war time, Agenda 21’s public-private partnerships to control rivers and water supplies, watersheds, blowing up dams, denying irrigation water to vegetable and fruit producing farmers in San Joaquin Valley in California represent major efforts to alter Americans’ “wasteful and evil capitalist” lifestyle, de-developing U.S. to the level of third world nations.

“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” (Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies)

Was water really in short supply or undeliverable in the communist “paradise” I had to endure for 20 years? No, it was not about water shortage, it was about power and control over our ability to drink, to cook, to bathe, to wash our clothes, to flush our commodes, it was an attempt to make us so miserable and submissive to their will that when we did get water, we were grateful to our benevolent masters and controllers.

Rain, God's Water Regulated by Progressives

“The water you drink today has likely been around in one form or another since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago.” – National Geographic

Water is life and it is recyclable, covering 70 percent of our planet; 2.5 percent is fresh water and “only 1 percent is easily accessible, the rest is trapped in glaciers and snowfields.” National Geographic tries to make the case that freshwater is in a crisis since its levels have remained the same over millennia but the human population has exploded to seven billion. No mention is made of animals that also need drinking water.

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/freshwater-crisis/

Environmentalists have been telling us for quite some time that man-made global warming would result in the melting of polar ice caps and glaciers, causing 25 feet rise in the ocean levels, destroying all the islands and coastal areas around the globe. But the moneyed liberals who spell this gloom and doom scenario have built elaborate mansions in coastal areas around the globe. And the polar ice caps have experienced this year a 60 percent increase in ice. http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/2013/09/has-global-cooling-begun-arctic-ice-caps-grow-60-year

Humans seem to be “inefficient water users,” says National Geographic. One hamburger takes 630 gallons to produce while “water-intensive crops such as cotton are grown in arid regions.” In the U.S., cotton is grown in the south where water is plentiful.

The ever-wise United Nations guestimates that by 2025, “1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity, with two-thirds of the world’s population living in water-stressed regions as a result of use, growth, and climate change.” Non-existent global warming/climate change is the culprit even though the earth has been cooling for the last 15 years. http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

Rainwater has thus become a contentious issue which must be regulated by EPA say environmentalists and their progressive supporters around the country who make their life mission to control the rest of us because we are so ignorant, we must be told what to do in painful detail. http://www.waterworld.com/articles/print/volume-29/issue-8/urban-water-management/regulating-rainfall.html  A wise judge in Virginia struck down the attempted rainwater regulation by the EPA. http://conservative-outlooks.com/2013/01/15/epas-attempt-to-regulate-rainwater-dries-up/ However, it did not stop other states and local boards to proceed with implementation of its regulation.

Before 2009 “it was illegal in Colorado to gather rainwater and snowmelt that fell from a rooftop, patio, or driveway into barrels.” It was considered theft. In most of the western United States, it is still illegal to capture rainwater due to “the prior appropriation doctrine that governs water.” Colorado allowed capture after a study revealed that 97 percent of rainfall in the Denver area never reached the rivers, it evaporated.

The Colorado Senate Bill 09-080 was so strict that urbanites could never capture rainwater.  The rules were as follows:

-          Collecting rainwater had to be done only on residential property

-          The homeowner had to have a legal entitlement to a well

-          No water was provided by a city to the homeowner

-          Water could only be collected from the roof

-          The rainwater collected could only be used in the manner described in the well permit

http://earth911.com/news/2009/07/03/colorado-bill-legalizes-rainwater-harvesting/

I wonder how many people are in violation of the law when they leave an empty container outside and it fills up with rainwater?

Progressives and the U.N. are obsessed with water, among many other things, as a way to control what people do in their daily lives. Take for instance a golfing community in Texas that pumps water from the Brazos river running next to the golf course. After estimating the number of gallons of water needed to water their lawn, they paid the county for the water plus an additional amount in case they have underestimated their needs. After years of this business arrangement, the county wants to “renegotiate” the agreement because they feel that the course is not entitled to so much of “God’s water.”

Additionally, the residents cannot build cisterns to catch rainfall because “God’s water” would run on the property, seep into the ground, and run off into the river, thus polluting it.

As I described in my previous article, http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/58534

United Nations has a strong vested interest to control our water supply and our passage through the seas, oceans, our shipping, fishing, and mineral and oil exploration on the bottom of the ocean. They are controlling it through Agenda 21, chapters 17 and 18 signed by 178 countries, including the United States, and through the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) which has not yet been ratified by the Senate for lack of sufficient votes. They will keep trying until they have the votes.

