Spill Over??

     You all are aware that the Old Gringo grumbles about the  press's inability to get anything right....almost, it seems, purposefully choosing to mis-report events and facts.   When terms are used repeatedly incorrectly, and when facts are repeatedly misstated, one can chalk it up to lying, ignorance, or stupidity, almost always, or to a combination of the three.

      The new "for instance" is telling.   The McAllen Monitor, very much a border-based newspaper, being published about eight miles from the international border with Mexico, has long warned that "someday" we are going to see "spill-over" violence coming out of Mexico and into the Lower Rio Grande Valley.   Any time now,  some time soon, any moment, it's bound to happen in the near future.

     The Old Gringo has written how such matters have always been with us, since the establishment of the Rio Grande as the international boundary.  He has also demonstrated how, in its new encarnation, the drug/cartel wars being conducted on Texas soil has been going on since the mid-to-latter 1960s.

This is not an estimate or a surmision, or a guess.   It is just the facts.

      The same McAllen Monitor that runs articles very frequently forecasting this coming "spill-over" ran an article in this Sunday's paper, section A, page 1, above the fold...."ICE detains convicted Mexican national.....the 45 year-old who served time in a U.S.  (sic) prison for murder, faces illegal re-entry charges".

     The article goes to to explain that Juan Gilbert Hinojosa Gonzalez was convicted 21 years ago and sentenced to prison for involvement and participation in the murders of four men.   Juan, who is a really nice fellow, decided to clean up the area where the encounter took place by piling hay bales on top of the four dead men.    To make certain that no litter would befoul the sacred soil of Texas, Juan was good enough to saturate the area with diesel fuel and set everything on fire.    The fire was so intense that it melted the metal of the 1976 Ford pick-up, and completely immolated the four previous associates of Juan and his accomplices.
     It is not that the Old Gringo is pegging things to that date....this event was so common by that time that everyone knew that the whole of South Texas was awash with....was tsunami'd by....drug trafficking and its associated violence.
As early as 1981, the Old Gringo was present at a get-together where certain grand poobahs of the Lower Rio Grande Valley's financial sector were gloating that the "Carter Recession" had not been so bad for the Valley as for the rest of the country because we had everyone on food stamps and the drug trade was bringing a lot of money into the  Valley that it otherwise would not have.    By that time it had been in full swing for a decade and a half.
      Back then it was two or three bodies of being dragged out of orchards and canals every week.   Now it's five or ten in the four county area.   In the beginning there were no complex gang organizations, but that ended by the mid 1970s  with the establishment of the Triple City Bombers (TRCs) and the Los 13s, advanced glue sniffers who went about killing each other in drive-bys and the like.   Great Society graduates.   Majored in AFDC and all suffering from terminal food stamp poisoning.
     In any regard....because the Old Gringo really could bore everyone to tears with several thousand examples of spill-over violence and explanation of the sources...spill-over violence has been pronouncedly occurring in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, as defined in present day terms, for forty years.   Please note that the Sheriff of Starr County who arrested the perpetrators of these murders went to stay with the Texas Department of Corrections for a good long while shortly after this crime went down.      http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1108/a06.html

     That's okay though, because his chief deputy was appointed to serve, and was later elected to the position in his own right, and then re-elected.....but, alas and alack....he did not quite make it to the end of his second term due to massive corruption charges and, like his predecessor, connections to organized crime.   His story that he can point to with pride with his grandchildren is found at this link  http://www.themonitor.com/articles/starr-30026-county-years.html ,

     The Old Gringo could go on with this cut and paste for the next millennium.  It is twice a week now, a policeman, a border patrolman, a customs inspector, a Sheriff or deputy.....for instance, Hidalgo County, BEFORE these above mentioned incidents lost a Sheriff for taking gifts and  favours, and other matters....he went to prison for a good long while....and you all need to remember that Hidalgo County is the 6th largest of Texas's 254 counties.   The District Attorney....an arrogant old fool to begin with...managed to....Well, that's a messy story for some other time.     http://www.texnews.com/texas97/corrupt092597.html

