Just to Pass the Time - a lamentation

      There were two things that rattled around in El Gringo Viejo's brain...a lot of hollow area there...and both had to do with water, tragedy, and a couple of names that were the same but different.  Ed FitzGerald.    One is Edmund FitzGerald, the ill-fated iron-ore carrier that went down in heavy seas one November not long ago on Lake Superior (Gitchigumee) with the loss of all hands (29 souls aboard).   The other is Edward FitzGerald who translated and studied the works of Omar Khayyam to the benefit of European and New World readers of fine things.  Below is a study of an old Persian wise man with his light of truth, his ''magic carpet'' of inspiration, and the epithet below, that seems strangely appropriate for this issue about the Malaysian Boeing 777.  Truly, as of yet, the Earth knows naught, and the Ocean mourns what is a massive loss of souls, we hope now in a better place.
Perhaps, who knows?  They might be on an island somewhere.   Below is the Anthem by Gordon Lightfoot about the ore carrier.  His song is almost a journalistic account of the disaster.  The people in that part of the Lake and along that transport route will never forget...not the event...nor the song, so long as there are those who heard that incredible announcement on Detroit radio stations that night, 10 November 1975.  "We regret to announce that authorities are confirming that the Iron-ore carrier, the Edmund Fitzgerald has sunk to-night, with the loss of all hands.  There are no survivors." 

The Earth could not answer nor the Seas that Mourn


(From the Rubaiyat through Omar Khayyam to Edward FitzGerald)
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     When the Malay airliner went missing El Gringo Viejo told his better three-quarters that there was something fishy about the whole thing.   He should have written it down at that time and followed up on the event, hour-by-hour.  But, she and I know that my pontificating and posturing had been done and probabilities expressed, etc.

An almost perpetual oil leak from
HMS Royal Oak, sunk in the English
Channel by a German kliegmariner
U-boat on the English coast in 1939.
HMS Royal Oak is still leaking, as
are scores of other craft from the
various wars and storms.

     My notion was that if  it had continued along the general proximity of the coast of Viet Nam, then it would have been seen by literally hundreds of thousands of villagers.  When the oil slicks were shown on television, I knew that those slicks had nothing to do with any plane crash.   They were, in all probability, small-medium fishing boats or little paquet craft that sank in a storm or other difficulty during their delivery of goods and groceries to the village stores.  Those vehicles will leak oil for years, and they are great places for fishing.  Their leaking bones  are quickly identifiable even to a novice such as El Gringo Viejo.

     At this point every piece of flotsam and jetsam will be associated with the plane crash and the possibility of finding "survivors" on some isolated island like the Bounty's crew grass-shacking up on Pitcairn in the middle of the Pacific Ocean after their mutiny against Captain Bligh.  Our calculations quickly determined that the plane could have been conducted to a place, not quite as far as the Gobi, but certainly into the Mu La Desert which is familiar territory to the Weegers, a pan Arab - Mongolian - Ind0-European race of people who inhabit some of the starker areas of Sinkaing Province of Red China.   A one-shot chance at landing a 777 Boeing could be attempted at Sri Lanka, although headwinds would have had to been nil, due to the increased kerosene consumption required in flying at 4,000 feet in such an aircraft.  A reasonably skilled pilot could do it, with a bit of luck.





Captain Christian and Captain Bligh wish

 each other a Bon Voyage as HMS Bounty

 heads for Pitcairn Island and the recently

 retired Captain and his crew begin their

 Indian Ocean odyssey.



    

     Although it does not fit well into a movie script, people like El Zorro, for instance, flew into the Laos - Cambodia extra-theatrical zone of American combat and surveillance back in the heaviest time of action of the Viet Nam War.  There are areas where one can imagine that the never ending green never ends, forever.  In those areas there are large clearings that have been done by various economic and military interests.   Even the Thais and the French had widely-known "secret facilities" in those precincts.  The Brits, Aussies, and Americans had essentially rough and ready air bases.



       The Weegers (yes, we know, Uighuers - for their dialect of Turkish language used in Western China)  would have all of those places that could handle a 777 in any semblance of a "controlled crash" (all landings are controlled crash landings, it is just that some are done better than others)....from which most if not all parties could ostensibly survive.   It would not be a miracle...remarkable maybe, but the authorities in the Vatican would not have to burn any midnight oil trying to figure out if there had been anything beyond natural human skill and a bit of good luck to take a plane down in some well chosen site and have all survive.  No miracles to test or gather evidence to prove and /or disprove.

    I keep going back to Sri Lanka, in any regard, because it has a real live place to put 14 wheels and 370,000 pounds of airplane down with less luck and more skill and experience.   And the fact is that the 777 in its various configurations is known to be the long distance champion in all commercial air service.

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 Our shoe/boot size is 14AAA, or as my mother would tell the other ladies, "My last son has very aristocratic feet".  Perhaps it is because of that that I feel an affinity to my fellow Sasquatch,  the 777.

More later.

El Gringo Viejo

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Portent of Victory - Please Republican RINOs, stay out of the way

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     If El Gringo Viejo's ego is too overly large, then this request is certainly too much for the pompous, self-impressed  RINOs who think that the Republican Party is 99.90% Them and 0.10% Others, composed of the 60,000,000 small proprietors, skilled blue-collar and technical people, the professionals, the artisans, the housewives / home-schoolers, the snake-handlers and foot-washers, Paladins and saddle-tramps, curmudgeons, and cat-lovers and lovers of the lesser animals.

