A Gringo in Rural Mexico: Mexico City Held Hostage - The Perpertual Gift from the Left That Just Keeps on Giving

Sunday 1 September 2013

Mexico City Held Hostage - The Perpertual Gift from the Left That Just Keeps on Giving

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One of the many hallmarks of the Left is the ability to essentially take possession of the commons. Streets, Boulevards, the grounds and/or interiors of public buildings, Plazas both of minor and major social importance, anything that is easily accessible is fair game. It is of no importance to the leadership or the participants in whatever event is being celebrated, protested, or attended, just who is inconvenienced or damaged. There is not the slightest concern about damages to property or persons in the wake of the human tsunami. Such damages even in a perfectly passive "march" or "occupation" or "protest gathering" can total 100,000,000 pesos when all is said and done.

Traffic tie-ups of gargantuan proportions, especially in huge cities such as Mexico City, are the norm when leftists labour unions and university "students" and professors are left loose from their keepers.

This is the layout at the Zocalo. one
of the 3 main centres of central-most
Mexico City. 60,000 "teachers", of
whom half are union thugs, are camped
on the public's common, in front of the
Metropolitan Cathedral and the Palacio
Presidential.

Traffic counts at the intersection of Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma, in another centre of Mexico City can and do regularly exceed 300,000 units per 24 hour period. So one can imagine when 10,000 union thugs and Public Worker dullards decide to sit down in the middle of where those two streets and a couple of other lesser feeders meet in the round "glorieta" of a wild carousel of urban vehicular mayhem.

The various leftist groups have everything worked down to a fine art. Lawyers very similar to our own pro-communist ACLU, thugs carrying their videography devices, other thugs lurking around to see if police or private parties are filming or photographing anything that ought not to be seen and recorded. When marching, the people, frequently dolts brought in from the marginal areas on the edge of town, are admonished by the monitor to "...keep three metres between you. Walk more slowly. We are here to be noticed! We are here to make the bourgeoisie angry and uncomfortable!.Let them wait on us!"

It now makes two weeks that the Sindicato National de Trabajadores en la Educacion have occupied the totality of the Zocalo. That is no mean feat. When I was there a month ago, the "strike" had just started and they had about one-fifth of the Zocalo filled. Now it is everything, with a warm body count of about 30,000 daily, and 20,000 at any given time. If they were to be bottling cologne, it would have to be named Eau de Septique.

Why are the "teachers" blocking up the main square and holding spot marches at the bottleneck in Mexico City, causing people to miss flights, long-distance deluxe bus connections...appointments...ambulances....fire engines, who cares..."We have grievances!!! We are us!!! You are only you!!! and of course the famous, "Si Ud. no es parte de la solucion, entonces Ud. es parte del problema!!!"

The problems with the national teachers' union and several of its State Directorates of said union seem to be that they do not want any reforms that would re-establish the enforced order scheme of deportment, evaluations of the teachers on a bi-annual basis, assessment of time and attendance (critical if one is expected to be at the front of a class instead of marching for the labour rights of the proletariat). They do not want to "advance" the curriculum to where it had been 20 years ago, in terms of math, science, foreign language, world/Mexican history, and world/Mexican geography.

The previous leader of the Union, pictured on the left, Esther Gordillo, is a hideous hag who ruled the union with an iron fist, starting slowly at first and then especially in the last 12 years. Now, however, she is making license plates for the central government, charged, convicted, and remanded in short order for having several mansions including one in the Mt. Carmel by the Sea area of California, another in Miami-Dade somewhere, and over 100,000,000 USD in liquid assets and negotiable instruments stolen from the teachers' union. She is a true practitioner of the diabolical Santaria pseudo-religion, and she looks it.

So, without the head witch around, there is some lack of direction at the top. There is also the latent Marxist hostility to either the old corrupt government party, or to the rightwing governments that replaced the old corrupt government party for two presidential terms. The Co-ordinacion Nacional de Trabajadores en la Educacion (CNTE), the governing body for the Teachers' Union ( the largest in Latin America) is locked into a death struggle with the Central Government...as Ernest Pen~a Nieto advances the plans of the previous regimen ( a centre-right government of the Partido de Accion Nacional - PAN) to cancel the authority of the union (STNTE) to do the hiring, firing, qualification, and advancement of teachers and administrators. The plan would be to turn the personnel and curriculum matters over to a Central Education Administration that would be more accessible to the citizenry, in keeping with the slightly to significantly better record the central government has had in terms of transparency and efficiency during the previous 12 years of PAN governance.

