Yes the Old Gringo knows.....

      The Old Gringo knows that it is mean to suggest that there are no people who look forward to...depend upon...and generally base their lives around their free money from Social Security.    When in Texas, we live next to a ....uh...woman, who is....uh....considerably disturbed, self-concerned, narcissistic, and self-consumed.    She is not as old as we, and well below the age of 62, much less 65.

      She receives free Ponzi money because she 'needs'  it.   She also has a "disability" and because of that she also receives SSI, which is classical Sanskrit for Ponzi - 93 Octane.

       During those days about a month ago while "the Republicans are closing down the Government so that nobody can have their 'help'....no Social Security, no SSI, no Lone Star, no Medicare, no rent subsidy, no help for the ones who need it most"....this woman came by at least twice per day.   She began the encounter always by asking "Do you think there's any chance we can still get our checks and our help?   Why are they doing this?   Don't they know we need our help?"

      The banks here in this once prosperous and noble area, had to detail extra persons to answer telephone inquiries from people who needed their help, calling in repeatedly every 15 minutes....every 5 minutes....every hour....10 times per day....to find out if their "help" had arrived to their bank accounts.   Some banks just stopped trying to accommodate the calls and let their incoming calls back up to be handled in routine order.

      Can anyone imagine that we voted ourselves into a program whereby a majority of the people in Hidalgo County of Texas....and in many, many, many areas of the United States....where there are that many miserable timid little people who have placed themselves into the position of fearing and grovelling to the government to such a degree?

     So yes, we are aware that there are people who are now addicted to being dependent upon their addictions to dependency.

As Always, your kind investment of time and attention with us is appreciated!

May the Great Yahweh bless all OROGs.

El Gringo Viejo

      

Governor, here's what you should have said....

Like the plurality of Republicans in Florida, my vote would have gone to Mr. Cain.    Romney tells me that there is global warming and that he "gave"  Massachussetonians free health "care".

       So, our Lord Governor reminds Romney that Romney called the United States Social Ponzi Scheme a Ponzi scheme even before our Lord Governor had called the Ponzi Scheme a Ponzi Scheme.   That is not the point.    It was such a waste of time.   The Geezers in Florida know it is a Ponzi scheme....that is settled fact....people living in The Villages really do not worry about Social Security.     Almost all of them either invest their Ponzi Scheme proceeds into something lucrative and then pay capital gains on the profits or they give the money to favourite charities and projects.

      So, Lord Governor Goodhair, you would have served yourself better to have said...."In Texas, we call this kind of a financial arrangement "fraud" and "conspiracy to defraud".....because it is a Ponzi Scheme.   Our school employees and State employees do not participate in the federal program because it is inferior and fraudulent.   The State of Texas employees and School District people own their retirement accounts...they can be willed to heirs and assigns....the accounts are the property and asset of that particular employee.     The accounts grow by wise and conservative management by a board of governors.    We also have private insurance accounts that are like a magic carpet once a medical problem arises.

       "What also needs to be pointed out is that I did not create the prosperity we have in Texas.   Texas benefits from a cumbersome, convoluted, inverted, and outdated Constitution which disperses authourity and power throughout a labyrinth of officials who have less power than some other person down the line no matter how high or low those officials might be on the food chain.

       "The Governor is the weakest of all the Statewide election officials.    He cannot even propose a budget until the State Comptroller of Public Accounts assures that this or that amount of money will be coming into the State Treasury over the next biennium.

