Monarch of Mendacity, President of Petulance, King of the Conumdrum

    

Captain Conundrum, vapid Master of the Mendacious 

     If the "big oil companies" take off business expenses from their income tax calculations, that is termed a "subsidy".   But if we allow people whose average income is 180,000 dollars per year to buy a VOLT and take off 7,500 dollars from their final tax liability that is called an "incentive".

     Actually, it is a conundrum constructed as only a bunch of arrogant, socialist control-freaks could do.   "Our EPA standards on coal will necessarily make electricity rates skyrocket in the years to come"....tee-hee...tee-hee-hee.   We really need to move the price of gasoline and diesel to European levels in the next few years.....right?   That's the plan.  So, fleshing this insanity out a little more, the same people who the President damns to Hell at every turn, the "millionaires and billionaires", are the only ones who can afford to buy a 50,000 dollar automobile (including State sales taxes, title, license) and they are the ones who have a 7,500 dollar subsidy to buy an auto with a 30 mile range (if the drivers use luxuries like headlights, ventilation fans, etc.).   This is an oil burning and coal burning vehicle with a battery that cannot be disposed of in any way that is approved by the same EPA that is trying to force people to buy the stupid thing to begin with....WHEW!!!    We're talking about big progress here.    It is more living proof that the White House is presently either an insane asylum or a operations war room under the command of Vladimir Putin, Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Aires, and Maxine Waters.

     This is not to mention that that the actual four billion dollar "subsidy" the President is talking about is directed towards people who have low producing, small wells on their own property.   They have wells that were self-financed or partnered with small oil operators and that commonly produce from one to six barrels of oil per day.  Those are the "big oil companies" who might have a "sawhorse pump" (my parents' name for the pumpjack) bobbing back and forth that you pass by when driving through Luling, Texas.    Those wells belong to Lula Belle McKlaferty and her retarded boy.    Lula and Jimmie have done alright since Jake died, because of the insurance, and because Jake did a clean out on that old well.   It cost a fortune....about 15,000 dollars....but the durned thing was so mudded up that it was bringing up more gypsum and brine than oil.

    About a year before Jake crossed over to be with his parents, he called Jasper Blount, the fellow with the clean out rig, and they pumped a few tons of barite mud into that old well.  Jasper told Jake that it seemed to him the old well had been filling, because they were taking out a lot of black pipe.    Sho'nuff,  when they started up the pumpjack, the fill-tank started taking in two or two and a half barrels of oil a day.    Before it had been two barrels of brine and a lot of mud.    They were lucky if a half barrel a day floated up to the top, and that oil was pretty poor...lots of sulphur content too.

Pumpjack killing flowers and causing
global warming and cooling in Texas

     You know, the folks around Luling kinda figured that Jake was knowin' that he was doin' poorly.   Anyway, Bush and the Republicans passed a bill sayin' that the IRS would allow the small holders to take down the expense of the clean-out the next year.   That meant that Lula Belle and her boy would be in good shape with the tax man for three or four years.   And now look at her.   She's makin' about 150 dollars a day net off'n that old well, price of oil bein' what it is.    I guess that why she has Old Man Sanchez and his kids doin' that roof job on the back of her main house.

And that is the way it really was .... and is ....in the real world.

El Gringo Viejo

WE HAVE THE OSCAR, EMMY, AND NOW..The FLUKIE

St. Fluke
Martyr of the Holy Order of I Buy, You Pay
Pray for us now, and at the time we pay our
taxes.

                     THIS IS A FLUKIE

The New Award Statue is fashioned to look exactly like its namesake, the fluke, which is a trematoda, a lower life form that frequently infects the human body's organs and blood.   It is made from organic fluke slime, complying with EPA demands concerning both Global Warming and Cooling.  It is named in honour of St. Fluke, the Martyr of the
Battle of Georgetown, and the Inquisition by the Flattearthers

And the winner of the first FLUKIE

The perfect image of a "Flukie"

STOP!  LOOK!  and LISTEN!    You Have to Hear This Michigan $1Million Lottery Winner Defend Why She’s Still on Food Stamps

 

"I feel that it's okay because I mean, I have no income and I have bills to pay."

