Wednesday 21 February 2018

Potpourri of Current Events and Opinions - Mexican political news, and other worthwhile things

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1.
    These are the times that try men's souls.   We touch a bit on the immediate issue of "gun control" and "assault weapons" and firearms that are "fully semi-automatic", and the trundle of the mindless "students" who are going to lecture people whose minds are essentially closed, made-up, and acting as if they are listening.
     We accompany them in their grief, however real it might be.   I was there in the middle of the Tower Sniper episode, 1 August 1966.  It is now an event long-forgotten, when the centre of Austin, Texas was frozen in time, space, and unreality.  Nineteen dead, 40 or so wounded.   My participation in all of that was in being there and involving myself, very peripherally.
     Sears and Roebuck absolved themselves and all America of this horror by discontinuing sales of firearms in their stores.  Little matter that they had a very fine line of pistols and rifles under the tag of Ted Williams  and J.C.Higgins, equivalent say to a good old Ford pick-up or Chevrolet Impala...good, solid pistols, rifles, and shotguns.   Sold at a good price.
     There were calls then to abolish private ownership of firearms, especially among...you guessed it...leftist intellectuals and "social justice" workers.  The answer to that was the equally banal, but more accurate statement of, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns''.

     Now come the "students" who are most in grieving.  Their task is clear.  They must shame us into the new religion of the World of Perfection Produced by Human Hand.  They are more enlightened, they know more than the "old people with old ways", and they have the permanent solution to "gun violence".
    None of the "students" spoke before or after about the fact that previous to the event in Florida, over 200 mainly black children were killed in the "community" in straight-out gangland insanity since the beginning of this year.


2.

     The Mexican Presidential elections coming up on the 1st day of July of this year will have repercussions throughout the intermingled, industrial world.  They have become complicated by peculiar alliances and already fuzzy proposals.   This is important to us, as reasonable Gringos,  because the Mexicans are our neighbours, and because their Gross National Product is the same as countries such as the Republic of Texas, the Dominion of Canada, and the Dump of Russia.   Mexico, for instance, has States with counties, any one of which produce more value in a quarter than the "peoples' republic of Cuba" produces in a year.   Canada or Texas are in that same category.   Mexico, for instance, with a population of 124,000,000 produces more than sub-Saharan Africa with a population of 1,200,000,000.
    
    Normally we have the marxist Partido Democratico Revolucionario (PRD - nutcase commie-lite), the Partido de Accion Nacional (PAN - centre right, composted from a mix of right-wing crazies such as your writer and the middle-class and upper-class), and the decrepit, again failing Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI - mossback, thuggish, 'centrist', 'reasonable', 'realistic', slightly to totally corrupt, original government party from the post revolutionary period until the years from 1919 to 2000).
Ricardo Anaya Cortez (PAN)
Coalition candidate for the
Presidency of the United
Mexican States
      Now, we have to mix into this mess the fact that there are very strange arrangements and mixings of philosophies being thrown at the electorate.   
     My party, were El Gringo Viejo a Mexican, would obviously be the National Action Party (PAN) because it is most like the conservative wing of the Republican Party in Texas.  But this time the PAN has made a considered alliance with the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) and promises to fold into the overall PAN plan of governance some of the PRD's platform, such as an allocation of a basic amount of survival money for the most marginalised in the Mexican population.
  The PAN keeps its basic thrust upon improving education and business conditions and protecting the concepts of common law and private ownership of this and that.   It is a fundamentally private-sector type party and believes that the best form of "welfare" is eleemosynary - private generosity given directly by those "who have" to those "who have naught".
An 'arriero' with a column of very apt and noble
donkeys (burros), taking supplies to somewhere
around the Grand Canyon, 1956

    Ricardo Anaya Cortez (PAN) is a "realistic" candidate who will do anything, not to "win" but rather to keep the keys to the Presidential Palace and to Los Pinos Presidential Compound.  He, therefore, has made truck with friends, neighbours, and even enemies in order to keep some form of natural and common law hovering over the Republic of Mexico.   Anaya is generally regarded a s being good for the long run, but "too young" to understand what he is getting into when dealing with the maggots, vermin, and serpents who dwell within the intestines of the "burocracia" (Of course, that word means 'bureaucracy', but it is spelled differently, depending on the occasion.  At times, one might see it spelled 'burrocracia' {governed by Burros} ).



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Jose Antonio Meade Kuribrena

    One of Anaya's opposition from the old moss-back Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is a fellow by the name of José Antonio Meade Kuribreña who is a very talented, multi-party public servant, well-educated, family man.  Señor Meade is respected, thought to be impeccably honest, and as dull as an old pewter knife.
     To his credit, almost everyone who is familiar with the man is certain that he is impeccably honest, but also willing to order the annihilation  of the cartels, MS-13, and other fountains of social depravity and organised crime.

