Word Count: 1346

A couple of days ago, Romania made a huge splash across the world as news reports filtered in about the good hitting police of Bucharest taking a break from their usual activities of robbing foreigners to discharge tear gas and deploy riot gear against some unarmed shepherds:

More than 1,000 shepherds have broken through police lines into the grounds of Romania’s parliament to protest against a law that regulates the number of sheepdogs they can use.

Riot police fired teargas at the shepherds, some of whom were dressed in floor-length sheepskins and blew horns, to keep them from charging at the parliament building.

Some 4,000 shepherds had travelled from rural parts of Romania on Tuesday for the protest in Bucharest. They are angry about a law that will limit the number of dogs that can guard their sheep, as well as a ban on grazing from December to April.

The law is intended to protect hunters and the environment.

Technically, there’s nothing untrue about this report. Shepherds were in Bucharest to protest the new law, and this somehow “necessitated” using tear gas and storm troopers to keep them from “charging” the Parliament.

But regular readers will know that I have nothing but contempt for the AP bureau in Bucharest, so I am writing this post to clear up the facts that are missing from this report. Therefore, here’s what really happened:

The idiot politicians who form up the unnecessarily and illegally large parliament actually voted on three bills this past week:

1. Outlawing smoking in bars, restaurants, and playgrounds
2. Restricting the number of dogs a shepherd can have, and
3. Outlawing the advertising of medications on television

The first one (outlawing smoking in indoor public places) was widely hailed by a lot of people. This law, however, only got sort of accidentally passed, largely on the strength of the Colectiv fire in November. I’ll analyze this law in greater detail elsewhere.

The third law, outlawing the advertising of medications on TV, seems to have been a complete mistake. Yes, you read that right. From reading Romanian sources, it looks like most lawmakers had no fucking clue what they were even voting for. As a result, the law will be sent to President Dirty Klaus for him to “examine”, and probably veto.

The second law, however, was no mistake at all. It was inserted into a parliamentary bill expressly at the request of some very powerful Romanian politicians, including Kelemen Hunor (the arch duke of Hungarian politicians) and a whole host of PSD (Ponta’s old party) cronies. It had nothing to do with “protecting the environment”, or even protecting wildlife. It was simply because some rich bastards love to massacre innocent animals.

Right before I was unceremoniously kicked out of Romania, I was working on a very long piece to answer two complimentary questions: Why is Romania so poor? and How did Ceausescu last so long in power?, especially interesting because so few other Communist nations followed that pattern. In my deep digging, I uncovered some pretty weird and grisly tales about Nicolae Ceausescu, including his fondness for “hunting”.

Now, if you’re like me, and I know that about 99% of my readers are, you’ve never once participated in a hunt. You probably think of hunting as some men dressed in camouflage gear, using guns (or perhaps a bow and arrows) to stealthily pursue some wild animals, killing one or two. This kind of hunting does exist, and is usually referred to as a “sport” because it involves some physical challenges.

But the kind of “hunting” that occurs in Romania is as different from this as black is from white. First, there’s no stealthy pursuit of an animal. Secondly, there’s no skill involved. Third, it’s not one or two unlucky animals who are killed, but many dozens (if not hundreds) that are slaughtered en masse. It is a sick and disgusting pursuit, and men like Mugur Isarescu love it.

These types of hunts are usually called hunting “parties”, for good reason. There’s plenty of drinking involved, plus telling dirty jokes, and whatever other bullshit stupid grown men do when they’re having fun together. Special teams of animal wranglers are paid to either bring the animals directly to the “hunters”, or else flush them out of the bush to make them pass directly in front of the “hunters”.

The “hunters” have assistants, so that after emptying an entire gun at innocent animals, the assistant can pass them a fresh gun so that the massacre never has to slow down. And while a tiny fraction of the meat from the murdered animals gets eaten in celebration of the “hunt”, most of it gets donated to the assistants as a form of payment. Furthermore, getting a license to hunt in Romania is expensive and/or requires political connections, so the activity becomes a kind of “golfing” outing for rich bastards, a sign of their elite and exclusive status as the little lords of the country.

THAT is the kind of hunting that prompted a handful of legislators to insert a bill ridiculously limiting how many dogs a shepherd could deploy. Mind you, these “hunters” already regularly shoot shepherd dogs (link in Romanian) with total impunity on a regular basis, and not a single environmental organization has ever reported that shepherd dogs were damaging the environment or wildlife.

But that wasn’t good enough. The rich lords wanted to use their godlike powers in Bucharest to dictate how a rural shepherd a thousand kilometers away does his job, one of the last surviving peasant traditions in Europe, all so that they could more effortlessly slaughter bears, boars, and other wild animals.

What makes the new law even more ridiculous is that the law was already vetoed once by President Klaus in 2015, and then sent back to Parliament, so the protests by the shepherds this week were for the second time that the Parliament voted for the bill.

The other unanswered question (by the AP and other world media outlets) was why in the world it requires jackbooted thugs in riot gear to “protect” the Parliament from a few unarmed shepherds, to the point where they “had to” deploy tear gas. The answer, of course, is that Romanian police are punk cowards, and they are hired to protect these thieving oligarchs from the people.

There was zero chance of the shepherds doing any significant damage to the integrity of the state, government, or even the Parliament building itself, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the police in this area of the world are used to control and repress the people, not support and protect them.

As many Romanian journalists noted this week, politicians in Romania are absolutely terrified of protests. That’s because Romania is only a democracy in the loosest sense of the word. In actuality, it is a ruling class of oligarchs (nobles) holding court in Bucharest, dictating everything from a village mayor’s salary to how many dogs a shepherd can deploy.

The Parliament is an illegal assembly of stealing, corrupt thugs, who regularly switch parties at the drop of a hat, refuse to let their own members be investigated on corruption charges, all led by the criminal king President Klaus Iohannis, who shouldn’t have even been eligible to run for the office, but was barely elected because the people were tired of the lying, plagiarizing monkey, Victor Ponta. The same band of Communist thugs are still in control, and there are far more politicians in Romania than nearly any other country on Earth, each one filling his pockets with taxpayer money and illegal kickback schemes.

So yeah, the real reason that the riot police were deployed to fend off a few righteously angry unarmed shepherds is because the politicians are frightened to death that one day the Romanian people will rise up and actually get the revolution that they wanted way back in 1990. Riot police and thug tactics worked then, just like they keep on working in 2015, but they won’t work forever…

AND NOW YOU KNOW!