Executive Order 13603 from March 16, 2012 gives the Department of Defense authority over all water resources. The order also covers all food, transportation, energy, construction materials, “health resources,” farm equipment, fertilizers, and all fuels that can be commandeered and controlled by our government both in peacetime and during national emergencies. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order-national-defense-resources-preparedness

Tombstone, Arizona, “the town too tough to die,” has been embroiled in expensive litigation with the USDA and the Forest Service over its ability to use water from the mountain springs that has provided the desert town with water since the 1880s, predating the Wilderness Act by 80 years.

A Monument Fire in 2011 destroyed the pipes in Huachuca Mountains that carried the water down from its source in the Miller Canyon Wilderness Area. Boulders the size of cars buried the pipes. The Forest Service denied residents the use of heavy machinery to unearth the pipes that were covered in some places by 12 feet of mud. Instead, they could only use wheelbarrows and hand tools. As they were protecting an endangered species, a pair of nesting Mexican spotted owls, the Forest Service declined to give further information unless the Goldwater Institute paid nearly $80,000 in fees. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/06/12/is-this-owl-forcing-historic-tombstone-az-to-fix-water-lines-with-horses-and-handtools/

Liberals do not have a problem with wind turbines chopping up millions of birds in flight around the world, including the golden eagle in California, as long as it is done in the name of renewable energy. But disturbing a pair of nesting Mexican spotted owls, so that 1,600 humans can get water, is not acceptable.  http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/09/27/California-wind-farm-seeks-permit-to-kill-eagles/UPI-90981380303425/

The 10^th Amendment protects states and their subdivisions from federal regulations that impede their ability to fulfill essential health and safety functions. “Though the water may originate on National Forest lands, Bureau of Land Management lands, and other federally managed lands, the rights to that water belong to the farms and ranches and cities.” The lawyers for the federal government disagree.

In mid-June 2012, a group of citizens armed with shovels trekked 2 miles up the mountain in 100 degree heat to restore water by hand from the Gardner Spring to the historical Tombstone, Arizona. http://netrightdaily.com/2012/06/tombstone-az-residents-forced-to-use-shovels-and-hand-tools-to-fix-water-supply/

Mr. Gosar made a one minute speech to the House of Representatives on December 12, 2012, “Our communities shouldn’t need their Congressman or a lawsuit to make basic repairs to infrastructure. The Federal Government should work with us, not against us, to preserve western water supplies.” http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H12DE2-0026:/

We now have to suffer the ill-effects of low flush “enviro-friendly” toilets that don’t really save any water since people have to flush them 4-5 times in order to get rid of human waste. To make matters worse, city sewers get stopped up because of low-flush toilets, costing them millions and millions of dollars a year to fix problems. The much touted flushable wipes also clog the small residential pipes and cost homeowners millions of dollars a year to dig out them out and replace. Yet there is plenty of water, save for cyclical periods of draught.

According to discovery.com, there are over 15,000 desalination plants around the world that convert ocean water into drinking water either by distillation or reverse osmosis. Environmentalists complain that both processes use too much electricity. Distillation involves boiling the sea water, capturing the steam, separating it into cooling tanks, which then condense the steam into fresh water. Reverse osmosis is filtration that removes the salt and minerals from the water. The brine left behind is usually piped back into the ocean.

Mike Mickley wrote in “US Municipal Desalination Plants: Number, Types, Location, Sizes, and Concentrate Management Practices” that 324 plants were built since 1971 in the United States, capable of producing 25,000 gallons of fresh water per day. The Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego, California is slated for completion in 2016 and will be capable of producing 50 million gallons of fresh water per day, providing 7 percent of the San Diego region’s supply needs.

Progressive don’t like desalination because it uses too much electricity provided by coal and other fossil fuels, the culprits of CO2 and global warming. They would prefer that we live in a feudal type society centered on a self-sufficient village.

