A documentary about torture

They just broadcasted the documentary Webjunkie on the Danish Television channel DR2.

What I saw was a documentary about torture. For no reason young teenagers were locked up for playing online games or seeking material on the Internet.

Parents who have been raised without modern technology don’t understand how the modern globalized world work and they become afraid of their children distancing from them. But done are the days where children could settle with being educated in the culture and history of the country alone. They have to learn global awareness and several languages. They need to establish global social networks on the computer. A friend playing world of Warcraft today could be your business partner tomorrow.

The parents fail to understand this and as result the lock their children up in a rehab center where the teenagers will grow up being the new lost generation.

As some people might know the lost generation used about the high school graduates Mao send out to rural communities where they were supposed be a good example for the local people. They were away for so long that they missed out going to the university and getting a career. They were overtaken by younger generations and ended up with a life without having reached their full potential.

The same goes for these young teenagers in the documentary. They lose time where they could build up social networks over the entire world. They may settle with working at a factory for 20 hours per day building cell phones until they commit suicide as so many of the Chinese workers in this industry do.

It is just waste of life and hard to watch.

Sources:

• Website about the ducumentary
• Down to the Countryside Movement (Wikipedia – about China’s lost generation)

When your child returns home ….

I was watching the Dr. Phil episode: What Happened to Tempest?: Standing Up to Mean Girls

Katie aged 15 was shipped off to Dr. Phil’s new sponsor – Center for Discovery, which took over sponsoring the Dr. Phil show after Aspen Education Group.

I found it very worrying when Katie during the show warned her mother against sending her away – AGAIN. So there is the root of the problem in this little family. Every time things get rough, the child is shipped somewhere.

It is not surprising that this girl is on alert and jumpy.

In a lot of residential treatment centers the use of attack group therapy is allowed. It is one of the most damaging types of therapy. When you allow group members to confront other group members about their problems, emotional breakdown is the risk. Group therapy is supposed to be about supporting each other. If a patient needs to be confronted then the attack has to be conducted by a professional in a one-on-one therapy session.

Attack therapy in group therapy environment was first used on a large scale by Synanon – a church community with a fine word – a cult in ordinary expression.

One of the group members started a chain of boarding schools called CEDU. The CEDU concept has been copied to a number of schools after CEDU closed. Another former member created a rehab in New York.

I don’t know how Center for Discovery operates. Aspen Education Group got one of their boarding schools closed down in Oregon because they used lap dance therapy where teenagers who had been exposed to abuse in their childhood was forced to react some of the indecent experiences they had been exposed to by dancing in revealing costumes. Several of the families and students have reached a settlement outside court this month.

The former students were exposed to confrontational group therapy. They suffered emotional damaged. They sued and reached at settlement.

The question is: Will Katie return home and live a normal teenage life after her stay. The update in the shows tells that they have a better relationship but one thing is to have a dose of your child from time to time; another to have your child living at home full time. I don’t believe that the mother has the tools to handle a post-institutionalized child in her home. I don’t believe that “Center for Discovery” can repair what other programs damaged.

Sorry to say. I simply don’t believe it.

Fixing a non-problem with your teenager

‘You are spending too much time on the computer’

It is a sentence which is becoming still more used in modern families.

Are there some days where parents’ wishes that they should be handling old-times problems like when they were kids and alcohol and teenage pregnancies where the problems?

Fact is that a lot of countries have moved jobs from manual labor to electronic long-distance work done over the computer. In a country like Denmark every third job in the industry is gone. In Denmark you are forced to conduct almost every kind of communication with the public sector over the Internet.

In 2014 the government forced every Dane aged 15 or above to establish a secure email-account in their system where every kind of information (taxes, school-papers, pension etc.) would be sent to the individual citizen. No snail-mail would be sent in the future. Relatives of retired people who had never been trained using a computer were recommended to get power of attorney to read their mails or help them getting the training which was offered for free by the city administration.

So why is it a problem if the kids use all their time on the computer? Even school is now offered long-distance for those children who fits badly into a traditional class-setting or are ill-equipped to function socially?

Because some people invented the diagnose “Internet Addiction Disorder” in order to attract clients now there the percentage of teenagers who acts out due to crime, alcohol or drugs are a record low!

There will always be something parents worry about and the professionals selling residential treatment programs know that.