        "The State Treasurer has to certify those findings.....it wasn't that long ago that our Treasurer's name was Jesse James....(but a different Jesse James)....and then he has to propose a budget over which he has no control until it is finished being acted upon by the honourable Legislature.    Odd as it might seem to most Yankees the Governor of Texas has less power and/or authourity over governing the budget process than the Speaker of the House of Representatives or the  Lieutenant Governor, who of course is the President of the Senate....and some say of Texas itself.     All OF THESE OFFICIALS ARE REQUIRED TO FORMULATE A BUDGET FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS THAT IS IN BALANCE....BY THE CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE OF TEXAS OF 1876 AS AMENDED.     THERE IS NO SUCH THING IN TEXAS AS A BUDGET SHORTFALL.   There might be an overload of lard in the pre-budget wish list, but only reporters and liberals and other hopelessly ignorant people use the term "Budget Shortfall" when referencing the Texas State Budget.    The last check shows that Texas still has 21,000,000,000 dollars in what is called a "Rainy Day Fund".   
          Since Governor Miriam Amanda "Ma" (Wallace) Ferguson had released large numbers of  convicts....mostly prohibition violator "wets"....but also a significant number of bandits and violent criminals....from Texas prisons during her first term in office, the Pardons and Parole Commission was stripped away from the Governor's office and authourity.  She was elected governor of Texas even though her husband "Pa" Ferguson, had been impeached and convicted from the office during the WWI period.   The Governor's powers were reduced to being able to stay the execution of a condemned person one time for a maximum of 30 days.  So much for the press making fun of George Bush for not commuting Carla Faye Tucker's death sentence.    The Governor cannot overturn a officially upheld decision that has been voted on twice after considerable deliberation and automatically appealled by law to the highest criminal court in the State.

The above was all stuff you could have used....boiled down to brief, Will Rogers style vignettes, or whatever....but, you're done at this point.    You are too young for a senior moment, you might have one of those blood vessel congestions in your brain, or you might have been having a TIA stroke-like attack.   If so we are truly sorry....but your show was done....overcooked.   Stick a fork in it.   And imagine, even with that, Romney finished below you. 

Recommended FEMA funding solution

     The solution to the funding problem for FEMA.....presently being demagogued to death by the White House and the Democrats in the Senate....is to completely defund the stupid program and shut it down.

The above picture is from the Galveston Island area very shortly after the Hurricane of 1900, when that community lost as few as 5,000 to as many as 9,000 souls to the winds and storm surge.   We were just after a War with Spain, a difficult economic Panic, one thing and the other.   There was no FEMA, just a bunch of dumboes who got togther from various agencies....mostly charitable and private....some National Guard mobilized by the governor.... and rebuilt the churches and bawdy houses and saloons and emporiums and banks and schools.
       To review the totality of the entire event check out this official sight from the Galveston County Historical Society....to see how things were and should be again.   http://www.1900storm.com/


Back from the front....or is it the outback

     We drove back up from the Quinta yesterday to address further issues with the father-in-law's situation.   The drive up was uneventful, the bridge line was mercifully non-existent.    Sundays are extreme days for crossing into the United States.   Sometimes the line are two hours long and other times there is little or no wait.

     Things are well and good at our place and the surrounding area.   Considerable rain, a good cropping season for the citrus, sorghum, peppers, corn, and the like.

        The animals are all there, still spoiled, still with their same pecking orders and personalities.

       Perhaps our biggest problem was the fact that our potable water system has cut back on the time of delivery from 4 or 5 hours beginning at one or two PM, starting and maintaining a good flow which begins to weaken during the last hour....to now starting promptly at 3PM with very strong pressure and continuing in that manner for about an hour and fifty minutes.     The same amount of water might be being delivered.   The cistern fills very quickly, but watering the gardens has become something like a scene out of an old Charlie Chaplin movie with the Keystone Cops.

      A lot of things happened during the Old Gringo's time away.   During the next few hours there will be a lot of communication with the family, back and forth, and preliminary planning for exigencies.   During quieter moments efforts will be made to collect and process thoughts and impressions and transfer it all to the OROG community.

El Gringo Viejo

Mr. O'Bama, Truth is Smear...Fight the Smears....?

Dear Mr. O'bama,

      There is a guy with your same surname who says he is president of all 57 States that compose this once great nation.    He was out on the hustings yesterday talking about how the children cannot learn in bad buildings without this and that.   How children have to have new, shovel ready schools and government feeding programs, year 'round.   Otherwise they just can't learn.

      Perhaps you might know him or you might be related to him.   I understand he has blood relatives living in public housing and on stamps in Boston, Massachusetts.