But the global warming did not pan out because it is a hoax. South Dakota got a record 23 inches of snow in early October this year that killed 100,000 cows - they either suffocated or froze to death. The MSM, with the exception of Fox News and the foreign press, did not report the disaster caused by the massive blizzard preceded by heavy rain. Our government did not send any help because South Dakota is flush with revenue from tar sands. Besides, the evil conservatives caused the government to shut down, FEMA’s hands were tied. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/13/south-dakota-ranchers-reel-after-catastrophic-storm-leaves-up-to-100000-cattle/

Progressives don’t like hydroelectric power generation because it is interfering with nature, aquatic habitats, and the natural flow of rivers. Many dams have been blown up during this administration, citing this reason. The fact that nature itself causes rivers to flood, creating and destroying habitats at the same time, has escaped the progressive agenda.

 

 

 

 

 

U.S. and the World by 2030

“Its soul, its climate, its equality, liberty, laws, people, and manners. My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!"

                                   - Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Monroe, June 17, 1785

What will the world look like and what kind of country will America be in the next 15-20 years at the rate of the fast-paced involuntary and hopeless change that is aimed at pushing us “forward” to disaster?

The “unprecedented change” will drive “60 percent of the world’s population to mega-cities by 2030, and competition for food, water, and energy resources could increase the possibilities of violent conflict.” (Frederick Kempe, President and CEO, Atlantic Council)

“The United States must urgently address its domestic economic and political dysfunctions.” The Atlantic Council, a think tank, wrote a 57-page report, “Envisioning 2030: U.S. Leadership in a Post-Western World,” to “help prepare the Obama Administration and its global partners for unprecedented change.” (http://www.acus.org/publication/envisioning-2030-us-strategy-post-western-world)

The report predicts a future of “vast economic and political volatility, environmental catastrophe, and conflicting, inward-looking nationalisms that would be unlike any period that the United States has seen before.”  “President Obama will be setting the tone and direction for U.S. policy in a post-Western world.” (Atlantic Council, Executive Summary, p. 5)

As the powers that be are actively and speedily working to affect this outcome, the global order champions “predict” that wealth will shift from west to east. Learning Mandarin may be a good idea - China is recognized in the report as “the most crucial single factor that will shape the international system in 2030.” (Atlantic Council, Executive Summary, p. 7)

Is a post-western world a world without the United States as the economic superpower, benefactor, and military protector of the globe’s ungrateful nations? The 20^th century economic guru of the liberal elites, John Maynard Keynes, said in 1937, “…the idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behavior that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice.”

The National Intelligence Council discusses in its December 2012 166-page paper, “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds,” the mega trends, game-changers, Black Swans, and potential worlds in the next 15-20 years. (http://globaltrends2030.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/global-trends-2030-november2012.pdf)

Food, water, and energy sources will become problematic due to growing populations in emerging markets and policies adopted at home that favor expensive green energy, wind, solar, and biofuels, preventing exploration of existing cheaper domestic resources of fossil fueled energy. As one commodity becomes an issue, it will affect the supply and demand of the others. Water needs will grow by a predicted 40 percent.

Energy supply may be obtained from fracking. Hydraulic fracturing (fracking), developed in the 1940s, could extract oil and gas from shales at much lower cost. However, the environmentalists' objections over the contamination of water, earth quake generation, and methane emissions, have slowed down the use of hydraulic fracturing, particularly in Europe. China, with the largest shale reserves, does not have enough equipment and water to extract gas through fracking.

The EPA will set back any logical resolution to addressing human needs as it will interfere with its myriad of regulations via the Clean Air Act in the misguided effort to protect some tiny fish to the detriment of humans.

NIC modeling predicts that prices for agricultural commodities will rise, impacting poorer countries the worst as they depend on corn which is also used for biofuel. Crop disease, drought, and bad weather events could compound the problem. (p. 34)

Genetically modified crops could be the way to provide sufficient and affordable food and fuel by using transgenic technologies and precision agriculture via drought-tolerant, salt-tolerant crops, micro-irrigation, and hydroponic greenhouses. Pricing water for farmers in order to discourage waste could be implemented. Currently, farmers pay one-tenth of the price that households and industry pay for water. (NIC, p. 97)

Poverty will be reduced as the result of the U.N.’s efforts to re-distribute wealth across the globe to third world nations, carbon-taxing and punishing developed nations for their success. In U.N.’s view, the wealth created by the west was achieved at the expense of the rest of the world. These retrograde totalitarian regimes bear no responsibility for their endemic corruption and constant religious and tribal wars.

There will be a diffusion of power without hegemony, dominated by control of regional coalitions. China, India, Brazil will be major players. China will become the largest economy. Europe, Japan, Russia, U.S. will continue to decline. Countries like Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Turkey will remain “second-order players.”

