Ceausescu’s children

 

 

 

The Romanian dictator had plans to increase Romanian population drastically to support its grandiose, Stalinist idea in making the country strong in both industrial and manpower finesse. After the 1989 revolution and the subsequent execution, however, the dream was in tatters. Hundreds of thousands of Romanian children were left poor, starving, physically disabled, and in limbo.

After 25 years, some of them start to tell their stories of what happens afterwards. Read the full article in The Guardian.

 

Excerpt:

 

When he came to power in 1966, Ceaușescu had grand plans for Romania. The country had industrialised late, after the second world war, and its birthrate was low. Ceaușescu borrowed the 1930s Stalinist dogma that population growth would fuel economic growth and fused this idea with the conservatism of his rural childhood. In the first year of his rule, his government issued Decree 770, which outlawed abortion for women under 40 with fewer than four children. “The foetus is the property of the entire society,” Ceaușescu announced. “Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.”

The birth rate soon doubled, but then the rate of increase slowed as Romanian women resorted to homemade illegal abortions, often with catastrophic results. In 1977 all childless persons, regardless of sex or martial status, were made to pay an additional monthly tax. In the 1980s condoms and the pill, although prohibitively expensive, began to become available in Romania – so they were banned altogether. Motherhood became a state duty. The system was ruthlessly enforced by the secret police, the securitate. Doctors who performed abortions were imprisoned, women were examined every three months in their workplaces for signs of pregnancy. If they were found to be pregnant and didn’t subsequently give birth, they could face prosecution. Fertility had become an instrument of state control.

This policy, coupled with Romania’s poverty, meant that more and more unwanted children were abandoned to state care. No one knows how many. Estimates for the number of children in orphanages in 1989 start at 100,000 and go up from there. Since the second world war, there had been a system of state institutions for children. But after 1982, when Ceaușescu redirected most of the budget to paying off the national debt, the economy tanked and conditions in the orphanages suffered. Electricity and heat were often intermittent, there were not enough staff, there was not enough food. Physical needs were assessed, emotional needs were ignored. Doctors and professionals were denied access to foreign periodicals and research, nurses were woefully undertrained (many orphans contracted HIV because hypodermic needles were seldom sterilised) and developmental delays were routinely diagnosed as mental disability. Institutional abuse flourished unchecked. While some caretakers did their best, others stole food from the orphanage kitchens and drugged their charges into docility.

Extreme Wealth Is Bad for Everyone—Especially the Wealthy

 

The addendum of conventional success we have mostly adhered to sounds like this: “the more you achieve, the more dissatisfied you must be to continually perpetuate your success.” As creatures induced by desires and wants, it is inevitable for us to crave for some things, and try to do something, or anything, to get what we look out for. This applies for all the history, and it is also a driving force that makes our society advance.

But does ‘the more, the merrier’ rule apply indefinitely? If everything were left unconstrained, you would definitely encounter a perfect inequality. A ‘winner-takes-all’ situation where, in a realm of limited resources, people are racing savagely to gain something, like a zero-sum competition. And here, inequality has become one issue. It is not that competition is bad; we are, instead, being faced with ‘free-for-all’ mindset. And too much of it is increasingly a bad thing, not a good thing after all.

Read the full article in New Republic about the growing inequality in United States, and what should, ideally, be done about it.

 

Excerpt:

 

Billionaires seems to have been sparked by West’s belief that rich people, newly empowered to use their money in politics, are now more likely than usual to determine political outcomes. This may be true, but so far the evidence—and evidence here is really just a handful of anecdotes—suggests that rich people, when they seek to influence political outcomes, often are wasting their money. Michael Bloomberg was able to use his billions to make himself mayor of New York City (which seems to have worked out pretty well for New York City), but Meg Whitman piled $144 million of her own money in the streets of California and set it on fire in her failed attempt to become governor. Mitt Romney might actually have been a stronger candidate if he had less money, or at least had been less completely defined by his money. For all the angst caused by the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson and their efforts to unseat Barack Obama, they only demonstrated how much money could be spent on a political campaign while exerting no meaningful effect upon it.

As West points out, many rich people are more interested in having their way with specific issues than with candidates, but even here their record is spotty. Perhaps they are having their way in arguments about raising federal estate tax; but the states with the most billionaires in them, California and New York, have among the highest tax rates on income and capital gains. If these billionaires are seeking, as a class, to minimize the sums they return to society, they are not doing a very good job of it. But of course they aren’t seeking anything, as a class: it’s not even clear they can agree on what their collective interests are. The second richest American billionaire, Warren Buffett, has been quite vocal about his desire for higher tax rates on the rich. The single biggest donor to political campaigns just now is Tom Steyer, a Democrat with a passion for climate change. And for every rich person who sets off on a jag to carve California into seven states, or to defeat Barack Obama, there are many more who have no interest in politics at all except perhaps, in a general way, to prevent them from touching their lives. Rich people, in my experience, don’t want to change the world. The world as it is suits them nicely.

