It Takes an Algorithm to Know a Lot About You

“I believe the primary role of the state is to teach, train, and raise children. Parents have a secondary role.”  - Hillary Clinton, “It Takes a Village”

Sci-fi movies like Minority Report, with a trio of psychics called “recogs” who can see “pre-visions” of crimes yet to be committed, setting in motion a Pre Crime Unit, came to mind when reading about China’s effort to detect “pre-crime.”

Bloomberg Business is reporting that “The Communist Party has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collect data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-03/china-tries-its-hand-at-pre-crime

It was reported that the DOD’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) called for research proposals to study social media and how it could facilitate insights into people’s real thoughts, emotions and beliefs, and thus predict behavior.

It is obvious that Facebook is collecting data on people’s beliefs, likes and dislikes, often prompting them to play silly personal discovery games that yield a score after ten questions are asked which may seem random to the average person but they are cleverly designed to mine data and information on that person.

Algorithms are said to “accurately detect key features of speech linked to structural patterns such as humor, metaphor, emotion, language innovations, and subtle non-verbal elements of communication such as pitch, posture, gesture, from text, audio, and visual media.”

Measuring cognitive behavior, it is alleged that a software called ‘Beware’ is already being used to analyze social media activity, property records, records of friends and associates, assigning a “threat score.” Police might use such a “threat score” to pre-judge if a person is dangerous. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-08/the-crime-you-have-not-yet-committed

Can computers accurately predict the future? Amazon uses algorithms to guess what you are likely to purchase, meteorologists make short-term accurate weather forecasts, and Facebook pop up ads from companies you liked or offering similar items you have purchased on line from various vendors; videos of movies you may like to watch may pop up on the screen as suggestions based on your past viewing. In certain cases computers have made strides in “predicting who will commit a violent crime.”

Controlling someone’s life, whether through data-mining or medical breakthroughs that involve DNA typing, does not stop with intrusive research and computer manipulation. Overt government control of our children is promoted by many on the left, including presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. She is of the opinion that parents are secondary in raising their child, the state comes first in its job to teach, train, and raise a child in order to better influence who they are, what they become, and where their loyalties reside.

I still remember the wife of the socialist dictator Ceausescu, Elena, who told the soldiers who arrested her in 1989 that she raised them, how dare they put handcuffs on her? We were to refer to her as our mother and the mother of the country, that our biological parents were just caretakers entrusted by the state.

Ambry Genetics, a prominent DNA-testing firm located in Orange County, CA, revealed a new database that contains the aggregated genetic information of 10,000 patients with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. With the explanation that insights may lead to better medicines and a healthier future for everybody, the company welcomes “collaboration with pharmaceutical companies to speed the discovery of new diagnostic targets, treatments, and cures to save more lives, sooner.” Ambry Genetics “hopes to expand the database by adding genetic information from 20,000 individuals each year.”

Drug Discovery and Development magazine interviewed Ambry CEO Charlie Dunlop who said, “Based on the sheer volume of the data we have released, we have already close to 200 new genes implicated in breast and ovarian cancer. This is about 10 times more genes than was publicly known yesterday, broadening understanding and potentially opening up more drug targets than from any single data release in history.” http://www.dddmag.com/articles/2016/03/massive-genetic-database-opens-public

But certain risk factors do not necessarily mean that a patient typed with such risk will actually get the disease. Are such genetic banks only about “preventing” genetic diseases? Might they have culling implications? Is playing God a good idea? Doing in vitro fertilization, screening the embryos, discarding the imperfect ones, creating 3-parent embryos, where will it stop? If you have changes in BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, might insurance be refused to you, or perhaps a birth permit will be denied if it goes that far.

Might life imitate art eventually? In the 1997 movie “Gattaca,” the main character, Vincent Freeman, cannot travel into outer space because he is genetically inferior, an “in-valid.” In order to pursue his dream, he must purchase the genes of a laboratory-engineered “valid.”