     Finally, the good news is that Juan the Body Torcher was sentenced to 35 years in Texas, but was released with good time after about 20 years.   He was then deported, but snuck back into the United States where he was hiding in a rural area around Rio Grande City, perhaps the epicenter of drug trafficking in the world.   He was captured and turned over to the ICE people, who will in turn probably turn him over to the State of Texas Department of Corrections on a parole violation charge.   Juan's three accomplices are still serving life sentences.   Their four drug trafficking competitors are still dead.

Thanks for your time.    Beware of Spill-over...so as to not get any on your new white shirt.
El Gringo Viejo

          

 

More Success

The Mexican Army and the Naval Infantry have officially confirmed the extermination of the leader and leadership of the Nuevo Laredo cell of the ZETA group.  They also captured, in Saltillo,  the cell's  chief financial officer who had all the account keys to bank accounts (probably in Saltillo, Monterrey , McAllen, Nuevo Laredo, Laredo, San Antonio, Houston,  Mexico City, San Luis Potosi, Panama' City, Caracas, and Habana).  They also killed 30 members of the cartel during the 2 week sweep, liberated 212 people being held for ransom or "increased service charges'" who were being detained in safe houses.   The also captured over one-thousand arms, none of which could be traced to the United States or to gun stores in Texas nor were they in good repair, and 45 motor vehicles.

     Mexican Armed Forces suffered one dead (a hero), six wounded to require medical intervention (also heroes) and six military vehicles damaged or destroyed.    These figures are corroborated by on the ground observers. 

      Sixty-three tons of marihuana, 900 pounds of methamphetamine, 140 pounds of cocaine, and 100 pounds of Mexican black tar and Colombian brown heroin were also captured and will be destroyed next weekend in a public place.

       Similar reports are expected for the Military sweeps in Reynosa and Matamoros.   Those reports will be finalized and made public in the coming days.  Once again, the military is giving the credit to good information being forwarded to them by the "anonymous denunciation" telephone and cyber links.

Just an up-date that you all deserve.    Our area around Cd. Victoria has been very quiet...very dull and boring for a good while now.    Still much to be done, but we are heading on the right road and in the right direction.

Thanks for your time and attention.

El Gringo Viejo

Favourite Hypocrisies....

One of my favourite examples of the sneering, snickering posturing of marxists who love to denigrate the "American Way of Life" is Pete Seeger's singing of the sarcastic and oh!-so-enlightened social observation of degenerate, dull, America, a song called "Little Boxes"....you can clique on to the song below.

      This picture indicates the success of communism in avoiding the dullness of the American concept of domestic and commercial construction.    It makes a guy proud to think that we have such salient, relevant observers of the human condition and the correct path for humanity in the arts.   It makes a person wonder, "Where have all the flowers gone?"  and all that important stuff.

http://youtu.be/La21jYGIQ8k

                                                                           AP

                                                           Central Pyongyang

     You know it's bad when a pro-marxist group like the AP publishes pictures of the "little boxes" brought to us by "housing programs", "urban renewal", "great leaps forward", "Housing and Urban Development" and other "New Slums for Old" programs and shovel ready projects.

Wishing everyone a merry Kwanzaa, the Old Gringo thanks you for your time and patience.     And remember, this land is my land, it's not your land, the Department of the Interior expropriated your land because I needed it more than you did.   You'll understand, I'm sure, ciao!.

El Gringo Viejo

But Aside from the Cartel Stuff, What About....?

     Then, there are the questions that come in or which are encountered in the great outdoors that can pretty well be phrased thusly:    "Are you received well by the people around you?   Do you feel comfortable in that rural environment, in that you are the only Gringo around?  "In a place where 3% of the people have everything and the rest have nothing,  doesn't the social vista depress you a bit?" and the question about "Why don't they ever progress?  No cars, no television, no cell phones, no computers....everybody living in cardboard boxes....why would anyone want to be surrounded by that?"