      Hmmmm....Stamps?   Stamps....like tea tax stamps imposed by the British Parliament and King George III...?     OH!  No...nonononono....FOOD STAMPs....How silly of me.   The first Tea Party wasn't about Food Stamps....it was about tea tax stamps...in Boston Harbour...I forgot.  

      I beg your  forgiveness, because I was trained up in primary and secondary in un-airconditioned schools with a leaky roofs and minimal heating.    My mother studied in the hills in Tennessee in even lesser circumstance.   My grandfather had three grades of school in Pennsylvania, taught by a tutor in her home along with three other children.   He learned two trades by apprenticeship and had read the totality of two encyclopedias and the King Jame's Unabridged and a large collection of American and British authors, as well as other selections by non-English language authors, by the age of 15.   My mother's mother taught school in Tennessee with whites, Negroes, and Indians in the same one room school...essentially an antebellum hewn log cabin... six different grades and 13 different children.    All completed their studies later on and had high school diplomas and went on to trades and professions.     The relatives mentioned in this paragraph were all highly literate, eloquent in speech, and possessed marvelous reasoning capacity and handwriting style.

      Some say that guy with your same surname sees schools only as a system for egalitarian indoctrination and the forcing of a bolshevik socialist agenda on a trapped audience.   Some have observed that those who are intended to be destroyed are forced at the point of a gun to pay for the poisoning of the children who will destroy the same people who are paying for the poisoning.

     Oh!   You ARE the same guy....?    With all those relatives from Kenya, DWI, public assistance, and all.... within sight of the original Tea Party?    Wowsers, Batman....I hope you can change that picture....there are a lot of people who hope to have enough audacity to call you what you are, then.

       Please tell us that you are not laughing up your sleeve.   You wouldn't push for school funding and "Save the Teachers" programs just to dump money into the Godzilla Monster National Education Association which doubles as a source of campaign contributions for
Democrat Party socialist initiatives and destroy-America-first programs.   You aren't really that same person are you?   It must be somebody else.   No one would be stupid enough to vote for anyone who would say something as specious and banal as "hope and change" without seeking a definition of what the person saying such a specious and banal slogan meant by such a phrase.


THE O'BAMA PLEDGE OF Allegiance, Recognition, and Commitment

I kinda, like, you know
Recognize that it's a flaggy thing
Of a racist, imperialist country of sorts,
And to admit, what everybody already knows,
That we have been the source of all evil for generations,
Enslaving billions, hating people of colour, poisoning the earth,
Offending Mother Nature and all oppressed people.
We remember,  we lean forward.
Fundamental Transformation forever!
No justice? No Peace!


The New Pledge
There are No Angels, There are No Devils

Heading Back Down...

The Old Gringo heads back down to the Quinta for another stay.   This will be a long stay.   The matters  of health with the father-in-law are as stabilized as they will ever be.   He is at home and resting.

     The issues into which the Old Gringo goes are improved in terms of the bad news and improved in terms of the good news.   We hope for continued improvement on all fronts.    The political season is with us in Mexico as it is in the United States and in Texas.   It seems like yesterday that Felipe Calderon Hinojosa was elected by such a slim margin that the issue had to be resolved by an Electoral Court- supervised, National Recount, as required by the Constitution.    Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, the Conservative candidate, eked out a 100,000 vote victory in a three-way race, barely beating the ultra-leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

      Things might be even more interesting again, says Yogi.   A bill in Congress might still pass, which would require a run-off if no national candidate receives 50% plus one vote of the full electorate.   Mexico has no electoral college, and heretofore, under the rules prescribed, the candidate that would come in first place for Governorships or Presidencies....that candidate won the whole pumpkin.   Technically, for instance, if there were 10 official candidates on the ballot (possible but very improbable) and the leading vote-getter had 20% of the vote, and the other 9 divided up the remaining 80% of the votes, then the winner of the election would have been the fellow with the 20%.

A somewhat presumptious, but official
emblem of the PRI, using the National
Standard as a Party Medium

       There was no need for many years to worry about these mathematical niceties.   The old PRI would always win by overwhelming majorities all the way up into the 1980s.  Nine to one, five to one...such ratios were common.   During the 1980s, however it became a little more dicey.  The 1982 election was not a cake-walk and there were rumours of massive fraud.   The rightwing PAN actually started winning seats in the lower house of the Mexican Congress.   No one had ever heard of or dealt with such an event.