From an unclassified document released in January, Money Morning is reporting that “the FBI’s Office of Partner Engagement revealed a new agency initiative based on Britain’s ‘anti-terror’ mass surveillance program.” This agency “requests that high school educators across the country inform on students who express ‘anti-government’ or ‘anarchist’ political beliefs.” Upon their observations, teachers report behaviors that they think might lead to violence, including persons who believe in conspiracy theories such as global government, police state, are those who believe in “libertarianism or constitutionalism.” http://moneymorning.com/2016/03/10/fbi-recruits-u-s-educators-to-inform-on-your-childs-political-affilliations/

Is Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s vision of a dystopian future in which “humans were genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order” still just his dark fiction that has frightened readers since 1931?

In our new and highly computerized world, “the lives of others” can be effortlessly watched and dissected to the DNA level and then lovingly controlled in order to preserve them the right way.

 

 

Sanitized Death

My daughter and I go to the nursing home so often that the head nurse rolls her eyes when she sees us, we are there almost every day. My husband jokes that we must wear a visitor’s badge every time otherwise they might not let us go, thinking that we were patients.

We did not place mom in a nursing home to abandon her there; we wanted her to have round-the-clock care that our small family could not provide. We were told that Medicare only paid for three hours a week of in-home care and Medicaid paid eight hours per day. It is certainly not part of our culture to put a loved one in a nursing home. Back then we had a very large and extended family who took turns to care for someone really sick or with long-term disability. There were few nursing homes in operation and those had the reputation of killing factories.

Today Wendy’s room is empty and is being scrubbed by the staff. The heavy smell of chlorine is permeating the halls. It is not unusual – it happens periodically when Wendy is gone to dialysis. But Wendy is gone forever. Her heart stopped the day before, shortly after her elderly mom and brother left from their trice-a-week visits. Wendy suffered for eighteen years and eventually was brought to this nursing home, blind and unable to talk or move, as her mom became increasingly unable to care for her at home.

Wendy, a tiny and gaunt blue-eyed woman, is in a better place now, no longer crying in pain day and night, only stopping when exhaustion put her into a short and agonizing slumber, or when my mom went in to talk to her in a soothing motherly voice in Romanian.  There was not a spot left on her hands that mom could touch to comfort her that did not have bruises or sores from repeated needle punctures. Sometimes her veins would bleed when she returned from dialysis.

They are scrubbing Wendy’s room spotless. Death is sanitized in this culture. People are so insensitive to dying because death is whisked away. When our loved ones pass, they are whisked away to the funeral home for embalming or cremation. There is no coffin on the dining room table for the customary three-day wake while families in the village or in town come to express their condolences to all relatives present.

Even when our beloved pets die, the veterinarian euthanizes them and disposes of their bodies in an incinerator or the owner buries them in the back yard. It is all sanitized death. We mourn their passing in a very civilized way which whisks the pain and suffering of death away and scrubs all evidence.

People usually die alone in hospitals or in their sleep. Few get their last rites or someone holding a burning candle for them. We are born into this world alone, in the presence of our mothers or perhaps an attending medic if we live in a western culture, and often we die alone, or in the presence of a stranger, if we are lucky to have anyone around at all.

We see sanitized death in movies and gratuitous violence resulting in death, but it is divorced from pain, from reality, it is just celluloid gore and blood.

There are residents in the nursing home who no longer have any relatives to speak for them. As the staff turnover is so constant, I often wonder how well these people are treated. I met a patient rights representative a year ago in the hallway, she gave me a brochure, but I have not seen her since.

We have argued with the medical staff to provide a slightly wider bed for mom because she keeps falling out of her narrow bed when she turns. Bed rails are considered cruel and a form of restraint. But they do not hesitate to strap heavy electronic bracelets on a thin and emaciated wrist to make sure the patient does not wonder off the property.

We were informed that Medicare dictates that a patient must be considerably overweight before a slightly wider bed is allowed. We live in a culture in which we are told, we are too fat for airplane seats and for our own health, but in a nursing home, being fat provides a more comfortable bed.