Aging countries like Japan and Western Europe, who are committing demographic suicide by having less and less babies, below the replacement value of 2.1, will experience economic decline and loss of national identity. Russia will suffer population decline. An important factor will be the statistics of Russian men who die at relatively younger age because of alcohol abuse, tobacco, and related accidents.

There are 80 countries currently with a median age of 25 or less. Eighty percent of all ethnic and armed conflicts come from countries with youthful populations.  By 2030, there will be 50 countries left with youthful populations. Fertility rates in these areas range from 4-6 children per family. Clusters of projected youthful states are:

-          Equatorial belt of the Sub-Saharan Africa

-          Middle East

-          Americas: Bolivia, Guatemala, Haiti

-          Pacific Rim: East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands

-          Pakistan, Afghanistan, southeast Turkey (Kurds)

-          Israel (Orthodox Jews)  (NIC report, p. 23)

Rapid changes and a shift in power could overwhelm governments.  A “governance gap” may evolve that could be replaced by regional governance of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), a rich individual, or a group of powerful elites.

Natural disasters such as staple crop catastrophes, tsunamis, hurricanes, erosion and depletion of soils, and solar geomagnetic storms might cause governments to collapse. (NIC report on Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, p. 52)

NIC’s models show an augmentation of the global middle class, health care advances, new technologies, new communication, and poverty reduction.  NIC analysis predicts the most rapid growth of the middle class to occur in Asia - India and China. (NIC report, p. 9)

Pathogens crossing from animals to humans can and have caused political and economic turmoil.

Respiratory pathogens can travel very fast across the globe. Prion disease caused Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans; a bat corona virus caused SARS in 2002. Black Death killed one third of the European population; measles and smallpox killed 90 percent of the native populations in the Americas; the 1918 flu pandemic killed 50 million worldwide. HIV/AIDS jumped to humans almost fifty years before it was recognized. TB, gonorrhea, Staphylococcus Aureus (staph) could re-emerge with a vengeance. Genetic engineering could release new pathogens in addition to those occurring naturally. (NIC, p. 14)

Nationalism is likely to intensify in regions such as East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East based on territorial disputes, religious beliefs, tribal vendettas, and theocratic ideologies. Although planners expected urbanization to promote secularization, the opposite occurred in many settings; it encouraged religious identity, particularly among Muslims.

NIC’s modeling sees Russia as fighting the battle of “integrating its rapidly growing ethnic Muslim population in the face of a shrinking ethnic Russian population.” The changing ethnic mix is already a source of growing social tensions. (p. 83)

The flow of human capital from the poorest countries, to middle-income, and to rich countries will cause social disruptions, unrest, and problems for urban governments. Increased urban population from internal migration and external immigration will cause food and water shortages. (p. 31)

Patterns of trade reveal the following major economic clusters: Europe (EU), Asia, North America (NAFTA), and Latin America.

Two-thirds of European trade takes place within the EU; NAFTA encompasses 40 percent of U.S. trade. East Asian intra-regional trade is 53 percent. Latin America intra-regional trade is 35 percent (excluding Mexico). Latin America is pursuing EU-type regional governance, the Union of Latin American Nations (UNISUR). (Atlantic Council report, p. 26)

National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) modeling for 2030 includes four potential worlds:

-          “Stalled Engines” (globalization stalls and interstate conflict grows)

-          “Fusion” (China and U.S. cooperate; it does not look promising so far)

-          “Ginni-out-of-the-bottle” (U.S. is no longer the world’s policeman and pocketbook, inequalities explode, no more international welfare, some countries prosper, some countries fail)

-          “Nonstate World” (NGOs, multinational businesses, academic institutions, wealthy individuals, megacities such as those envisioned by U.N. Agenda 21 become the leaders; “increasing global public opinion consensus among elites form hybrid coalitions” – a page right out of the U.N. Agenda 21 goals)

The 2030 global modeling points to potential Black Swans such as Euro/EU collapse due to “unruly Greek exit causing eight times more collateral damage than the Lehmann Brothers,” nuclear war, WMD, cyber-attacks to the power grid and the Internet, solar geomagnetic storms, a democratic or collapsed China, a reformed Iran (wishful thinking), and global anarchy, if U.S. power collapses or retreats and no other power is willing, capable, or able financially to provide international order.