     His problem might be that he is overqualified for the job, and that he might lack the spittle and spat to fight for the "centrist majority".   His family is not of the "Soap Opera (telenovela)" quarter of the elite Mexican society such as the present Mexican Presidente.   They are more mundane, real, self-qualified, unimaginative, educated,  intelligent, etc.   El Gringo Viejo, although he is not my preferred candidate, regards him as a Felipe Calderon Hinojosa type...just a plain, poor-rich, smart, good guy.
     In terms of the coming election, his Anglo / Celtic surname, Meade, will neither help nor hurt him. Why?  Because there are Mexicans who would love to have a long episode of dull and boring English / American Common Law.  There are others, of equal numbers, who absolutely, never, under no condition would never vote for him unless he would sign a Will and Testament that ..." ...the afore-declared, being of sound mind and body, stipulates and directs the entirety of my Estate of nearly 300 years in the family be awarded to my  new wife, Maria Feissima Gordota de Maximiliano y de la Vega, aged nineteen, totally incompetent, but willing to hold a texting device until Death do her part."
     He is known as one who would argue to the floor-mat with Trump but be able to wrest an accord, as would Anaya-Cortez.
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     Thence cometh the problem.   The new "PARTIDO MORENO"...the party of the "brown".   It has nothing to do with being "brown", but it appeals to the people who wish to choose that they are downtrodden, and they also want to follow one of  "their own".   It comes from wealthy and upper-middle class urbans who want a reason to hate their parents.  It is founded upon the ire of people who hate other people who have "more".  
   Problem?  Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is another of the typical demagogues, a white man,  who shovels millions of shekels into the Beignk du Ouplatra and then strut around as Saviours of the Poor.  Liberation Theology, anyone?   Millions of dollars channelled through the capillary-like labyrinth and manipulated by people like Marc Rich who embezzled over 200,000,000 USD and was convicted, but then pardoned by Billy Jeff Blyth during the last minutes of Billy Jeff's presence in the horribly contaminated White House.

     For instance, nobody particularly interesting....Yassir Arafat and his bleached-blond, very un-Muslim "wife", Frida and Diego, the Ortega brothers, the Castro-Ruz brothers, Hugo Chavez, Maduro, the Mitterand establishment, Planned Parenthood which specialises in 'free money' from the stupid people who pay taxes...etc.  They all use off-shore banks to hide the money that evaporates.  They all have homes in gated communities in the United States and Europe, where they can escape the Hoi Polloi and rub shoulders with important people like Madonna and  
While El Gringo Viejo is a partisan, he is not a liar.  Andres is not giving a
 "nazi salute".  This is the posture a person takes when he/she is giving
 a pledge in the official Latin world.  It comes from the Roman
 period, and is designed to point a person'ssoul to the
 people he/she is addressing as an assurance that
 his/her commitment is true, certain, and given
 freely, without coercion . 
     Andres mastered the art of demagoguery has since become a travelling salesman for selling  false dreams.   He assures everyone that their problems are brought on by the Gringos, by Trump, by the Rich, by the Church, and of course by the people who raise prices during the early morning hours.
    He is a pitiful little man, waiting for his chance behind the podium, to lecture a crowd of one million, like Nuremberg, and be a dictator, haranguing the gathered about the evils of the Jews, the Church, the Rich, etc.
      The last election he lost for the Presidency of Mexico (his second defeat), for instance, his zomboid followers sealed off the most important Champs Elysee boulevard in the New World...the fabled Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City.   Traffic count?...perhaps 100,000 per hour (or more).   His sycophants, desperately seeking something for nothing, occupied the main plaza in Mexico City for 18 months after the last election and shut down traffic, as they set up their "puestos"  (small restaurants and garage-sale businesses on top of 5 miles of a 16 lane boulevard; a disaster in the centre of a city of 23,000,000). 

    Known affectionately as AMLO, this is the next Maduro / Chavez / Ortega waiting for the chance to demagogue Mexico back into the 18th Century.  One can simply look at Venezuela  /  Colombia and see the difference that the marxist or nazi system (Venezuela) compares poorly to the imperfect nation next door...and that is because Colombia knows what happens when drug traffricking and marxism mix.    Venezuela is in shambles, and Colombia, next door,  is prospering in its own way.

     AMLO wants to bring Bernie Sanders Economics to Mexico, after Mexico went through the same thing from 1920 through the year 2000, just like the hated "official party" (PRI) prescribed to cure the ills of Mexico.  Mexico improved, in spite of, not because of the prescriptions of the PRI's socialist and national socialists and labour-union strangulation.

      We must hope that AMLO's fortunes and high scores in the "encuestas" (polls) will begin to moderate and finally collapse as they did during the other two times he ran.  To-m0rrow, we shall analyse a bit about the enigmatic Vicente Foxx Quesada, who seems to love to spit in the face of Trump and the Americans who rooted for him when he won the presidency of Mexico in the year 2000...breaking the PRI's hold on power that had lasted 70 years.   Not bad for a ranch boy who had been a Coca Cola delivery truck driver in Guanajuato back in the 1960s.   We wish that he would just keep his mouth shut...especially when talking to people on American television who equated him to Satan not so long ago.

More later.  Thanks for staying in.
EL GRINGO VIEJO
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