Every time we visit, we take time to talk to the patients who are able to come out of their rooms, patients we know, who do not have relatives coming to see them, they live too far away or are gone.

We wished the staff would allow us to bring Gary, the longest resident there, pancakes like his mother used to cook for him when she was alive. He still remembers her even though he has difficulty expressing himself. Gary told my daughter how delicious they were and his eyes sparkled with a momentary twinkle of joy. Then his head slumped down in a resigned frown.

Death is sanitized and whisked away from the corridors of pain and suffering.

An American in Cluj

“Bucura-te, Tara scumpa, imbracata de parada,
Ca, din alte tari straine, vin prieteni sa te vada!     -  Vasile Militaru, 1936

Our paths have crossed years ago at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, a residential school in Columbus, dedicated to gifted students from around the state who wanted to be challenged by an enhanced curriculum and by the combined expertise of teachers with doctorates in their respective fields.

His interest was not necessarily math and science, Darius Roby loved foreign languages and the wonderful programs offered there by two foreign women, who taught five different languages. His mentor was my colleague, a very inspiring and entertaining teacher from Venezuela, who supplied their fantasies with stories of world travel, especially France, and mysterious places. Her enthusiasm was contagious!

Darius was born in a town close to the Mississippi Delta, a poor region left behind by its own making but rich in culture and music; it is “dotted by antebellum homes and destitute black communities,” as Darius wrote. He described the poverty as self-inflicted by people who “live hopelessly chasing the Pie in the Sky that democrat candidates always promise them and never deliver.”

But his ancestors lived over the past two hundred years in the “Red Clay Hills” area where “Appalachia begins, more ethnically mixed,” where great cotton plantations give way to more forested and hilly regions where small farmers grow crops like corn.

Darius pursued International Studies (Social and Cultural Identity) at Ole Miss and, after graduation in 2010, decided to make good on the promise to see the places that he had spent years reading about in his history books. Europe to him was not just France, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, or Germany; it was Eastern Europe as well with its long history dating back to the Roman Empire. He wanted to see where the “backwoods gravel roads led to and what was on the other side of the hill,” so he chose Romania to study at Babes-Bolyai in Cluj, the Faculty of European Studies.

It did not take long for Darius to fall in love with Romania - discovering her beauty was curiosity, enchantment, and serendipity. On his semester abroad in France in 2009, he decided to visit Moldova but had to spend one day in Bucharest because his connecting flight to Chisinau was canceled. A year later he found himself in Bucharest and, instead of hopping on a flight to Cluj, he decided to take the long route by train, the trip of a lifetime.

“The grey, rather depressing communist architecture around Bucharest’s Gara de Nord [northern railway station], the farms of the Wallachian Plain, the smell of petroleum and heavy industry in Ploiesti, seeing the Carpathian Mountains for the first time and instantly falling in love; passing Brasov and getting my first glimpse of Transylvania was a special moment – seeing little villages that would do any postcard justice, shepherds in cojocs standing on the hills watching over their flock, and familiarizing myself with the new names whenever the train would stop: Sighisoara, Medias, and Campia Turzii.”

Arriving in Cluj by taxi, passing by the old synagogue, the Roman Catholic cathedral, Darius marveled at the Hapsburg architecture, so different from the Wallachian architecture, Darius knew he was in for a fascinating adventure.

Learning Romanian seemed easy to Darius after having spent seven years studying French and two years Russian, but remained a “source of grief.” While the French congratulated him when he spoke French to them, even though he made mistakes, punctilious Romanians made sure to correct him or switched to English every time he made errors. Darius understood first hand that education socialist style was not the feel good, let-me-give-you-a-trophy-for-trying American style education, but it was based strictly on merit and achievement, impatient, you can either do it or you don’t, and much too harsh for westerners.

He met Romanians who lectured him on how Romanian is a Latin language and he should not make certain mistakes. There was so much pride in their language that a Westerner could easily mistake good intentions of perfection for arrogance.