I saw an article in The Telegraph about the Chinese boot camp industry. Parents confine their children to a boot camp like environment and if they survive the stay (several have already been killed) they return home to the same environment and fail because the modern life requires them to use computers and can return for yet another stay in the boot camp.

As the twenty-two-year-old Li Wenchao who is a repeat patient is quoted to have been said:

‘I am afraid to go back to a normal life,’

‘I fear I will become addicted again. That is why I have asked to stay longer, until I develop enough confidence to deal with life’.

To deal with life!

But that is the problem. Life is not inside the camp. Life is on the outside. Life is conducted of the terms which we give our youth.

It reminds me about the very popular boarding schools in Denmark called “Efterskole”. The students like them. In fact they return home with a boosted self-confidence. Some months later many suffer from depression-like symptoms. They face difficulties to the new life outside the boarding school.

What is the problem?

The answer is that they have confined themselves to a positive group orientated world where the speed is four times the speed outside the boarding school. They have been part of a group bound together so tight that they resemble a religious church movement.

We have all been taught what happens when you are kicked out of such a group. People are shunned. The former boarding school students feel it like this not because they are unwanted. No at the boarding school they had almost no private life. They were forced into a group in a positive way and they slowly lost the ability to function isolated as most teenagers do alone in their room with their laptop connected to the world listening to music and communicating with friends over social networks.

Of course you end up depressed if you have been around people and suddenly have to learn to be alone again. The very same happens to the teenagers in the Chinese boot camp. Inside the boot camp everything is done off-line. The world outside is online. They cannot prepare their students in a proper way. The entire investment turns out to be a failure.

Fixing a non-problem regarding your teenager can end up being a deadly experience for the teenager. That is one risk. The other risk is that your teenager will have to live with the consequences of having been kicked out of the normal daily life for a period. Worst case scenario is suicide. Best case scenario is a life filled with therapy and mentors to learn how to live normally.

Sources:

• Inside the Chinese boot camp treating Internet addiction (The Telegraph)
• 5 treatments for chronic internet addiction (The Telegraph)

Is Denmark Utopia

Bookcover: Michael Booth’s “The Almost Nearly Perfect People”

At least in the minds of Danes!

Certainly the Danes who were able to reach the age-limit for early retirement in time before the age-limit was raised will confirm that they live in Utopia.

But the days where Denmark was the happiest nation in the world is over. If Denmark was Utopia why will young people who have grown up in Denmark where they could socialize their friends and classmates over some beers or glasses of wine travel down to Syria or Iraq to fight on the side of ISIS?

The answer is clear! Denmark is no longer Utopia because the several Danish governments have forced Denmark to globalized and open up to world. Gone are the days where Denmark went down the countries in the European Union and told them the conditions the Danish people wanted for Denmark’s participation in the European Union. Conditions they had no options to but to accept because Denmark at that time was the intellectual center and most developed country in the world.

Poor business acumen changed all that. Denmark had a number of public money bins not so clearly visible as Uncle Scrooge’s money bin. They were privatized during the last 30 years: Airports, the phone and fiber-network, railroads – even the databases with confidential data.

The private investors were happy, the hackers were happy. The Danish Citizens where robbed. The assets they had paid for by leaving more than 50 percent of their income off in income taxes were auctioned off for almost nothing.

If you watch Danish television you will often see TV-series like “Matador” and “Huset på Christianshavn” both portraying life as it was before Denmark became member of the European Union. Quiet lives with little drama. Dramas which would be settled over some beers in the local pub called the Rat hole.

Denmark was an island with happiness built over 100 years. Oddly enough the cornerstone of the entire welfare system was put in last. The entire foundation was built without a foundation but when they put the foundation down under the castle of welfare they did it good. The foundation of the Danish welfare society was the early retirement – in Danish called “Efterloen”. Suddenly every Dane knew that they could work 120 percent without any thought about their health because they could plan to retire once they turned 60.

Many Danes began to take long education in Universities. Instead of borrowing money they took a number of gap years. Some started the professional line of work they then put anything into aged 30 or 35. They knew that they could risk anything because if they went bankrupt they could get unemployment benefit until retirement. There was no longer any reason to kill themselves and their family to prevent the names of their wife and children to undergo the shame of failure. They could change name, collect the money and wait until it was over.