The "escudo" or shield battle emblem of
the Institutional Revolutionary Party

    The next election in 1988 was similar.   Challenges, strong challenges from both the left and the Right assailed the election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the PRI.   Official figures showed him winning with 52% of the vote.   Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of Lazaro the Expropriator, threatened blockages, barricades, and barrages saying that he had been robbed of the Presidency.   Manuel Clouthier of the Conservative PAN declared that he had also been robbed.    The press....especially the leftist international press, declared that Cardenas was obviously the true winner. Their thinking? Mexico has a lot of poor people....Clouthier represents the rich and there are fewer of them....everybody hates the PRI in the middle...so therefore Cardenas actually won the election.

This is the symbol and shield of the National Action Party.

Said to be the "Party of the Rich"it is actually an amalgam

of skilled blue collar workers,small business people, Country

Club rich, and professionals,and rural fundamental Catholics.

Very complicated nationalConventions as one might imagine.

Correlates to the American Republican Party...with very similar

divisions and point of agreement.

      The actual spot recounts of tabulations authourized by the Federal Election Commission for several thousand precinct revealed, however, that Clouthier probably had won the election, pretty much by the same margin as had his party-mate, Felipe Calderon Hinojosa 18 years later.    In any regard, Carlos Salinas de Gortari was declared the winner....and although a  member of the liberal wing of the PRI, he immediately began ruling from the conservative position.....engendering hatred forever among the Freida and Diego people in Mexico and among the Mrs. Mitterrand Nazi/Communist alliance, Vichy people in Europe.   That is why the pro-communist French bankers started the last international bankers' assault of the peso in 1993 at the end of his term.    It is also why they backed the pro-communist "sub-Comandante Marcos's"  Indian "rebellion" in Chiapas, in 1994.   That "revolt" solved all the problems, forever, again.    Marcos, by the way, refers to himself as a "hammer and sickle, Stalinist, Castro, Hugo Chavez classical communist".

Party of the Democratic Revolution Partido de la Revolución Democrática

This is the Democratic Revolutionary PartyEmblem.

This is the extremely violence prone, communist-lite,

 party.   Same solutions.  Tax the rich and then

 imprison them or drive them out of the country.

 Nationalization of all forms of production,

 transportation, and commercial activity.

All group functions of this party are accompanied

by mountains upon mountains of litter and broken

store windows, bus and auto window, and graffiti.

     

       Presently the old, old Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) seems to be gearing up for the tailor's fitting, as they say. But, last time, six years ago, the consensus was firm and done. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had won the election four months before it had taken place. The Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD) was making a list of companies to be expropriated, and what war criminals and oppressors would be brought to trial. The Oppression of the Masses would soon become...unabashedly....the Oppression by the Masses as they said. The only problem was that with the approach of election day, certain irrationalities and arrogance began to show itself. Lopez Obrador eschewed the necessity for submitting himself to participation with the "others" in the televised debates. The reason? The election is already settled. This Al Gore-like attitude did not play well with the literate.

       So, AMLO's ethereal lead did what ethereal leads do so well. In one month's time, he went from a 48% level....ahead of both of his principal opponents by around 20% each....to a 30% level and a fight for his political life. He lost. Even though he cried foul loud and long, the fact is that the votes were essentially counted in public and recounted in public, and like Al Gore before him, with each recount AMLO slid further back. After-election polls showed that virtually all of the PRI votes would have gone to the PAN candidate were there to have been a run-off. That would have left AMLO and the PRD essentially representing a narrow band of ultra-leftist rich and extreme upper-middle class elitist "intellectuals" and a body of the "siempre pobres" (forever poor) who are ever eager to latch onto whatever free crumbs might fall from the table. AMLO tried to maintain himself in position for the nomination this time around of the ultra-leftist PRD, but even they tired of his Fidel and Hugo-like four-hour lectures about secular morality and the evil of being a Gringo and the evil of wealth and America and the evil of religion. He is actively campaigning for the nomination of the minuscule "Party of Labour" , the Partido de Trabajo which is an equally looney but much smaller marxist group.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FINALLY :