The populace is ready to change the old system by an almost 7 to 1 margin. So, these occupations and blockages will stale very quickly, and it almost certain that police/demonstrator confrontation will begin soon to clear the Zocalo and the other public parks of protestors. An injunction will finally be applied for and granted, sooner rather than later, and that will give the police the opportunity to unblock any intersections, highways, toll-booths, and/or accesses to sub-way, train, bus, or airport facilities.

The left....a useless bunch at best....is also afraid that if the sanctity of existence of self-rule by the union falls, the union will die. Further, it will hasten that moment that allows the national oil company, the only show in town will be able to permit foreign investment and partnership arrangements since 1938, when all foreign interests in oil production, refining, and marketing were expropriated. For these reasons and several other irrational notions, the left will dig in hard for the next 18 months, trying to save the wasteful, useless demagoguery-induced programs that the Mexican left, and even hard-leftists throughout the world thought would save Mexico and Latin America from American hegemony and the exploitation of the downtrodden.

The case is clear. Mexico with 9 times the population of Cuba has a GNP that is 220 times the output of Cuba. A good comparison of a nation mired in communist dictatorship (emphasis on the dictatorship) and a nation emerging and evolving from nationalistic socialism to common law and free market/production/consumption economic policy.

More later. There will likely be additional material entered on this screed.

We genuinely appreciate you time and attention. We are still disturbed by the reconnaissance report from the Big Sandy Creek agent and the observation and comments of El Zorro....If all OROGs will take note, if we were to take those writings and wad them up and throw them into the air...it would have come back down exactly like an incompetent buffoon acting like he was Mr. Toughguy with lots of red line and Tomahawk Cruise missiles and no need to consult wit' nuttin' o nobody! That same buffoon lets his Secretary of State go out and pronounce the beginning of the new era of bellicosity against Bad Leaders, only to be contradicted within 12 in diametrical fashion...just before heading out to play a little golf....with Joe Biden????????????????????

Tell me if A Gringo in Rural Mexico doesn't have the best analysts and commentators!!

El Gringo Viejo

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Click to visit our little Adobe Hideaway…

This is our rustic, but very comfortable place, out in the rural area to the northwest of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas…the State's Capital. From a bustling city of 400,000, we placed our domicile a bit more than 20 miles into the scenes of mountains, citrus groves, spring-fed creeks and rivers with crystal clear waters, and an abundance of bird species that make veteran birders shake their heads in wonder.

We are all but adjacent to the venerable Hacienda de Santa Engracia (about 500 yards away), which dates to the 1720s and has ancient structures still in use, very elegant, and mystical in many ways. It has operated as a guest hotel since the 1970s.

Our little place rests on three and a fraction acres, fronting on the Rio Corona, which is lined with over-1,000 year old cypress trees. The nearby Sierra del Cautivo…a major segment of the overall Sierra Madre Oriental that dominate most of eastern Mexico, lies to the west by about three miles. guards the many springs that maintain the almost perpetual flow from those heights (up to 12,000 fasl) while our place is situated right at 1,000 feet above sea level.

Give us a call, come by and visit…it is truly a different venture in the most positive sense. We can be reached by our email - privatouring@gmail.com - which is our preferred method of communicating.

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What is an OROG?

Once a person lands on our page, that individual becomes a member of the Order of Readers of the Old Gringo, (OROG). There are no dues or assessments to pay, no meetings, no requirements. We are not associated with the KKK, the WCTU, the French Masons, or the Global Warming Glacier

Protection Committee.

We do have a distant connection with the Knights of the Golden Circle and hold the maps to the internment sites of 34 tonnes of Confederate Gold, and 1,000 tonnes of Mexican Imperial Silver (bar and coinage) derived from the collapse of the Reign of Maximillian von Hapsburg, Emperor of Mexico (1863 - 1867). I think we can remember where we put it.

