Salt, an Element of Life

In the elements of life category: salt.

Salt, NaCl, is essential to life, in a rather precarious balance - too much is bad and can kill you and too little is dangerous and can kill you as well. Salt without iodine is also an issue.

During the Roman Empire, salt was more precious than gold and Roman soldiers were paid in both coins and salt, salarium.

The Latin word for salt, salarium, gave us the English word, salary.

We can produce salt in three different ways:

1. We can evaporate it from the ocean in a painstaking process. The neolithic people in Boulby processed salt at scale thousands of years ago.

2. Rock salt can be mined from the ground, a process that is quite old too. For example, the Khewra salt mine in Pakistan dates back to Alexander the Great. This Khewra salt is sold under the name of Himalayan pink salt. The Khewra mine is not really that close to the Himalayan foothills; it is about 200 miles away.

In north-west Austria, the Hallein mine is so old that they found within it the skeleton of a Celtic miner who had been trapped there thousands of years ago. No longer exploited, this mine is now an exploratory cavern with its own funicular railway.

3. The least difficult way to exploit underground salt is to bring it up in the form of brine, without any humans ever setting foot in the mine. This is called "solution mining." Brine is brought up from underground with pressurized water. This solution has a 30 percent salt content. To get an idea of how much salt is in this brine, compare it to sea water which only contains 3 percent salt. However, the electrolytic process to extract the salt uses a lot of energy and does release pollutants which are being carefully disposed of now, hopefully.

No dynamite or drills are used, just pressurized water.

Adakaleh, the Island that Became the Romanian Atlantis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Grief and Loss

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Equality of Outcome Is Equality of Misery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

The Uniform Uglification of American Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

George Carlin, a Genial Comedian

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

No topic was off the table:

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

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

3.       Tired of bicycle paths that seldom anybody uses.

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

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

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

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

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

Ateneul Roman, a Historic Concert Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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