But Romanians are friendly, warm, and kind, ready to offer comfort to someone in need, and very forgiving.  Darius discovered that “Romanians truly appreciated the small things in life because they were not spoiled by them. They might go about their business with frowns on their faces but they will go to the moon and back for you once you become a part of their circle of loved ones.”

Small things in life were lived and appreciated more, Darius discovered.  After four to five months of cold winter, when most fruits were hard to find, it was a special treat to find new potatoes in spring, cartofi noi, or late summer plums, prune.  

When the snow has barely melted on the ground, it is heart-warming to celebrate “Martisor” on March 1, pinning a symbol of spring tied with a red and white string on a favorite girl’s lapel.

He quickly discovered that Romania is a “bureaucratic paradise” and cultural rules of etiquette are quite different. While filling out paperwork for residence permit, for school, and other documents, carrying bags and books, Darius used his foot to shut the door to the health clinic. That simple act of necessity in America earned him a rebuke from the doctor who yelled at him that he disrespected her by closing the door improperly.

Upon finishing his M.A. in July 2012, Darius was offered a job as Chief Editor for the English and French pages of “Clujul Vazut Altfel,” an NGO that promotes the cultural, historic, and touristic attractions in the region as well as the ethnographic value of Cluj County and Transylvania. The salary is nothing compared to what he could make in the United States, but his work brings him a sense of contentment not unlike the Romanian joie de vivre.

“Clujul Vazut Altfel” organizes excursions to villages and cultural sights in the surrounding areas, a wonderful educational experience worth far more than many boring days in the classroom. www.en.cluj.com

Romania is a gem of history, its cultural, historical, and natural wonders are truly breathtaking. “Almost every village has its own treasures – from Roman castra found in the middle of a cow pasture and fortresses that once defended medieval Moldova from the Turks, to waterfalls with stories that have long ago passed into legend. Six years have not been long enough to discover them all - I do not think that a lifetime would suffice.”

NOTE

Darius Roby’s travel blogs can be found at the following links:

http://uatoday.tv/opinion/bakota-the-place-that-no-longer-exists-on-maps-473638.html
http://www.moldova.org/along-lesser-traveled-roads-trip-to-moldova-part-one/
http://www.moldova.org/along-lesser-traveled-roads-trip-to-moldova-fortress-soroca-part-two/
http://en.cluj.com/rosia-montana-where-history-and-industry-meet-progress-and-conservation/
http://www.moldova.org/darius-roby-orheiul-vechi-a-window-on-the-past-2/

 

 

 

 

Unconscious Bias is Thought Police

The media has lately jammed the air waves with its newest indoctrination tactic driven by various United Nations organizations, the “unconscious bias” and, more specifically the “invisible race bias,” and the “invisible gender bias.” Training workshops in “thought police” are taking place around the country and around the globe to “assist” people overcome such unconscious bias and “nudge” them in the right direction.

Who would have thought that the song heard around Europe during World War II, “Die Gedanken sind frei “(Thoughts are Free), would become “verboten” in the 21^st century, as bureaucrats are trying to control our very thoughts? The song expressed the human defiance to their Nazi captors, saying, you can imprison us in concentration or in prisoner of war camps but you can never hold our thoughts captive or hostage.

In preparation for the International Women’s Day, on March 8^th, the International Office of Migration, the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Permanent Mission of the United States are hosting on March 7 in Geneva, Switzerland, “an event under the auspices of the Geneva Gender Champions Initiative/network, to discuss invisible gender bias and its impact on gender equality.”

The Geneva Gender Champions is a non-governmental organization (NGO), an international lobby dedicated to “gender equality and parity.” http://genevagenderchampions.com/

Euphemistically named, “Planet 50-50 – Tackling Invisible Gender Bias,” this event will be facilitated by Tanya M. Odom, “an expert in inclusive leadership.”  Inclusive leadership sounds great on paper, “all stakeholders have a seat at the organizational table,” but some people are not leaders at all, they are followers, no matter how much we would like them to lead. Leading from behind is not leadership. http://www.iom.int/news/iom-unog-unohchr-and-us-host-geneva-event-tackling-gender-bias

Global leaders (everything is now global, including thought policing) will share their personal experiences in dealing with “cultural bias and with organizational structures and practices that inadvertently benefit men and disadvantage women.”