All kidding aside, we are acerbic, but we do not bite. We do believe in our antiquated philosophy, but we try to not impose our quirks and beliefs so far as to be disrespectful.

El Gringo Viejo

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Wise Words

Communism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Winston Churchill

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Be sure you are right, then go ahead.

I bark at no man's bid. I will never come and go, fetch and carry, at the whistle of the Great Man in the White House, no matter who he is.

I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done. But, if such was not to be, then you may all go to Hell, and I shall go to Texas!

David Crockett

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And on and on it goes. The more the Government gives away, the more it takes, and the less Americans do for themselves, until finally, like Europe, there is nobody left to do anything, and there is nobody left to pay for, the nothing that is not done.

And, yes, Virginia, there truly is a Santa Clause, and he and Mrs. Clause and their helpers care greatly for the good children of the Planet. So long as there is happiness, kindness, charity, generosity, and the Spirit of Fellowship, Santa Clause will be there, representing those noble things, and he will always move in a spiritual way so as to provoke humankind to goodness.

El Gringo Viejo

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“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Booker Tallaferro Washington

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It is impossible to make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.

Abraham Lincoln

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El Gringo Viejo: a fair description

Life for El Gringo Viejo began on the Texas-Mexico frontier, near McAllen, Texas literally on a real, live farm. The farmer, as one might imagine, was his father, who had moved with his parents from Gwinner, Sargent County, North Dakota in 1915 - 1916 period, down to the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. (And yes, Virginia, that is the way Sargent County is spelled.)

His parents farmed in an area close to the new community named after its founder, called Ed Couch, in Hidalgo County of Texas. My grandfather is buried in the Weslaco Municipal Cemetery about 10 feet away from his friend, Ed Couch.

After studies, and a stint in the 1st Cavalry, 12th Regiment (mounted), Headquarters Squadron of the United States Army...riding warhorses back and forth along the Rio Grande from the late 1920s and early 1930s. He did not speak much about his service, but we determined that he apparently made rank of 1st Lieutenant.

El Gringo Viejo's Father established his farming and citrus grove-care operation just north of McAllen, Texas. Mother was a housewife and a professional woman....a learned, eloquent, well-read woman.

They were educated people, my father winding up as a Superintendent of a major school/facility of the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation in Austin, Texas after a twenty year career in education at the secondary level. He had degrees in History, Psychology, and Education Administration.

El Gringo Viejo is the last of three children, all males. Number one was Milton Birchard, Jr. who was born in 1936 and died in a vehicular incident in 1988. He was narcoleptic. He held a doctorate in geography from Louisiana State University and was head of the Department there for a good while.

Number two is Norman Francis, who was born during the WWII situation in 1942 and became an important Republican political engineer and fundraiser. He served as Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas during the late 1960s and early 1970s and as Senator John G. Tower's immediate Executive Assistant. The Senator is the Godfather of Norman's first son.

Norman died at age 77 in Austin, Texas and I was one of four eulogists who was chosen to speak at his en memoriam at the Austin Club in downtown most Austin…within sight of the State Capitol.

It was a personal duty and very rewarding

in every way.

My arrival was in 1947, and I was destined to confound my parents and all those around me. Educated entirely in public schools in McAllen, skipping the third grade, and stumbling out of my high school in the upper 90% of a class of 606. I

attended and graduated from Southwest Texas State University (now named Texas State University, unfortunately), being one of the few conservatives to graduate out of the School of Sociology, although my treatment at the hands of my tormentor-professors was not so unpleasant in those days. Emphasis of studies were social demography, and Latin American Affairs with a concentration on Mexico's history and current political evolution, with a minors in History, Geography, and Political Science.

El Gringo Viejo is one of the old, unreconstructed high-church Episcopalians. Politically, he is very fundamentally conservative. He prefers Baseball to football, and considers that baseball with a designated hitter for the pitcher should be called "poofy-ball". Favourite major league team of all times? The Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. It will never be the same again.
El Gringo Viejo's father was born to a Hudson Valley-type girl and a man who had lost two older brothers who served in the Pennsylvania 96th Regiment of Volunteer Infantry during the War Between the States.