     One might like to visit this site, http://www.casitadelasflores.com/  in order to see that there are people in Mexico who are as deranged as the Old Gringo.    This place is in the perpetually charming city San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.    The owner is a bit "eccentric" and totally dedicated to her own path through life.   This individual, and several scores of thousands of others, find life interesting and rewarding while operating some kind of a business and living some kind of a life in some favoured corner of Mexico.

     There are still almost 1,000.000 American citizens living full or part-time in Mexico, each in his own zone of comfortability and his own particular corner of choice.   The Old Gringo chose this particular site because the owner personally redesigned what was a very irregular space and converted the space into an attractive, functional, asylum for sane people.

     Most of our readers already know that almost everyone in Mexico over the age of 8 has twelve or more cellular telephones...almost.   There are, however, as many people per capita in Mexico with cellular as there are in the United States or Canada.    Another thing that might surprize folks is that the comment almost always made by someone returning to Mexico for the first time in....say....twenty year...is "Everything is changed.   The highways are so much better.   Wow, there have been a lot of improvements".

      The vast majority of the Americans who live and/or work, full and/or part-time are not hiding from anything in the United States, nor are they anti-American.   Some are pinkoes, some are rightwing crazies, some are wealthy, some are "independently poor", and some are trying to make one social security check stretch to cover everything (almost impossible).   There are surfers, fishermen, crafts people, artists, archeologists, aetheists, and even people who think that cats have souls.  
      Of people I have known, the youngest free-standing Gringo making his way actually lived in Mexico City and had a regular job at a technical lab working on computer apps.    He was about 21 years old.  The oldest is a geezer of some note who is a beach bum down in Oaxaca....who, oddly enough, is very well to do and has his personal airplane docked in Mexico and his small but very fancy two-master at harbour not far from his favourite beachfront saloon.   He was a very young 82 and made Hugh Hefner look like the  mummy that he is.   He also smoked cigarettes....although, according to him, not as much as he used to.

      The Old Gringo does not count among our number stoneheads, the mushroom hunters, the hostel/anarchist/666 people that can be found in a few places...I guess everywhere in the world by this point.     Most of these "I'll take a bath when I die" people are found around archeological sites and some out-of-the-way beach areas that are near not-to-far-out-of-the-way beach areas like Puerto Angel and Puerto Escondido and Huatulco's upper reaches.   They are easily avoided.

      When they come up with their story, "My squeeze and I were shaken down by a greaser cop and we need a little money to by a bus ticket back to the States...man... can you help a fellow American?...We're really desperate, man, we haven't eaten in a couple of days." You can usually tell them that you are a bounty hunter down looking for someone..."who looks a lot like you". Admittedly, the Old Gringo has done that, because he looks mean enough. He has also said, "I was going to ask you for little bread man. The same cop must have hit you too".

     In any regard, there are a lot of us still-functional crazy people down here who are comfortable with the vast and overwhelming majority of the people who surround us.   One last thing is that the Old Gringo is of the opinion that the people who purposefully put themselves in the middle of the locals have a better time and go of it than the folks who buy or build into the "Almost totally Gringos Only" gated developments one might find in Baja California.   To each his own, however.

More later.   We need to see if  Hope and Change have totally destroyed my portfolio or if we have been annexed by Burundi yet.   Thanks for your time and attention.

El Gringo Viejo

The Solution

      The Old Gringo almost weeps when John Stossel on FOX and Mr. Keenan on the Squawk Box, and Bill O'Reilly cannot stick to the free enterprize, non-government solutions that actually work.   Keenan say, "Everybody is for a safety net provided by progressive taxation..."   when he is folding a segment and entering into a commercial break.   O'Rielly says that Big Oil does not deserve to make this or that level of profits...and John Stossel agrees with O'Reilly that we need to make sure that the poor don't suffer.   GaG...!   Why cannot people with conservative inclinations just tell the government..."It's none of your business how much money I make."   "It's none of your business that I fly in a private jet or that I have a yacht." "The profits of the oil company or any company belong to the stockholders and other owners of the company.  What do you propose?  Giving the money to the government for their worthwhile projects?"   No, No, No to bondage.   Yes, Yes, Yes to self sufficiency.