 (She is also under consideration for The (Sir Edmund) Hillary award

     for perfect, narcissistic mendaciousness.  Four first-person pronouns

         in less than a 20 word sentence is pretty good for a FLUKIE)

184 Comments »

     The abovepictured fraudette gains the honour of being the first recipient of the FLUKIE because she embodies all the best of a female who has absolutely everything, but who still feels justified in demanding that the rest of us and and children and grandchildren pay for her food, tennis raquet restringing, monopoly game, veterinarian services, clothes, and/or any and/or everything else, depending upon how she feels at this particular stage of the moon or not....maybe.
     Her particular accomplishment, as many of the OROGs already know, is that she won 1,000,000 dollars in the Michigan lottery (idiot tax), and stupidly took the quick pay alternative, thereby losing over 200,000 dollars.   She then noticed that since she was still unemployed that the dolts at the Michigan Department of Human Refuse had decided to keep sending her money into her "I like to eat free Card".   Only 200/month.   I mean...what's a crummy 200/month?   For a single Flukie?   But, guaranteeing her place in the FLUKIE Hall of Fame, she wisely pointed out "I'm still unemployed".
      Miss Flukie wins during this award cycle for being the best example to approximate the Chutzpah of a Georgetown University political activist demanding that the rest of us and our children and grandchildren should pay for her contraceptives.

     Miss Flukie has already done everything wrong.   She took the quick pay, then bought a house, and of course, a new automobile.   It was probably a VOLT...but who knows.   Perhaps it was a Corvette.    So, within the next four or five months she will be angry that the tax man in Michigan wants 4,000 dollars in real estate taxes, and her credit cards will be maxed out.  Living proof that the lottery really is an idiot tax.

     Good luck, Miss Flukie.   If you had won the money on Wheel of Fortune or Jeapordy we would all have been happy for you....but then again....you couldn't win, because you've proven that your are a dolt and a loser.

El Gringo Viejo
Chairman
American Flukie Academy

We need to point out...

     This is not terribly surprizing.   Bill Maher has come out to defend Rush Limbaugh.   El Gringo Viejo thinks that Maher is something of a pitiable personality who at times chokes on his own unreasonable vitriol.  However, his right to say things and not be punished by hypocritical superiors should at least have been considered before they threw him under the bus for saying the same things on the air that his bosses were saying over their martinis in their super-select saloons in Manhattan.
       The Jew-hating atheists of Jewish extraction...almost all marxists, like Saul Alinsky...hate Yahweh and Jews and Christians and Moslems who get along with Jews.   They are a strange lot.  They too were celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers in those days following 11 September 2001.   El Gringo Viejo hopes, in any regard, that Bill Maher can continue to resist turning to view Sodom or Gomorrah and becoming a pillar of salt.   Come back to your faith, go to a nice conservative synagogue with a good cantor.  Yahweh is patient and Abraham will rejoice in the return of his grandson.   There is hope.
      Bill Maher pointed out that there is something more going on to this story than it might appear (obviously).   He also says that the sponsors withdrawing from Limbaugh are following an unfortunate path.   It is also refreshing to note that the surliness of the martyred Saint Fluke and the hysterical rage and sobbing without tears of the War on Women victims has already begun to stink like dead fish guts.....have they been here three days already?   I thought she was your uncle.

     The Carbonite stock going into collapse is refreshing, as well.   El Gringo Viejo also sent messages of dismay to several of the hypocritical, pinko businesses who sponsor those who attack reason and abandon those who preach reason.
El Gringo Viejo....  

It is done, the Alamo is lost

During these hours the fires ordered by Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had consumed the remains of the Defenders of the Mission of  San Antonio de Valero....known to the locals as..."la capilla de los Alamos....the chapel of the Cottonwoods.

Col. James Bowie

     Only one of the defenders was not thrown onto the common pyre.   Juan Jose Esparza was the only person to be granted permission to be buried in Holy Ground, under Christian Rites.   All the others were immolated.  Including David Crockett.   Esparza was a close friend of James Bowie, the co-commander of the outpost.  Esparza essentially snuck into the compound through a window, bringing his wife and children with him.    That evening or the next day, he took to the defense of his very ill friend, Col. Bowie and bolstered him in the continuing arguments that he had with the childish and arrogant, 28 year old William Barrett Travis.

     Travis was Southern aristrocracy.  He also carried the rank of Lt. Colonel.   He looked down his nose at the sometimes sober Bowie, who was famous as an alligator wrestler, dueler, gambler, and adventurer.   Travis was cold, spoiled, arrogant, and as we say in the South, 'full of himself'.   James Bowie was a man of Eastern Tennessee with considerable life experience in and around Southern Louisiana, especially New Orleans.    He spoke Cherokee, and could read, speak, and write English, Spanish, and French, making him comfortable in any environment...low or high.  All who knew him thought him given to flights of extreme chance in business, and perhaps being fascinated with risk.   People say he invented the Bowie Knife, but that honor actually belonged to his brother Rezin Bowie.