The surnamed line (Newton) originated from East Anglia, not far from a place called Washington in northeastern England. They came into Boston Harbour, Massachusetts in 1642 (the 1st voyage of the Mayflower had overbooked), and settled there and in Maine as well as spreading out to Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania, over the generations for the first 220 years.
Another batch of folks, mainly Anglo, settled in the middle Hudson Valley. There was another group of Celto-Teutonics types from Saxony and Prussia, establishing and settling along the Hudson River from around what is Catskill County northward to Duchess and Rennselaer Counties around a place named Red Hook. The main group came in during the early 1650s.

My mother's people were another English line of long-term Southern and Tennessee people, from the Eastern part of that State, who originally came in during the 1660s through Virginia and North Carolina, and finally into Eastern Tennessee, settling in and around a county to be named Franklin, and helping to establish the city of Winchester. Almost all of these people originated from southwestern England, near the frontier with Wales.

Only recently did we verify that she had many people involved in the service of the Confederacy. One died in northern Mississippi, another Captain Asa Grant, 2nd Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, was severely wounded and succumbed to his wounds finally in 1869, and another hung around in an Ohio POW camp (Camp Chase) for about 13 months, while three others were either wounded or died in action, including David Limbaugh, Lieutenant, 42 Tennessee Infantry. Another five made it through relatively unscathed.

Almost all were, oddly enough, related to the great-grand uncles and gggg-grandfathers down to gg-grandfathers of Rush Limbaugh. The gggg-grandfather came into the Colonies in the early 1740s from a Prussia and Saxony background, and served in both civilian and military capacities to the Continental government and Army. He was the XO of a Militia Battalion of 3,000 Pennsylvania effectives. They honed their military readiness under the supervision of Gen. von Steuben and someone named Washington at some place called Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

A grandson of his, Isaac, settled in Tennessee after the War for Independence against King George III. So Rush and I share grandfathers, four generations deep on the American Continent.

It should be stated here that were I to be called to declare, my allegiance would still be with the Southern Cause, although I bear no rancor against those who feel the same about their instinct to maintain the Union. Oddly enough, both my mother (a Southerner) and my father (a true Yankee by blood) believed that we would have remained closer if we had separated, and each side gone the ways of their own yearning, but amicably.

The last of the English (El Gringo Viejo's) line came during the time between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They left County Wicklow, where they had been involved, apparently, in that peculiar Anglo - Scots/Irish practice of making whiskey by the use of peat for fuel. They were also involved in the business of production and processing of various types of grains as well as the production of whiskey, gin, and beer. By their surnames one would know that, while coming out of Ireland, they were actually English, one with the surname of Christian and the wife, Webster. They had, in fact, married in Christ's Church Cathedral, Anglican, in downtown Dublin in 1796. They landed in New York, set up shop in the City among previously arrived relatives, and then in Albany. We have some record that this Christian who married the Webster had actually lived in the colonies, but travelled several times back and forth between the Spirits businesses in England and Ireland and the New World. They wound up as the generations progressed in and around Minneapolis (St. Anthony) & Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Racine, Wisconsin. My particular line went from New York to Alabama, then North Carolina, and then Wisconsin to join up with the rest of the extended family, finally in Minnesota, before the War Between the States.

The Time Line of entry of all lines of my children's blood ancestry on their mother's side in the New World begins in 1578, when Spaniards of mixed Hebraic and Iberian peoples, and others of ancestry from Portugal, Galicia, and southern Spain entered into what was to become Monclova and Saltillo, Coahuila. They are brought under the auspices of the Explorer, Conquistador, and Colonizer Jose Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva, with elements settling in Lampazos and Cerralvo (Nuevo Leon), in Palofox (Texas), and Revilla (Tamaulipas) on the Rio Bravo.
Also, the Count of the Sierra Gorda, Col. Jose de Escandon brought another group of mainly Spanish, Portuguese, and Azoreans in the early 175os, settling along the Rio Bravo (Grande), and then on the north (Texas) side, spreading up to what is now Yorktown, Texas (near and southeast of San Antonio de Bexar, more or less) before and during the Texas Republican period.