       This is when I know that the war is nearly over.     Allow me to try one more time.   In America....because of our founding nature and guidance by a soul trained in a reasonable Hebrew, Protestant, Anglican, or Roman catechism, no one is going to be allowed to starve to death....or even to suffer hunger.   We are the people of the "barn raising".   When the rest of the world was thinking  "communism" we had already nearly perfected the sociology of communitarianism.

      Then, almost suddenly, we were told that what churches, synagogues, Rotarys, Masons/Shriners, Lions, Mooses, Kiwanises, Knights of Columbus, their women's adjuncts, and scores of thousands of other charitable organizations like the Salvation Army....thousands of small and large social service groups, were not enough.   America is a horrible place.   We did not have programs like the "advanced" countries in Europe that took care of people in a clinical and professional way with a government sponsored bureaucracy.

       We established welfare programs for the poor....and, like Europe, the more money that became available....geewhilikers....the more poor people we had.  I remember a "progressive" Republican college buddy telling me about how we GOPers had to "get out in front of the Democrats by proposing 'ElderCare'....a Republican program that would "give Geezers free medical care"....When I observed that there is no method by which "free medical care" can be given to anyone save by miracle, and that any program run by any government would immediately become a gold mine for agents of corruption, he scoffed and declared, "No one would ever steal a dime from a program meant to help the Geezers!"  This was in 1966.

        Then Planned Parenthood told me that children needed "neutral values" sex education.    When it was suggested that maybe sex should be a bit shrouded and scary, not clinical and veterinarian.....maybe emotions like love and values like responsibility were more important than knowing about the location of fallopian tubes....I was informed that my mentality had produced an illegitamacy rate of over 5% (the rate for Negroes at that time was 7%).....CHILDREN HAD THE RIGHT TO MANDATORY SEX EDUCATION...So There!!

      So, best estimates are that over 70,000,000,000 dollars were 'frauded out' of Medicare and Medicaid last year alone.    And, of course, Negro illegitimacy last year went down slightly to 76%.    Whites of all types are now around 19% in spite of PP's and Howlywould's best efforts to make the rate higher.

       Now the cant is "We have to address issues important to the Hispanic community....the African American community....".     We now frame issues of unwillingness to provide oneself with his own fodder....or to provide for one's own progeny's nutritional necessities....as "Hispanic" or "African-American" issues.    First, create the problem.   Then blame the rich, the white, the self-reliant, and especially ridicule conservative "minority" people as not being "real Hispanics" or "true to his Black".    There is no hope.   We have whelped out the people who will burn down the bakery.

      The the businesses and industries who line up like the capitalists of the Ruhr Valley in Germany during the 1930s to gain favour with the German National Socialist Workers' Party are the same as the welfare culture bums. They are part of the  crowd who want subsidies for ethanol powered solar panels that produce windmill generators!!!
       THOMAS EDISON, HENRY FORD,   ROBERT FULTON, ELI WHITNEY, ALEXANDER BELL, THE WRIGHT BROTHERS AND MICHAEL GATES AND A MILLION OTHER GEEKY WIERDOS DID NOT HAVE "GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT" IN THEIR IDEAS.    They flew into darkness, with an idea, a drive, a notion.
       Ten million small businesses, like barber and beauty shoppes, bars and restaurants, franchises, cleaning services, laundromats, Amway people, dance and music academies, fishing and hunting guides, etc.etc.etc.etc.etc.etc.,were set up without the kind and soft guiding hand of Father Abraham...Father Woodrow....Father Franklin.....Father Harry.....Father Lyndon....Father Jimmy....Father Billy..and now Father O'bama, the first Irish President of all 57 States.   Republican presidents usually served just as Brothers....except for Ronald, who was a President.