        This election will be a referendum on the very real war against the drug trafficking Cartels. Felipe Calderon Hinojosa began this war in earnest. It had been picked at around the edges for years. The number of conspiratorial intrigues is astronomical. There are too many big people involved in the business....too many big politicians....too many Roman Catholic Church people....too many of these, those, and thems to ever confront the problem in any meaningful way.
    BUT!    Felipe Calderon Hinojosa and many, many social scientists and just regular people had come to the realization that the drug trafficking business had become much more than just a bother. It had ceased being something that could be seen in the flashy cars, ridiculous ostentation of 60 room mansions with 5 swimming pools and pet elephants in the front yards...pet tigers....Bentleys....half-witted sluts with $ 1,000,000 body jobs who would always wind up looking like an 87-year old Eleanor Roosevelt by the time they made it to 23 years of age.(...a few even look as bad as Nancy Pelosi during one of her frequent bad-face days.)     People...almost everyone...had looked the other way....tolerated the excesses..."que asi' son" (that's the way they are) and somehow equivilated the drug-trafficking business as an extension of the common everyday corruption that Mexico had lived with from 1917 until nearly the end of the 20th century.

     BUT!    The old classical corruption was typified by an empowered middle or lower level clerk or functionary saying, "Very Well, this is all in order, but there are no official stamps available. You will have to come back in eight days when Sr. Lopez returns.   He is the only one who can put the stamp on". 

    "But, Senorita, I have come in from Yurirria and it was a 14 hour train ride.   I have brought what you said I must the last time I came in and it is extremely difficult now to go back and then return."

     The lower level bureaucrat makes a strained face.."We are very busy here and I am very tired.   It is impossible to make any exceptions.   Come back in eight or ten days.  Next!".

     The petitioner starts to leave and as he reaches the door a nice man comes around the counter and says,"I am between clients.  It is terrible what that girl did to you.   We are all very distressed with the way she treats our fellow citizens.   Look, for 200 pesos, you wait here, and I will take a taxi over to where Lopez is....he's in a bar watching the soccer match, he's not somewhere important.   He's a nobody just like you and me, but his brother is the Congressman for some place up in Chihuahua....he doesn't even live there...but he's the congressman....Imagine.   Lopez carries the stupid little seals with him.   Give me the money, I'll pay him, the taxi, and keep a little for my services and you can be back on the train heading west this afternoon."

     So the hapless citizen sizes up this somewhat corrupt advantage-taker, and decides to fork over the 200 pesos.   The man says, "No, no...outside."

     They go to the "sitio de taxis" on the busy boulevard in downtown Mexico City.   Suit wearing, polished on-call taxi-drivers are reading newspapers, wiping down their cars, gossiping in the midst of the crazy cacophony of traffic, harkers, pedestrians, and general urban madness.   "Luis!  Can you help me for a few minutes?"

     "You need to run to the Bar La Oficina to see Lopez?"

     "Yes, my client is in a hurry to make it back to the train station."

      And so the citizen is left on the sidewalk.   In all the dishonesty and theatre, one wonders if the two hundred pesos will become a "free beer coffee break" for the bureaucrat and the taxi-driver or if there will be some honor at the bottom of the garbage can of humanity.    After twenty minutes, Luis, the taxi, and the bureaucrat come up.   The documents are signed and carry the official seals necessary. The taxi driver has already been paid a generous minimum for a very short drive, Lopez made enough for a few more free beers, the kinder and gentler shake-down artist has his shekels, and the citizen is off to the train station.

      But wait!    The bureaucrat says, "Eh, momento!   Lopez had a toothache.   Take the taxi to the train station....why walk?"   The toothache has reference to the concept of this form of corruption...known as the "mordita" or "mordida" (the little bite), depending upon the context or tense.   If Lopez had a "toothache", it meant that he had decided to take only 50 pesos for doing what he should have done for nothing.   The other fifty pesos?   Well, the gallant corrupt lower bureaucrat "split the difference" and "spread the wealth" by paying for the citizen's "free" ride to the train station with the citizen's same money that had been essentially extorted from him to begin with.    A form of Obamathink.....perfected in Mexico many. many, years before this present batch of marxist bandits came to Washington, D.C.