Interactive sessions will teach participants how to “raise awareness of recent advances in neuroscience and organizational psychology and learn how they can help to inform actions to tackle invisible gender bias.”  I don’t know about you but this sounds very Orwellian to me.

Just because men and women are biologically different and thus physically differently-abled, have different qualification, abilities, and experience, they must be equal.  And the United Nations and its bureaucrats must re-educate your brain and your thinking with mind-bending techniques to make you agree with them.

The idea that we should somehow manage and control our “unconscious bias” in order to create a progressive diversity in the workplace smacks of mind control in order to satisfy the political correctness crowd that has gone berserk.

This “unconscious bias” was formed, according to experts, as a necessity for survival, in response to physical and property safety, identity, or sense of existing. It is a primal biological response to a threat and it is important to our survival. But, if it does not meet with the approval of experts, it must be controlled and changed through careful indoctrination. This “belief or attitude in our heads” must be rehabilitated.

Even though we use this discerning bias to make sense of the world around us and make decisions that seem safe, valuable, and competent, unless it meets with the approval and criteria of the PC crowd, it must be rewired. They know best what a positive bias is and what constitutes a negative bias. They can let us keep our positive biases but they must eradicate the negative biases from our brains. After all, it is not our fault that we harbor such negative biases, we are told by very wise progressives, it is the fault of our parents who instilled an “inflexible or negative conscious or unconscious belief about a particular category of people.”

And if we have biases as an instinct reaction to our primal biological and wired urge for safety, identity, and wellbeing that must be changed as well. The human brain is wired to categorize and distinguish “safe” from “dangerous” but, that is inappropriate as well. Things are only dangerous or safe if progressives say they are dangerous or safe. We cannot allow our brains to make those judgments.

Pre-established filters such as perceptions, assumptions, interpretations, or preferences that we developed as human beings have created our biases via parents, belief system, values, our culture, extended family, schooling, teachers, and the church.  In this process, according to progressive experts, we have created “blind spots” which must be brought to light and sanitized.

If we think divergently from the progressive ideology, if we disagree with failed multiculturalism, with open borders, with endless illegal immigration, if we think that rewarding failure, mediocracy, and jobs based on something other than intellectual and physical ability is counterproductive, that men and women are physically and biologically different no matter how much progressives tell us that we are equals, if we think that everyone has equal opportunity in this country and should take responsibility for their actions, we are “unconsciously bias” and must be aggressively indoctrinated and our negative biases erased.

 

 

De-Nationalize and Globalize



Photo: Hannity.com

I have described in my book, “Liberty on Life Support,” the American economy and the country in general as a comatose patient. There was even a widely circulating cartoon on social media picturing Uncle Sam on a hospital gurney, attached to life support, barely clinging to life. At first glance it may seem a gross exaggeration until you actually look at the national debt clock, understand the true state of the economy, the condition of the socialist and collectivist education driven by Common Core, and the political power and corruption.

It seems that fundamental changes are occurring around the globe, driving countries to de-nationalize, to destroy their sovereignty, and to globalize under the guidance of the same U.N. elites who know what is best for an “overpopulated planet” that is going to be destroyed by a manufactured global warming Armageddon.

If we accept the financial terms dictated by the trillion-dollar climate change industry, too vested into its own financial gain to care about the inhabitants whose lives and futures are expendable to the whims of the few billionaires, we might be spared our doomsday fate by allowing ourselves to be literally taxed to death. Money always solves problems for bureaucrats; why not tame Mother Nature with taxed money as well?