My children and theirs are qualified to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of Liberty, The Sons of the Grand Army of the Union, The Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Daughters of the Confederacy. By my side they are 16th generation English Colonial - American and 6th generation Texian. By my wife's side, my children are 23rd generation northernmost New Spain, Texian, and American. Isolating Texas alone, my grandchildren are 15th generation Texian.

LIKE?

Cats, and then dogs.

Fishing, even a bit of bird watching, now and then.

Really good music..antique, old, 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll, classical - Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, both Strauses, and many others, African tribal sounds en chorus, Mexican bolero...mariachis when they play out-of-doors, some country and quite a bit of the old western (Sons of the Pioneers, the Texas Ploughboys, Marty Robbins "Gunfighter Ballads, for instance.), even some of my own piano works, bagpipes, Enya, marimba, Caribe.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess always seemed to me to have been, and remains, a true masterpiece of Americana.

Well maintained Firearms, smooth running small equipment, old autos that respond to repair and upkeep and keep going. Used to have BMWs and so forth, but being old helps tone things down a bit.

Antiques, and antiquities...Meso-American archeology...and religious history. Formal religious services among the Orthodox..as in Anglican, Roman, Orthodox and Conservative Jewish services and celebrations. Hard to find, now.

Overnight radio, rightwing talk radio until it becomes overly tedious and repetitive.

Weather and climate.

And strangely during the past few years,cooking. Not just barbequeing...but actually dishing up gourmet-type stuff...and gardening to a purpose.

We grow a lot of our own spices for our little bed and breakfast and we specialise in flowerng plants, bushes, and trees that attract bees and literally hundreds of species of common to extremely rare birds to our place.

Lifelong Republican, honourably discharged - United States Army (conscripted).

Now drifted into the position of favouring the amicable withdrawal of Texas from the American Union. My grandchildren are 15th generation Coahuila/Texas by my wife and 8th generation Texas by me and my will is to have them answer for the debt of Texas and not for the debts incurred by the National Socialists who have taken possession of the central government in Washington, D.C.

DISLIKES?
Any kind of socialism...bolshevik, national, marxist, social democratic, Trotskyite, progressive, ....and any kind of socialist.

The Ku Klux Klan and such types who figure that they have to hate somebody because of how he/she was born. They are just role players, resucitated by the Communist Party USA in the 1920s, whose members are fueled by a well deserved sense of inferiority.

And almost all social activism.

Almost all labour union officers and almost all labour unions. (There are some exceptions.)

Public assistance of any kind. All welfare and/or charity should and must be privately handled in order to avoid the trap wherein we have fallen, that being the multigenerational slide into the abyss of forlorn hopelessness that is government slavery and dependence. That slide is cheerfully supported by politicians who love to buy votes with other peoples' money.

Lotteries operated by governments.

Litter, filth, graffiti, gangs, and waiting in line for people using food stamps whil'st they argue with the cashier about how they "need" this or that to be covered...when they have three carts with 450 USD of snacks and things we cannot afford because we are in an 'upper income" category.

Church reformers who want to change my church instead of them going to another church and just leaving me alone.

Medications for boys who are over-active, and medications in general.

Lite beer, lite Coca Cola, fat-free, lo-cal, artificial sugars and sweeteners, anything marked "healthy" on food packages, sugar-free, margarine, and driving 23 miles to buy gasoline over there because it is 2 cents per gallon cheaper.

Any government programme designed to help anybody; 94% of the time the programme winds up morphing into some kind of monster. Then liberals and do-gooders will propose another programme, twice as costly, to cure the ills caused by the first cure-all.

Officiousness, and the term "non-profit", as if there is some kind of moral superiority in the failure to produce wealth.

Physical abuse of an animal, an extraterrestrial, a child, slave, woman, or anything like a tractor or power tool, firearm, sewing machine, or an auto, etc.
Loud and/or sharp noises, especially when such noises have no particular purpose.

Wasting anything, from paper towels to Clorox to cake and cookie batter...anything. And....waiting in a line.