The Perfect Mark

 

A Massachusetts psychotherapist was duped by a Nigerian e-mail scam, and how this became a huge thriving business from 1980s to 200s.

Read the full article, published in May 2006, in The New Yorker.

 

Excerpt:

 

Every swindle is driven by a desire for easy money; it’s the one thing the swindler and the swindled have in common. Advance-fee fraud is an especially durable con. In an early variation, the Spanish Prisoner Letter, which dates to the sixteenth century, scammers wrote to English gentry and pleaded for help in freeing a fictitious wealthy countryman who was imprisoned in Spain. Today, the con usually relies on e-mail and is often called a 419 scheme, after the anti-fraud section of the criminal code in Nigeria, where it flourishes. (Last year, a Nigerian comic released a song that taunted Westerners with the lyrics “I go chop your dollar. I go take your money and disappear. Four-one-nine is just a game. You are the loser and I am the winner.”) The scammers, who often operate in crime rings, are known as “yahoo-yahoo boys,” because they frequently use free Yahoo accounts. Many of them live in a suburb of Lagos called Festac Town. Last year, one scammer in Festac Town told the Associated Press, “Now I have three cars, I have two houses, and I’m not looking for a job anymore.”

According to a statement posted on the Internet by the U.S. State Department, 419 schemes began to proliferate in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when a collapse in oil prices caused severe economic upheaval in Nigeria. The population—literate, English-speaking, and living with widespread government corruption—faced poverty and rising unemployment. These conditions created a culture of scammers, some of them violent. Marks are often encouraged to travel to Nigeria or to other countries, where they fall victim to kidnapping, extortion, and, in rare cases, murder. In the nineteen-nineties, at least fifteen foreign businessmen, including one American, were killed after being lured to Nigeria by 419 scammers. Until recently, Nigerian officials tended to blame the marks. “There would be no 419 scam if there are no greedy, credulous and criminally-minded victims ready to reap where they did not sow,” the Nigerian Embassy in Washington said in a 2003 statement. The following year, Nuhu Ribadu, the chairman of Nigeria’s Economic & Financial Crimes Commission, noted that not one scammer was behind bars. Last November, however, Ribadu’s commission convicted two crime bosses who had enticed a Brazilian banker to spend two hundred and forty-two million dollars of his employer’s money on a fictitious airport-development deal. (Prosecutions by U.S. authorities are rare; most victims don’t know the real names of their “partners,” and 419 swindlers are adept at covering their tracks.)

 

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed

 

An appreciation to those working relentlessly, spending parts of their lives watching and screening out hardcore porn, torture, gore, flesh-squeezing, or any other undignified videos, posts, and statuses, to keep our Internet safe for reach. An appreciation, not sufficiently enough to be crafted in words, for these people who have endured mental and psychological pressure while filtering these things, something by which most of the so-called ‘content moderators’ could have easily got into mental breakdown.

Hint: this used to be completely done within the vicinity of Silicon Valley, but as content moderation industry grows (now up to 100,000-workforce strong), it is now increasingly outsourced into developing countries with cheaper wages and few welfare incentives (only 300 US$ a month), most commonly Philippines.

Read the whole story, the first of its kind to be published and written in long form, in Wired.

 

Excerpt:

 

A list of categories, scrawled on a whiteboard, reminds the workers of what they’re hunting for: pornography, gore, minors, sexual solicitation, sexual body parts/images, racism. When Baybayan sees a potential violation, he drills in on it to confirm, then sends it away—erasing it from the user’s account and the service altogether—and moves back to the grid. Within 25 minutes, Baybayan has eliminated an impressive variety of dick pics, thong shots, exotic objects inserted into bodies, hateful taunts, and requests for oral sex.

More difficult is a post that features a stock image of a man’s chiseled torso, overlaid with the text “I want to have a gay experience, M18 here.” Is this the confession of a hidden desire (allowed) or a hookup request (forbidden)? Baybayan—who, like most employees of TaskUs, has a college degree—spoke thoughtfully about how to judge this distinction.

“What is the intention?” Baybayan says. “You have to determine the difference between thought and solicitation.” He has only a few seconds to decide. New posts are appearing constantly at the top of the screen, pushing the others down. He judges the post to be sexual solicitation and deletes it; somewhere, a horny teen’s hopes are dashed. Baybayan scrolls back to the top of the screen and begins scanning again.