Antonio Lopez de
Santa Anna c. 1869

     When Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna ordered the Defenders burned in a commom pyre like dogs, finally even deciding to throw Bowie in with the rest, Juan Jose Esparza's brother, Francisco, a middle ranking officer in the Mexican force under the command of General Filisola, asked the Supreme Commander for permission to take Esparza's remains to be buried.   That was the only one who received such permission.   There were 17 known Latin Defenders, although there is a probability that some of Captain Juan Seguin's men were never rostered....meaning there may have been as many as 35 to 60 Latins....known as Tejanos.   Impromptu volunteers would not have been out of the question because Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was extremely disliked by the people of Coahuila and Texas, Latin and non-Latin alike.

Lt.Col. William Barret Travis

      Bowie, however, is an interesting element among the Texian Forces.   Some think he was afflicted with tuberculosis, others say he was fighting the residual effects of a bout with typhoid.    Others say that he was struck hard by the death of his fiancee' in Mississippi some years before....and then after a very successfull marriage ...which had financial and emotional depth  into a pre-eminent San Antonio - Monclova - Saltillo based Spanish/Mexican family it all happened again.   A cholera epidemic swept through Texas in 1832, so Bowie sent his wife, children, and several of his in-laws to Monclova to wait out the plague in the healthier, drier, and higher air.    They all died when the cholera broke out there.
    So, there is reasonable speculation that Bowie, although relatively young and very accomplished, decided that he had a better place to be than on this Earth.   From the time after the death of his family, he had taken to drink and, while still gregarious and friendly and popular among the people in and around San Antonio, he was obviously a man with a wounded heart and soul.   He would not be the kind of man one would want in charge of a military garrison.
      So you have Bowie, the Mexicanized fighter for the Constitution of 1824, and Travis who really did not like the Latins and their peculiar brand of Christianity.    Bowie has a Latin friend who essentially comes into the Alamo to die with and for his Anglo friend.   Then we have Travis turning to Captain Juan Seguin, a brilliant Mexican army officer who hated Lopez de Santa Anna to ride out for re-enforcements, because  Seguin was the only one who knew enough about the lay of the land and the populations to be trusted with the job.

Capt. Juan Nepumecino Seguin

      Imagine Captain Juan Seguin riding to find Col. Fannin in order to bring him and his 350 men to the Alamo's defense.    He finds that Fannin's group has been annihilated at Victoria, near the coast, and all were lost.   General Urrea has riden back from a forward scouting to find that lesser officers have ordered the execution of all the prisoners, some 300 men, according to the orders of Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana.   Urrea is furious, because he knows well the rule of "if we do it, then they will do it ten times over".   But, the damage is done, Seguin rides back to San Antonio to find that upon his arrival, the Alamo is fallen, all is lost.
     He continues then to the east, looking for Burleson or Houston or Austin or anyone.   He finds Mrs. Dickenson and her baby and Man James.  He arrives to meet with Samuel Houston and to confirm that Fannin, Bowie, Travis, and Crockett are all gone.   Along with almost 500 regular and irregular militia.   Although he is a trained artilleryist,  Seguin goes on to command the Texian cavalry at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, where he and the Texian forces destroy Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's headquarters command of some 1,800 men, through a Washington-like attack on a Holy Day...a Sunday...21 April 1836.
      Lopez de Santa Anna had brilliantly conducted an Army and Navy attack, 1,000 miles away from his point of origin, moving three large corps of combined military force, cavalry, infantry, and artillery over deserts, mountains, cold, snow, and rain, encountering the enemy on frequent occasion and winning a succession of 24 straight engagements.   In every engagement the Texians had been beaten badly.   And then he camped with his main force on a swampy peninsula, surrounded by water, with no exit.   The carelessness of arrogance.

      Finally consider the Yucatecan Infantry, earlier this morning before sunrise.   They were put at the front of the attack group, attached to the 2nd Batallon de Zapadores, Ingenieros de Combate.   To them it was a form of punishment as Yucatecos, because that province had declared itself allied with the forces supporting the Constitution of 1824.   Lorenzo de Zavala had written that Constitution and Lopez de Santa Anna knew de Zavala was taking refuge in Texas.   So, the Yucatecan soldiers lay in the heavy wet snow that morning before sunrise, then became exasperated with their suffering, finally rose up and began the attack before the bugle call, that would leave 182 - 225 Defenders dead within the next 2 hours, and a minimum of 400 Mexican soldiers dead, and as many as 225 more dying of their wounds over the next two months.
      All of this defense and offense over a place that was neither worth defending nor assailing in military terms.   The brother-in-law of Lopez de Santa Anna, Gen. Perfecto de Cos declared, "Con una victoria mas como el este, perdieremos no  solo la guerra, pero quizas el pais.   (With another victory like this, we should lose not only the war,  but perhaps even the country).