My friend Mircea Brenciu compared Romania, our country of birth, to a sick patient who is being experimented upon by transnational groups that are intravenously administering “transfusion” therapies that are not in the best interest of the patient. It is an experiment that is supposed to prepare the patient for integration into the “European civilization” as defined by the technocrats in Brussels. 

The formulas, used to tear the patient away from “the collectivist mindset through brutal and inadequate methods” and to integrate him into private property and personal initiative and responsibility, have created “grave fissures in the social order.”

These transfusions seem to be quite toxic to the sick patient, especially when the treatment is administered against the will of the people. Once the patient is infused with so much globalism, the arteries are left wide open and the patient is likely to die, unable to defend himself from the onslaught of foreign body invasions.  At such a point, nationalism will disappear, sovereignty will be gone, and the strange idea of global citizenship will become mandatory.

People who deny that such a globalist movement exists, may have been surprised when kindergarten students from PS75 in New York City were “made to create an American flag with the flags of 22 other nations superimposed over the stripes.” The words below the flag stated: “We pledge allegiance to an International Flag.”http://www.hannity.com/articles/hanpr-election-493995/outrageous-public-school-students-taught-to-14451508/#ixzz423J1rdqh

Alienating people from their national roots, from their identity, culture, language, and history, will certainly endanger their safety and survival. This transfusion of globalism is likely to change the patient from a solid nationalist grounded in history into a Frankenstein-ish metamorphosis that will remove the patient’s spine. In the end, the country may go the way of the former Yugoslavia, divided by faceless bureaucrats according to their interests.

The fundamental transformation around the globe is not going to leave any country unscathed or unaffected. The master plan is composed of many treaties, partnerships, committees, organizations, and other foundations for the “public good.” Unfortunately, the good public had no input into its own plans, never got a seat at the planning table.

Certain developments occurred in the western world that are promoted and advanced by the main stream media and academia:

-          The institution of family has been discouraged and derided; fertility rates have dropped precipitously among the civilized world.

-          Large groups of people have left their countries for economic reasons or were displaced by war and tribal rivalries.

-          Increasing health issues due to poor nutrition or poisoning of the food supply with unnecessary toxic substances used as “preservatives.”

-          The dumbing-down of education, glorifying mediocrity and bad behavior, excusing violence, deriding honor, love, kindness, patriotism, respect, sacrifice, diluting and destroying the work ethic, and erasing history, culture, and ancestors of note.

-          Destruction of the societal cohesion united under one nation and one God.

-          The excessive and massive spending that put many countries into huge and unpayable national debts, affecting the future of generations to come.

-          Giving up sovereignty to an international body such as the United Nation or a transnational entity like the European Union, or to a partnership such as the Trans Pacific Partnership.

-          The damage to Christianity and the Church through its transformation into a political body that advocates collectivism.

-          The destruction of capitalism and private property.

-          Corruption and harm to the rule of law.

-          Promotion and advocacy of atheism, pornography, and deviant life styles as the forced norm.

-          Endorsing abortion, the sale of body parts, and trafficking of human organs and of sex slaves.

-          Societal reorganization around the climate change industry under a master plan called Agenda 2030.

Whether this profound crisis across the globe can motivate citizens to save the comatose patients remains to be seen. Experimental global change to de-nationalize and the fundamental transformation of western societies, whether planned or not, can have intense and long-lasting consequences.

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

 

Poverty Induced by Socialism Is Hard to Shake

Empty meat market     Photo: Octavian Paul Draja

To say that poverty induced by socialist dictatorships is hard to shake would be an understatement. Ask Cubans and now Venezuelans what is like to live in the workers’ paradise that Fidel forced upon his people while he stashed away billions he has stolen with his cronies.

The socialist dictator Hugo Chavez left behind billions in personal bank accounts while Venezuelans struggle to survive under his socialist successor Maduro, who mismanaged the economy just as badly. One of the nations with the richest oil supplies cannot feed its people and provide basic goods that Americans take for granted, bread, milk, butter, diapers, detergent, just to name a few, and must spend hours each day in endless lines to find what they need if they are lucky.