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

 

 

The consequences of employing cheap labor for the sake of a product awaited by millions of people over the world, as many suicide cases, industrial accidents, and labor strikes in Foxconn factories, processing most of the world’s smartphones and other electronic devices, across China have shown.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

 

Excerpt:

 

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to cleaniPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

The Facebook Comment That Ruined A Life

 

 

Justin Carter was an ordinary person – he played games, got active on Facebook, and did most stuff what teenagers normally do, but one unfortunate incident, which most of us barely care in our daily lives, puts his life, and his reputation, on jeopardy.

He posted a threatening comment in the social media site, and he was put in jail for a few months, and his legal case ends up in limbo.

Everyone, please be careful whenever you post something on Facebook.

 

Read his full story on Dallas Observer.

 

Excerpt:

 

One of the comments appears to be a response to an earlier comment in which someone called Carter crazy. Carter’s retort was: “I’m fucked in the head alright, I think I’ma SHOOT UP A KINDERGARTEN [sic].”

Carter followed with “AND WATCH THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT RAIN DOWN.”

When a person writing under the profile name “Hannah Love” responded with “i hope you [burn] in hell you fucking prick,” Carter put the cherry on top: “AND EAT THE BEATING HEART OF ONE OF THEM.” (The Austin police officer who wrote up the subsequent report noted: “all caps to emphasize his anger or rage.” )

That’s when someone in Canada — an individual as yet unidentified in court records — notified local authorities. Because Carter’s profile listed him as living in Austin, the Canadians sent the tip to the Austin Police Department. Along with a cell-phone screenshot of part of the thread and a link to Carter’s Facebook page, the tipster provided this narrative: “This man, Justin Carter, made a number of threats on Facebook to shoot up a class of kindergartners. … He also made numerous comments telling people to go shoot themselves in the face and drink bleach. The threats to shoot the children were made approximately an hour ago.”

The Library of Babel

 

A surrealist short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a universe that entirely consists of libraries.

Read the full story in The Critical Point.

 

Excerpt:

 

Some five hundred years ago, the chief of one of the upper hexagon came across a book as jumbled as all the others, but containing almost two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a traveling decipherer, who told him that the lines were written in Portuguese; others said it was Yiddish. Within the century experts had determined what the language actually was: a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic. The content was also determined: the rudiments of combinatory analysis, illustrated with examples of endlessly repeating variations. Those examples allowed a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library.

The City Solution

 

 

Pictured above: Seoul, South Korea

 

Cities can become a huge headache if not managed well – numerous examples, say, Lagos or Jakarta, can say a lot about it. But, looking at it on the other perspective, cities can also offer a great lesson for some of the world’s most cumbersome problems in 21st century, in particular the solutions policymakers are seeking.

Take a look back at this National Geographic’s December 2011 edition article.

 

Excerpt:

 

The fear of urbanization has not been good for cities, or for their countries, or for the planet. South Korea, ironically, has never quite shaken the notion that its great capital is a tumor sucking life from the rest of the country. Right now the government is building a second capital 75 miles to the south; starting in 2012, it plans to move half its ministries there and to scatter other public institutions around the country, in the hope of spreading Seoul’s wealth. The nation’s efforts to stop Seoul’s growth go back to Park Chung-Hee, the dictator who jump-started the economy. In 1971, as the city’s population was skyrocketing past five million, Park took a page from the book of Ebenezer Howard. He surrounded the city with a wide greenbelt to halt further development, just as London had in 1947.

Both greenbelts preserved open space, but neither stopped the growth of the city; people now commute from suburbs that leapfrogged the restraints. “Greenbelts have had the effect of pushing people farther out, sometimes absurdly far,” says Peter Hall, a planner and historian at University College London. Brasília, the planned capital of Brazil, was designed for 500,000 people; two million more now live beyond the lake and park that were supposed to block the city’s expansion. When you try to stop urban growth, it seems, you just amplify sprawl.

Sprawl preoccupies urban planners today, as its antithesis, density, did a century ago. London is no longer decried as a tumor, but Atlanta has been called “a pulsating slime mold” (by James Howard Kunstler, a colorful critic of suburbia) on account of its extreme sprawl. Greenbelts aren’t the cause of sprawl; most cities don’t have them. Other government policies, such as subsidies for highways and home ownership, have coaxed the suburbs outward. So has that other great shaper of the destiny of cities—the choices made by individual residents. Ebenezer Howard was right about that much: A lot of people want nice houses with gardens.

 

 

 

‘A History of Violence’, by Steven Pinker

 

 

The ‘truth’ posited by most mass media reports – in regard to all recent forms of violence worldwide in 21st century – is that the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place to live, where the binding assumption is that ‘people are more and more getting easily killed and wounded, and humanity is becoming more savage than ever’.

