A Gringo in Rural Mexico: A few quick logs to put on the fire started by the political scene.....

Monday 5 June 2017

A few quick logs to put on the fire started by the political scene.....

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The following are a number of points that come to mind as I drive back and forth, up and down, the road twixt the Quinta Tesoro de la Sierra Madre and my various home-bases.

(1) The Madness of Lib-Logic - If a person proposes or supports some notion that an illegal alien who has an outstanding warrant from the Department of Homeland Security - Immigration and Customs Enforcement, should be held by local or State authority until the DHS - ICE officers come and pick up said individual.....then according to the entire Left and the Obsolete Media, that person is a racist, bigot, neanderthal, and just a plain ol' deplorable.

The Obsolete Press, lamentably now including many of the local broadcasters, has declared the new law dealing with illegal aliens who have compounded their offense by committing a serious misdemeanour or felony is "racist". It is pointed out that any person supporting this new law is probably a Nazi SS enforcer, a bigot, a bad person, and as stated above, a veritable "Deplorable".

They equate the Texas law recently passed by both Houses of the Congress of the Republic of Texas and signed by the correctly designated Head of State as a law designed to harass and generally denigrate "hispanic" people, all of whom are assumed to be cherubs and people awaiting beatification. The new law is said to be, in their terms, ''racist".

I equate those who argue in this manner to the drunken gunfighter flailing his pistol around, firing at nothing and everything. They have chosen this time to make of a relatively simple matter something terribly complicated.

How so? It is simply because this new law simply states that the constabulary throughout the Republic of Texas, and more especially the elected Sheriffs of the Counties and the Chiefs of Police of the various and sundry municipal jurisdictions of the Republic of Texas honour and comply with active detain-and-deliver orders from DHS - ICE. This means, equally simply, that illegal aliens who have been detained by arrest for suspicion or by warrant for crimes of a serious nature, once their penal obligations are acquitted, should be referred to DHS - ICE so as to facilitate their immediate deportation. In some cases, the DHS - ICE people might recover the individual to be transferred to a holding area for later prosecution based on other pending warrants.

We will point out that among the people whom the Obsolete Press and the general leftist movement loves to call "Hispanic", and who are American / Texian citizens or legal aliens, it is my best estimate that 80% favour this process. Frequently, they are the ones who have to put up with the swirling mass of criminal slime that have come to our shores, plains, mountains, towns, and cities in order to commit murder, mayhem, and disorder. Mara Salvatrucha Anyone?

Here, locally along the frontier, the local print, television, and radio media are pointing out the obtuse racism of the Governor Greg Abbott who wants to throw all "hispanics" in jail and have them deported whether they are legal, illegal, citizens, or not. This is not a joke.
It is the same as the picture ID voter requirement false-issue. They look into the camera with that "look". The "look"? It is that "look" that reveals the certain knowledge by the reporter that he / she has "caught" another honkey Klanner being a Mexican-hating bigot. Little matter that most of the Latinate people who are legally in Texas and / or citizens of three to fourteen generations.....most of them want protection from illegal aliens in Texas who are here solely for criminal purposes. Of that latter group, long ago they were very few.....now, they are legion.

One last, and very valid, angle pertaining to this matter. One might note that Mexico has been delivering people with wants / warrants in the United States and / or Texas on an astoundingly regular and dependable basis. It was the norm, not more than a generation ago, that obtaining extradition for a wanted person in Mexico to be sent to Texas or elsewhere in the United States was nearly laughable. Now it is de rigueur. Texas especially (I sincerely do not know about the other States) has been good about delivering people who have been requested by Mexican authority when the proper charges, warrants, and causes are presented. It is like....dare I say....the way things should be.

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Robert (Sheets) Byrd's ''private" train for his wife who
hated flying. It still runs both directions, 3 times per week.
It is especially beautiful during the Spring and Fall. In
fairness, it is still running a 93% occupancy.

(2) The notion of "crossing the aisle in order to get something done" - Instead of going through a long, wordy explanation concerning how this writer arrives at the conclusion that now resides in his brain (can we still say 'his'?), it is patently impossible for straight-thinking classical Liberals, classical republicans, classical parliamentary monarchists, modernist Conservatives, traditionalists, orthodox religious thinkers to "cross the aisle".

This is the Saloon Car

And before the irate masses bury me up to the neck and begin the stoning, please understand. Crossing the aisle to anyone who identifies as one of the above cohort of philosopher, thinker, or believer means being "reasonable" and caring about the opinion of another person who is not in accord with the issue at hand.
To the Left, "crossing the aisle" means...."Agree with us and vote the way we say or we shall accuse you of wanting children to die, throwing grandma off the cliff, of having ever said the word 'mongoloid', of wanting to abolish Social Security, and being a racist. And a HomoPhobe (fear of human-like entities)".

Point? There is no such thing as "crossing the aisle in order to get something done"when one is dealing with leftists. Their rule is "What is yours is negotiable. What is mine in mine.".
The closest we might come to that in recent times is the idea that we do some log-rolling with other peoples' money. For instance, "You give my wife a private train to Charleston, West Virginia with AMTRAK, and I will vote for your embargo against Brazilian and Mexican sugar."
West Virginia U.S. Senator Robert Bird (Grand Exalted Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan) had a wife Erma Ora James - Byrd, who, like Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson (Lady Bird), and your humble servant, had severe allergy to flying. Et Viola'! A full scale overnight train with diner, saloon car, and deluxe alcoves in the Pullman section for someone who is "very important". And what is "mine" is mine? The train still runs, and ironically, it is doing a little better than breaking even. Were it to run daily, it would make good money.

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(3) Grey Panthers form shout-down groups at Town - Hall meeting with their US Representatives -

They are the perfect picture of America's left. It is something like, "The Republicans have a blockade against our friends in Cuba, pushing them into extreme poverty. And we want our free stuff, and the rich should pay for it.!!!!! We demand it!!!!! Explain why you want us to die!!!!"

All of this, of course, references the "discussion" we are having with people like the Grey Panthers and other Soros Choir members who specialise in holding up pitifully impudent and meaningless placards, 'Why do you want my daughter to die?" and "When will you share?" and shouting, "If you let the planet fry, we are all going to die".
They shout things that can not be discerned, and if discerned cannot be understood. And then, if they are successful in totally interrupting any communication, they retire from the field of argument, content that they have won.

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This is a delayed publication, primarily because I forgot to post it a couple of weeks back.
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.