“Doina Bumbea was born on 25 January 1950 in Bucharest, Romania. She had two brothers, one of them being Gabriel Bumbea. The other one died in 2014. Her father died in 1989, but as of 2014, her mother was still alive.
In 1970, Bumbea left Romania and went to Rome, where she married an Italian citizen. Bumbea would later study fine arts and become a painter. In 1978, she met an Italian posing as an art dealer who promised her a job as a gallery curator in Tokyo, Japan, if she made an art exhibition in Pyongyang, North Korea, first. She accepted this and was sent to North Korea, from where she would not be allowed to leave.
According to Charles Robert Jenkins, an American defector in North Korea, this country reportedly kidnapped Bumbea and other foreign women for a “spouse-sourcing” program for American defectors in North Korea, as the birth of ethnically mixed Koreans went against the wishes of the state, but also to obtain a number of ethnically non-Korean agents for the country. Therefore, Bumbea was forcibly married in the early 1980s to the American defector James Joseph Dresnok by the North Korean authorities. She had two children with Dresnok, Theodore Ricardo Dresnok, born in December 1981; and James Gabriel Dresnok, born in February 1983. Bumbea died from lung cancer in January 1997 in Pyongyang, isolated from the outer world. Her husband died in 2016, while her two children would become soldiers in the North Korean army.
Bumbea’s family only discovered what had occurred to her in 2006, when they connected Jenkins’s accounts with a BBC documentary about James Joseph Dresnok, who was still in North Korea. In 2008, following her death, Bumbea’s brother Gabriel founded the Doina Bumbea Association, a Romanian NGO dealing with missing persons and their search and rescue. In 2014, he attended a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, representing this association. At this meeting, the situation of the North Korean abductees was discussed. He also attempted to meet with or contact his nephews, although unsuccessfully. Gabriel has created a page in honor of Bumbea on Facebook.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania was aware of Bumbea’s case and met with Gabriel to talk about it. It made some statements, but did not speak much about the subject. Gabriel has also met with former Romanian presidents Ion Iliescu and Traian Băsescu, but also with senator Dan Horațiu Buzatu and MEP Marian-Jean Marinescu, all in relation to Doina Bumbea. Although the Ministry of Foreign Affairs made efforts to clarify the situation with the North Korean authorities, they were ignored in Pyongyang.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doina_Bumbea)
This.
Both can be true.
Fuck the Kim family and all that horrendous North Korean regime.
And fuck Trump, his family, his cronies, his sycophants, and all MAGA morons, and the regime he’s trying to establish. The US was never “the good guys” except by comparion against other, even worse places, but now? Under Trump? There’s no shred of decency, honesty, competence, and by the looks of it, democracy.
I know I’m thinking about it simplistically but the Trump family dynasty and their hangers-on have a lot of wealth that’s just figures in digital ledgers, right? What’s to stop someone on a computer from just wiping that away? Realistically, if you were able to put all their accounts at zero, what recourse would they have? I guess I just don’t understand modern banking.
If you zero out their balance but there’s no transaction, that doesn’t match up and will easily be reverted. If you make a fake transaction that is also easy to dispute and revert. Most digital things have backups or histories where you can compare and clearly see if some funny business occurred. That’s why most scams involve social engineering to convince the target to willingly transfer money in some method that can’t be easily reverted rather than editing databases.
Yeah, plenty of countries can (and do) have flaws. That doesn’t mean that every single person in those countries is a criminal, of course.
Even now, the US is nowhere near the bottom of the ladder, many worse countries out there. The problem is, the US acts like they are still a shining city on a hill or whatever they use. Not even close. They aren’t even reliable now, which one of the things China has going on for them.
I never said every single person in those countries is a criminal.
And I never said you said it. I was agreeing with you.
Oh, ok then.
Not even then. The high point of US decency, honestly, competence and democracy this century was when it helped bomb Yemen back into the stone age and turned Libya into a slave state riddled with civil war, among other things. America is nicer to the people living inside its borders (unless you’re poor and black, poor and native American, poor and an immigrant or just poor), but that’s hardly any consolation for the people living outside its borders whose lives it ruined anyway.
There was that time during WW2 where they kicked the nazis out of some countries and then actually let the original owners of those countries have their countries back. That was a definitively “good guy” move.
Yeah there was also that time where WWII was started by methed out Germans who admired how calculated and efficient America had become at using eugenics and racism as tools of power and decided to have a go at it. You know, to “build a better world”.
So the shit-winds are blowing in both directions, Randy