The opportunity to go for everything changed Denmark and pushed it out of the shadows of the oil crisis. The core of the products in the Microsoft Dynamics series were invented in Denmark, Skype had Danish inventors, Borland Software had numerous products developed in Denmark. Intel Gigabit network product had their roots in Denmark, the windmill industry was reborn in Denmark and Danish cuisine originally consisting of fluid products only like mead and beer is now in the forefront. I could continue forever. Common for these innovative products were that they were developed by people taught in school to question everything the teachers said and the fact that they would have a safety net if they failed.

And it is not all. No modern invention is the work of a single genius. Modern inventions require teamwork and sharing of knowledge. It was established by allowing teenagers to drink alcohol in high school. Special Friday bars were established on campuses. It enabled the students to open up bypassing the natural silence Danes imposes on people they don’t know and create lifelong networks of friends who would hire them or do trade with them.

But the sale-out blocked this approach. The Danish society could no longer afford unemployment benefit without limitation. It could no longer afford early retirement. It could no longer allow students to take their time letting them pass exams not only with top grades but also with the social network and life experience to make the champions of the world regarding development and testing of new products.

All this because the politicians sold out?

It is not the entire explanation. It was more than an internal failure made by the politicians alone that caused the sell-out. Our membership of the European Union contributed. The European Union is far from perfect. First and foremost every country has a duty to protect its borders. Could the United States exist if Arizona suddenly decided not to patrol the borders to Mexico allowing illegal immigrants to take all low-paid jobs all the way to Maine? No United States would collapse. But that is what Greece and Italy do. They don’t stop illegal immigrants and refugees. They travel all the way to Denmark because they don’t know anything about the misery Denmark has become during the last number of decades.

Secondly what if Silicon Valley contracted with the entire population of McIntyre and surrounding cities in Georgia to do any work not related to administration? Mama June and the rest of the hill-billies would not know what to ask for salary and would properly agree to develop Windows 11 or 12 for salaries waitresses are used to. That is what Danes experience with workers entering from Poland and other countries which used to be part of the Warsaw pact countries. They take every kind of job they can often sleeping in abandoned houses, tents and very often using their time having family members out of job shopping in supermarkets and private houses without paying.

Often the Danish firms outsource work to various small companies who outsource part of their work to other small firms. At some point in this chain of deals taxes and normal salaries are no longer paid. The workers work for almost nothing. The Danish society is cheated of income-taxes. How can any country defend themselves against illegal immigration when there are not allowed to control their borders and they are forced to be member of the European Union where there are countries which neglect their duties controlling the external borders?

Mass-unemployment is the result. The Danish government has forced people to seek two jobs regardless if the firms seek employees. The firms are bombed with applications. Because the magical number is 2, people apply for jobs they have no chance or qualifications to get. The software industry developing automatic systems to reply with no when people seek jobs is booming but now the firms get so many applications that they have no chance to find the employees they want. Every time a job position is put up a firm received several hundred applications. It is needless to apply for a job because the jobs are often taken by people in the network from the Friday bars in high school.

It creates a problem for the youth who dislike drinking alcohol or socialize sober in the Friday bars. They have no chance to enter the job-market. They become marginalized and over 100 have already left for the Middle East to fight against our values.

People need to know that they need to accept the Danish culture fully if they come here to live an honest life. They need to take Danish names. They need to allow their children to drink alcohol when they are 16. They need to allow their children to date as pre-teen. They need to allow the school to teach the children about sex when they are 10 years old so they don’t have sex while dating. Denmark has almost no teenage pregnancies due to this strategy. They need to stop talking other languages than Danish. It is just as immigrants entering the United States before the First World War did. Back then they took English names, they learned to speak English. Nothing has changed.

We as Danes need to tell them this. Otherwise our country will collapse. The myth this book speak of will continue to exist in people’s minds until they actually arrives here. Then it would be too late for them and for us.

Denmark is no longer Utopia.

Denmark can be Utopia again.

We need to close our borders. We need to tell people who want to live here about our customs and how they need to surrender theirs to be a success again.

We need to look at France and nationalize what we have sold just as France did with the banks in 1980s. Investors will run but they will come back the minute we are Utopia once again.

Source:
The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

Foreign Adoptions to Denmark are lowered by 80 percent

A recent article tells the story about how the number of foreign adoptions to Denmark has dropped with 80 percent since 2005. It is good news because several investigations and documentaries have shown that the entire international adoption traffic is riddled with corruption.