Steven Pinker proves it as fatally wrong, though. In his assertion, instead, the world is becoming an ever more peaceful civilization within these modern times. And he has a huge data set of statistics to disprove today’s conventional consensus.

Read his complete explanation in Edge.

 

Excerpt:

 

The extraordinary 65-year stretch since the end of the Second World War has been called the “Long Peace”, and has perhaps the most striking statistics of all, zero. There were zero wars between the United States and the Soviet Union (the two superpowers of the era), contrary to every expert prediction. No nuclear weapon has been used in war since Nagasaki, again, confounding everyone’s expectations. There have been no wars between any subset of the great powers since the end of the Korean War in 1953. There have been zero wars between Western European countries. The extraordinary thing about this fact is how un-extraordinary it sounds. If I say I’m going to predict that in my lifetime France and Germany will not go to war, everyone will say, “Yeah, yeah; of course they won’t go to war.” But that is an extraordinary statement when you consider that before 1945, Western European countries initiated two new wars per year for more than 600 years. That number has now stood at zero for 65 years.

And there have been zero wars between developed countries at all. We take it for granted nowadays that war is something that happens only in poor, primitive countries. That, too, is an extraordinary development; war used to be something that rich countries did, too. Europe, which traditionally has been the part of the world with the biggest military might, is no longer picking on countries in other parts of the world, or hurling artillery shells at one other with the rest of the world suffering collateral damage. This change has been extraordinary.

How Libya Blew Billions and Its Best Chance at Democracy

 

 

When Muammar Qaddafi, then so-called the ‘Madman of Africa’, ruled Libya, this nation of nearly 6.5 million, despite brutal totalitarian rule and very strict control in all aspects of life, achieved unprecedented success as one of the richest, and most prosperous, in Africa. While dissident voices were crushed and government opposition was severely curtailed and tortured in underground prisons, literacy rate was nearly in its absolute terms. Healthcare was provided free for everyone, and its populace even received yearly bonuses from the government. It also has one of the world’s highest foreign exchange reserves, with the bulk worth more than 100 billion US$ stored safely in bank accounts across the globe, excluding their another sovereign wealth funds. Economy was highly booming, with numerous projects being implemented across the whole country. Infrastructure, in particular its irrigation, was fully functional.

All these hopes shattered when Arab Spring took the country by force. Preferring ‘freedom’ to ‘stability’, the country’s people, young and old, men and women, moderates and hardliners, all took their weapons to overthrow what they had deemed ‘four-decades of soul-deafening rule’. Everyone was looking for that voice, the opportunity for them to express themselves as they wished. They staked everything else for the sake of democracy, and for the sake of freedom.

Now, with Qaddafi’s rule coming to a tragic end, Libya is now at its own tatters. Democracy is partially achieved, but under a very dangerous cost: militia battles become a daily consumption for most of its populace. Paradoxically, and sadly enough, almost everyone was longing for his leadership, once again.

Read the full article in Bloomberg Businessweek to know more the fate of post-Qaddafi Libya.

 

Excerpt:

 

In the last few months, the Libyans have been finding out. Warring militias have destroyed large sections of Tripoli’s international airport with mortars, shoulder-launched missiles, rockets, and tanks. The fighting made the news again in July when a rocket or shell set a large oil depot on fire, sending clouds of choking black smoke over Tripoli. Shortly thereafter, 27,000 Libyans fled the fighting on foot in a single day, arriving as refugees in neighboring African countries. In just one week in July, according to a brief issued by the Soufan Group, a consultancy specializing in the Middle East, more than 60 people were killed in Benghazi, and the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Canada have evacuated their diplomatic personnel.

Libyan oil production has declined to about 300,000 barrels a day, and a half-dozen prominent figures on the Libyan political scene, whose names had appeared in optimistic Western newspaper articles about the brave Libyans who opposed Qaddafi and fought for a more equal and democratic future, have been murdered. Their deaths have passed without any demonstrations or other significant forms of public notice inside Libya, a measure of how irrelevant the causes for which Libyans fought three years ago have become.

Libya’s economic future, once touted as the brightest in Africa, looks equally bleak. Western news sources around the time of Qaddafi’s death reported that the dictator had stashed tens of billions of dollars away in overseas accounts that the country desperately needed to pay its bills. After the dictator was toppled, the search began for his hidden personal fortune—an El Dorado of imagined gold that was built in part on the confusion between Qaddafi’s personal assets and state-controlled assets such as the LIA. This fortune was estimated in various publications to be from $70 billion to $100 billion and quickly gave rise to a cottage industry in which fortune hunters struck deals with representatives of Libya’s National Transitional Council to locate missing assets in return for 10 percent of the take.