     From an event that lasted for a little less than a month, that involved directly less than 3,000 men, there are a million stories and angles, points of view, and tidbits that will continued to the analysed, talked about, studied, and frequently misunderstood for the next one thousand years.....or more.   To be sure, we shall, and our progeny shall, Remember the Alamo.

Thanks for your attention.   Remember the 6th of March 1836.

El Gringo Viejo

CNBC did something decent

Dr. Juan Jose Suarez Coppel, Director of Petroleos
Mexicanos, Mexico's Oil Monopoly

It is a bit disturbing, but when it happens, El Gringo Viejo has to just accept it and use the information for the benefit of all.  CNBC, the financial affairs network had a good article based on an interview with the Director of Petroleos Mexicanos, Dr. Juan Jose Suarez Coppel.   The Director pointed out that Mexico received 10,000,000 barrels of refined, high test gasoline from EXXON - Mobil, and that Mexico also sends 85% of its oil exports to the United States.   Also, it is understood that EXXON "harvests" a radioactive isotope of some rare metal and that isotope is used as the reactive agent in some kind of MRI process for medical research and treatment.  PEMEX does not claim against that benefit for EXXON, preferring instead to take the preferential pricing for the refined gasoline.

     The 10,000,000 barrels of gasoline, essentially EXXON Supreme 93 octane, is refined from Mexican and other oils.   It used to be, and may still be the case that EXXON refines what is sent to Mexico without any mark-up.   It is essentially wholesale priced out to the original supplier.  The amount of oil that Mexico exports to the United States dwarfs the amounts we receive from all but Canada and Venezuela.   There are months when Mexico's exports actually put them in first place.

     The reporterette asked Dr. Suarez if he thought North America could be self-sufficient and self-contained in terms of oil, gasoline, and natural gas, and he replied in the affirmative.   He pointed out that the reserves of all three countries are "beyond millinial", and the logistical advantage of keeping the resources within the Continent were clearly evident.   Suarez-Coppel heads the giant company, ranked 43rd among all companies on the Planet, and presently producing 105 billion dollars in annual sales.   PEMEX recently, after many years of trying to root out union and other problems in terms of accountability, was awarded the title as the most "transparent" of the megabusinesses in Latin America.   Suarez Coppel was "puzzled" by the EPA and other governmental problems holding up the Canadian - American Keystone Project, and pointed out that Mexico and the United States have been transporting natural gas and oil via pipeline for many decades with no significant or dangerous problems.
      There, in seriousness, have been several "great leaps forward" since during the last three years of Zedillo Ponce de Leon, Fox Quesada, and now Calderon Hinojosa which have resulted in many structural, administrative, and financial improvements in this huge company.

Some new news and some restating of known knowledge.
El Gringo Viejo

And He Did Not Receive a Call From the President of the United States

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhZ3vRiq6TI&feature=related

    El Gringo Viejo recommends this link very strongly if one would like to see what a homeless, five year old boy, selling candies and soft drinks on the streets of Seoul, South Korea can do if he just plogs away and believes in himself enough.   This shows an oriental form of the Susan Boyles  "Got Talent" show, and is well conducted, equally surprizing in the results.

     One also is brought immediately to the question at hand, that if this boy can suddenly walk out in front of 1,000 people in studio, and know that 2,000,000 fellow Koreans are watching him on live television and do this well, then certainly a 30 year old woman with all the privileges in the world must certainly be able to figure out how to buy her own medicines.   Perhaps she would even want this boy to pay his fair share for her pill? 
     As he is being questioned, he informs the panel that he has never had any lessons, although he did try to listen to people at a music school, from outside the windows.  Of course all the women in the audience are crying, and the female judges are sobbing and blubbering...and all for good reason, I imagine.   And yes, El Gringo Viejo is crass enough to draw comparison between two seemingly unrelated events.   And the comparison should be drawn.   Some people have class, others are socialist parasites.

     This young man did gain a little training before his arrival to the contest.   He gained a little more as he advanced into the finals of the competition.   Then he....    No, El Gringo Viejo will let you all find out whether he won the whole thing or not.    A further bit of disclaimer, he did receive a public housing accommodation finally, through the intercession of his first voice coach.   But, remember that in South Korea, much of the housing was "nationalised" after the Korean War, in an effort to rebuild the huge amount of damage that the War had visited upon the people and their houses and properties.   Many people wind up buying their aparments and privatising them legally.   So, it's not like Section 8 or "the projects".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIusYFl3oTo&feature=related

Okay, so you'll know.   Here is the final so that you don't have to look it up.   I know you're busy.
El Gringo Viejo