In Somalia parents were paid and promised that they only leant their children to Denmark as a kind of open adoption. Seeing that their children got get access to the Danish education system which is second to none, they lied their children younger and went home with money and the idea that they would get both paid and an well-educated young adult back. In some extreme cases the parents were also lied to about them suffering from a disease which would kill them long before their children would turn into a teenagers.

It is not only Denmark which has been targeted by corrupted officials abroad. Many Americans have received a child who has been emotional damaged by their first year in their home country. The child could have been born by parents with drugs or alcohol problems. The child might have been born with symptoms of addictions because the mother was an addict during the pregnancy.

The parents are not prepared for this. They are sold an illusion. Even if the child is healthy the child could face difficulties bonding with their new parents.

Very often – too often, the child needs residential treatment because doctors are quick to label the child with Reactive attachment disorder. Very often the child is just looking to seek its origins while going through the rite of passage towards adulthood. Even a normal teenager can be a challenge to rise so when a doctor put a label on the child, the adoptive parents may feel relieved.

Bookcover: From Hopeless to Hopeful: Raising an Older Adopted Child by Anne Sullivan

I saw a book called “From Hopeless to Hopeful: Raising an Older Adopted Child” by Ann Sullivan. She adopts a girl from Russia. She neglects to teach her daughter the full story about her childhood in Russia so the daughter starts to make dramatic stories up her mind. Her daughter ends up in one of the wilderness programs which kill teenagers every year. The percentage of casualties in some wilderness programs is so high that it would be safer to let toddlers play on the high way; then follows a stay in a residential program mostly known to have hired employees with poorly driving skills. Two girls from this residential treatment facility died in a traffic accident some years ago during an outing.

I found it disturbing that the mother killed the social profile her daughter had on Myspace without consulting the daughter. She also moved while her daughter was in the program. So a child having lost first her old country then have to accept losing her childhood home while living a restricted life in a small village out in the desert.

The question which left me after having scanned the book was how the mother – Ann Sullivan – was approved as an adoptive mother. This brings me to another book called “The Child Import” by Amalie Linde, Matilde Hoermand-Pallesen and Amalie Koenigsfeldt. They cover the huge number of German kids who were adopted to Denmark after the second world war. Many of the children were born as result of rape by Russian soldiers or shameful relationships with fathers from the United States, England or France. It was a traffic which continued until the early 1960’s and ended in tragedy for many of the adopted children.

Bookcover: Boerneimporten by af Amalie Linde, Matilde Hoermand-Pallesen & Amalie Koenigsfeldt

Some of the 3,000 children tell their story in the book. We are talking abuse and incest. There was even a case where a wife to a doctor was suspected of killing some of her adopted children. She was suspected to have been silenced in jail to avoid a trial which would expose the adoption scandal. The doctor wrote the death certificates and as direct result of this case the law was changed so no doctor can sign death certificates for relatives.

Foreign adoptions have been, are and will be a question about money. So where will the children come from in the future. In Denmark we have an expensive foster care system. What our parliament is working on is to convert some of the families from expensive foster families to cheap adoption parents. The social heritage in Denmark has proven almost impossible to beat, so many of the politicians believe that they will do children from poor and underprivileged families a favor by putting them into the foster system as an early age so they get use to their new family from the very start.

I fear that while they will have stopped corruption on an international level that they will continue to create victims domestically when children who are from second generation poorly integrated immigrants, underprivileged families or children who just have too many teddy-bears in their room will be yanked away from their birth parents to satisfy a market for adoption parents.

Even when you are third generation immigrant with an odd religion, underprivileged or over-serviced with teddy-bears you have the right to your birth past. I dislike the new adoption strategy. Reactive attachment disorder doesn’t disappear just because Danes adopt Danes or US Citizens adopt US Citizens. Of course some of the costs will be hidden inside the huge budget the social services in Denmark (mis)manage but it costs are still there.

We have solved a problem abroad but to satisfy the demand and keep the money flow running we are risking creating a new problem.

Sources:

• Adoptioner falder til rekordlavt niveau (Berlingske Tidende)
• From Hopeless to Hopeful: Raising an Older Adopted Child (by Anne Sullivan – Amazon Link)
• Some of the teenagers who have died in wilderness programs (Today a child died memorial blog)
• Boerneimporten (by Amalie Linde, Matilde Hoermand-Pallesen and Amalie Koenigsfeldt – Saxo Link)
• Indlæg om Adoptioner (Bloggen Embedsvaerket)