      That, and variations of that process, is what corruption meant in Mexico.   Sometimes it was for a few pesos.   Sometimes it was for a lot of pesos.   It still goes on, although much diminished from its peaks in the 1972 through 1990 period.    The Cartel people on the other hand, were almost entirely outside of private-public sector debates and relationships.   They offer a deal....it is called Plata o Plomo.   One has the choice between silver or lead.    Private people pay money for protection,  or they take money to do things that are illegal....earning the double reward of being paid and not being killed or not having their daughters raped, tortured, and killed.    Public officials also have the same opportunities to "serve"and the same choice of rewards.

      Felipe Calderon Hinojosa threw into this mix the Army, the Naval Infantry, and an increasingly morally more straight than not Federal Police presence.    The Army in the early 1990s had a bit of a stain with the 65th Regiment of Infantry....also known as the 'narco-batallion'....that served up in the Sonora State area for about 3 years.   Its two commanding generals were taken down in an internal investigation conducted by the Army.    Those two officers were sent to military prison.   One has since died.     Almost all Mexicans and all Americans known by the Old Gringo say that the Army is an institution to be admired in Mexico.  The Naval Infantry has also come into that same range of esteem in the past few years.

      The war that Calderon chose to join Mexico into has been difficult.   Most Americans cannot understand what is going on, not because they are stupid, but because the foreign press does not report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  

        But, Calderon has known.
       After watching his State of Michoacan become a killing field, lorded over by wild-eyed, stoned, crazy killers....turning a decent little dump like Apatzingan, Michoacan into a hell-hole of zombies who worship "Santa Muerte", that all Mexico...even all of North America is at stake.  Obama and his "Justice Department" can play games designed to take down the private sale, possession and use of firearms in America with programs like "Fast and Furious", and Mexican officialdom can play the obligatory "It's America's fault" by saying publicly that they are swamped by private-sale American guns in the hands of the Cartels....but they know the truth and state it privately and with increasing frequency.

      Mexicans also know that the war is not what anybody wants, but a huge majority say, "Pero, que mas nos queda?"   -   What else is left to us?    The period right around April of this year is marked as a turning point....when people began noticing real improvements in social order.   It has been a one step back and two steps forward deal, but the flood of reliable "anonymous denunciatins" has been the cornerstone to the successes of the Mexican military as well as civilian authourity.

     So, while Felipe Calderon Hinojosa cannot run for re-election by Constitutional prohibition, and while he cannot claim victory quite yet concerning this matter, it is very probable that the PAN and their main opponent the PRI will campaign by saying that ".....certain modifications, need t0 be made...."   It is very doubtful that either of these two groups will turn away from the war.     This is because the common Mexican is in favour of the war....in spite of the fact that he does not like the war.    The people like to see the traffickers receive their just rewards.   The press, foreign and domestic, has been stunned by this attitude.    The Mexican press has changed its tune from "combatant neutrality" to "the Military engaged a group of armed thugs".    People go out of their way to complement those in uniform.

      Other gradual withdrawals from subsidies, the continuation of privatization of the Mexican economy, and the gradual shift from organic law to precepts more in line with Common Law are not going to be changed or challenged by either of the two main parties, the PAN or the PRI.    Specifics will be coming out from both Parties.   The Old Gringo will be sifting through positions of the candidates and the parties on the issues and reporting those matters as well as the best and most reliable polling data as we move towards the First Sunday in July, 2012.

Stand by in coming days and weeks for more of the above as well as stories about BeBe the Labrador, the old regular dogs, and more importantly, the cats.   Other social and business matters will be forthcoming as well.    Birds, butterflies, forest animals, rains, flowers, and the like will also grace these pages.

Thanks again for your time and attention.   Your following gives solace to the Old Gringo during these times of problems with the father-in-law.   We have used your blog to wring venom out of the heart and you have been good enough to tolerate our frustrations.
More Later as always.
El Gringo Viejo