Most people are confused about poverty and each person and economists define it differently. People, who desire socialism and are voting for either Bernie the borderline Marxist or Hillary the Socialist, complain endlessly how unjust and rigged the system is, how the Man keeps them down and there is no equality and social justice. Nobody seems to have any idea about personal responsibility and work ethic.

When compared to most countries in the world, American “poverty” is a bonanza from heaven paid for by government largesse with taxpayers’ money. This government largesse will eventually come to an end when it runs out of other people’s money and it can no longer print trillions once hyperinflation sets in.

According to many Romanians, including hundreds of thousands of poor gypsies who refuse to integrate into normal society and change their lives, Romanians are the citizens impoverished by the communist party and their Securitate successors after the revolution of 1989 when communism ended officially on paper.  Twenty-seven years later, not much has changed for most rural populations.

The online news expunere.com reported that fifty percent of Romanians are very poor and 54 percent of rural inhabitants do not have an occupation.  Most children raised in rural areas have one family member working or the family depends entirely on social welfare.  According to this source, 72 percent of rural families cannot provide their five-year olds a minimum acceptable diet, resulting in malnutrition and disease - 225,000 children go to bed hungry.

To make matters worse, 37 percent of people fifteen years and older are functionally illiterate – they either cannot read or cannot write correctly. In the rural area, 20 percent of children have only an eighth grade education. Citing Eurostat, the overall school dropout rate in 2014 was 18 percent. Unemployment in rural areas among young people, 18-24 years old, was 22 percent. http://www.expunere.com/jumatate-din-populatia-romanieie-este-afectata-de-saracie-in-mediul rural-54-din-localnici-nu-au-ocupatie.html

The standard of living, while vastly improved for people in most large cities, remained the same in the suburbs and rural areas where no significant progress in terms of infrastructure has been made. People live and die trudging through deep ruts in the mud of mostly unpaved roads, carrying water from the village well because nobody has running water or sewer pipes. Outhouses dot the landscape.

In a comment to the poverty news, Silvia Cristescu stated  that “all corrupt individuals who fall under the investigation of the National Directorate of Anti-Corruption (Directia Nationala Anticoruptie or DNA) were members of the former Romanian Communist Party and their heirs. All who defrauded the country, she said, are pro-Russian communists and their children. 

The more than four million Romanian citizens she believes, who left the country for greener pastures of economic opportunity and freedom, understood perfectly who robbed the country blind.  A large percentage of this diaspora voted anti-Ponta, anti-PSD (Social Democrat Party), and anti-socialism. “The enemy of the country is socialism, Marxist atheism of KGB origins,” said Cristescu.

In her view, those who sold the national forests, the land, the factories, and other items in the patrimony of the country, were the same individuals who rejected serious foreign investors under the pretext that they were not “selling the country” but sold everything they could in secret. After all, they knew all the ropes and judges, and, without accountability and fear of the law, pocketed the money, enriching themselves beyond belief.

When honest Romanians tried to replace these former Securitate members who were running for office or incumbents, their votes were stolen by those who were bribed to vote favorably or, not unlike here, mysterious boxes were discovered with hundreds of thousands of votes for the presidential candidate the people did not want.

The Russian KGB influence was so strong in Romania that overturning the disaster of socialism is still a daily battle that takes place today. Socialism will eventually die with the older people who grew up under the mentality of socialist dependency.

However, young people who have no experience, no historical knowledge or recollection of how bad it was under a socialist dictatorship, are lured today into the promise and blind belief that socialism is egalitarian and socially just, the same leitmotif running through the strident and eager-for-their-own-demise collegiate voting crowd, the very ignorant millennials.

Some Romanians take comfort in the fact that Christian America is on their side, that there is now a strategically placed American military base around Constanta, and that socialism will collapse in Romania. Unfortunately, there are many NGOs at work on the ground in Romania that interfere in its politics with loads of cash and grants that are hard to resist, given the stressed economic situation there.