The real reason for the Democrats settling on the Debt Extension and getting out of town is seen below.

The green line is 'approve or strongly approve'.
The red line is 'disapprove or strongly disapprove.

Just a few thoughts.   More Later.    Thanks for your time as usual.    Non-political observations coming up during the early evening.
El Gringo Viejo

Reality Check

True Lies:

     (1)      We have to raise the debt limit in order to show how fiscally responsible we are.   This will allow us to spend money we do not have.  (?)

     (2)     If we raise the debt limit that will preserve our credit rating.   The rating agencies will see that we can practice prudent self-restraint.   (?)

     (3)     If we raise the debt limit, that will put an end to the deficit spending that causes the debt.  Just because the Congress is an indisciplinate Parliament of Whores does not mean that they would be so stupid so as to immediately begin spending money they do not have.   No one in his right mind would spend money he does not have.....right.   (?)

     (4)     It is a good thing that we raised the debt limit, because otherwise we Geezers would not have had any use for their sozialversicherungsnummer.  The German National Socialist Workers' Party  really did good...inspiring the New Dealer Democrats to imitate their brethren in the establishment of this fine program.    This fine program practiced privately is a major felony.   Social Security under a better name would be called Bernie's Friendly Retirement Fund....111 Hudson, Suite 3446, Riker's Island Building, New York, New York, or email us at  WEripUmadeOFF@gotchadummy.com

     (5)     Unless Father O'bamaham had intervened the Republicans would have taken Kwanzaa away from the children and the retransgendered.                              

    (6)     And the Un-reverse-re-trans-bi-anti-inverted-convoluted-gendered.

    (7)     And the children who did not have a White Kwanzaa the first time it was taken away by George Bush.

    (8)    It is good to realize that now that this debt limit has been increased, there will be no need for TARP XXXVI for shovel ready projects.   One of the first proposals is to mow the grass at Arlington Cemetery for the first time since Father O'Bamaham was re-elected for the 29th time....wake up!  wake up!  It's the Year 2207 ......!!!    All the people buried there have been unionized.   We burned down Arlington, Monticello, and Mount Vernon because they were owned by white slave owners.   We gave women the right to vote again.  The National Cathedral has been ceded over to The Universalist Cosmic Study Group.

     (9)     Millionaires, billionaires, private jet people, Oil Companies will be made to pay their fair share, jailed, outlawed, prohibited, and neutered and spayed.   Only movie stars will get to have gasoline and private planes.   Gangster Rap people too, and the historically underutilized.....and other people who have never been proud of America until to-day.    And Nancy Pelosi
    (10)      If we don't pass this debt ceiling increase...the stock market will collapse.    (?)
    (11)       These are the times when a person is comforted knowing that we have a fine press corp, a  cadre of geniuses as economic guides, and a president who was raised by his communist grandparents, who has a wife who was never proud of America until somehow or another her husband, who has never had a job in the private sector, never owned or operated a business, never heard a negative word at a ''church'' that based its theology upon the hope for the destruction of America....a wife who Luuuhhvvvvves to TRAVEL..(me and mom....and my closest 422 friends....)  was nominated by the Democrats for the office of the Presidency.  ??
    (12)      Fundamental Transformation and Hope and Change have really been good for America.   (?)

AAAAHHHHRRRRRGGG.

The Old Gringo is going back into his cave.   My favourite place in the world might be San Marcos, Texas.....but these events foreshadow the brilliance of my decision to have prepared a place at his other favourite place....the Quinta Tesoro de la Sierra Madre.    I fear there are not enough Americans capable of critical thinking to make us a path out of this morass.

Thanks for your time and patience.

El Gringo Viejo....