    Any nominal Republicans who have ever said, "Well, what we need to do is keep the good parts of the Obama Socialised Medicine Initiative (OSMI) and tweek  the bad parts so that it can be both fair and functional.".....must choose between being spayed AND neutered and sent to a "home", or the iceberg cruise remedy for old Eskimoe women.

The Good Ship Obamacare undergoes a bit of
tweaking during its lift-off, providing over
500 Billion minorities, the Children, and the
LGEBWZODH community with free health.
Kathleen Sibilius called it a
"very successful send-off....a
 real blast."

     As we have stated here 42,540 times, it is absolutely, totally mandatory that the entire OSMI be overturned, rescinded, repealed, and abolished.  Letter, word, sentence, paragraph, page, article, front cover and rear.  All of it.  One hundred (100) per cent.   It will have meant over 9,337 acres of forests in the United States and Canada were destroyed for nothing.   It will somewhat denigrate the sacrifices that (Sir Edmund) Hillary Rodham Corkscrew has made for hundreds of years,  for the women, and especially for the children, and most especially for the minorities for whom "she ain't no way tired".....and everything.  Especially everything.  Oh! The Humanity......!

)

      And think of everything that Barry Soetoro wanted to give to the Middle Class....for free.....and the subsidies....free money....free....when the millionaires and billionaires have so much and will not share with the hungry, SSI, SS - disability, AFDC, Section 8, Lone Star Carded, Head Started, WIC, Medicaided....and school breakfasted, lunched, snacked, summer mealed!   Oh! the Humanity!!

      It is simply not fair.   The government really should give people things for free.  For instance, where are my birth control pills?

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    But we diverge, as usual.   What the Forces of the Cosmos hath put together, please....let no RINOs rend asunder.  For every one moderate that the RINO can convince to lower himself to vote for a Republican, we can deliver three hairdressers, four teachers, two mechanics, three snake handler/foot washer mix-breeds...and about nine other motley Tea Party nutters.

    For every "Hispanic" that the country clubbers can cajole into voting Republican because we can "give" him/her "more"....we can deliver 10 Latins, powered under their own steam,  who consider themselves Americans first...or Texans first.... and do not want anything given except a clear path to his/her self-derived prosperity and spiritual fruition!!

     So, esteemed RINOs,  please stay out of the way.   Keep your official Gerald Ford "Whip Inflation Now" buttons in the back of the third drawer of the highboy....try not to pop with pride as you drive past the hundreds of empty Bob Dole ADA hankeydap parking spaces that are never used except by food stampers, who usually can leave a few pampers behind as a momento, or the Romney proposal of "fixing Obamacare" so that it can look more like the disaster in Massachusetts.  John McCain...well...he speaks for himself, and I honour his service.   Even voted for him....and Palin.  Voted for all of them actually.   Tired of anaemia as a political diet.  No more tofu...no more skimmed milk....no more lite beer.    The battle is joined.   The Sumpter shots have been fired,  and the Democrat front bencher was defeated by a Republican back bencher in the Florida US House of Representatives by-election.   Why?   Because he was a better candidate with the better ground game.

More Later!

El Gringo Viejo

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Fifth Amendment begins its march to the Constitutional Convention - The first shoe drops in Georgia

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/03/first_state_passes_article_v_convention_of_states_resolution.html

     This is our last effort to try to post this.   It has strangely been taken down twice now.  Click onto the linkage to review what El Zorro and Mark Levin and others have been proposing for considerable time now.

     That proposal is a Constitutional Convention designed to limit the powers of the Central government to those matters previously designated in the Constitution, and the distribution of the powers mentioned in 10th Amendment back to people or the Several States as described in said Amendment.   This proposal also calls for limits on the terms of service for people serving in the legislative precincts of the Central government's congress.

      The movement has started to take concrete form with the passage of this act in the Georgia legislature.   My understanding is that these matters, according to the 5th Amendment, are affairs of each State's legislature, House of Burgesses, or the legislative authority as composed in that State.  It is not to be an affair of the judiciary or the executive of those States.

     There will be a fairly quick following of suit by the Southern States, and probably even a majority of the Mid-Western States.  From there it will be up to the remainder to determine if they wish to be people in control of their own destinies or if they genuinely want to continue on the path to national socialism, with its attendant welfare-state dependency, crony capitalism, and labour union thuggery.

    That said, please check onto the link.  We need to understand that if the Republicans take over the Senate during the coming November elections, and then take office in January of 2015 and begin talking about "fixing" and "improving" the Obama Socialised Medicine Initiative (OSMI) there will be an explosion of ire equivalent to the period just before the outbreak of the War Between the States.  At that point there will be massive movement, reinforcing an already growing disposition among large numbers of mostly sane Texas favouring withdrawal from the present Union.

     This was an original thought by El Zorro several years ago, and the action has begun.  There are undoubtedly several score thousands of cousins of El Zorro and Mark Levin.  The path that they point out is one of very few correct paths remaining to us, and El Gringo Viejo endorses it, equally as the re-establishment of the Republic of Texas.  Study and commit.

El Gringo Viejo

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This deals with us directly - El Salvador in the balance

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     The best information that we can seem to come up with at this point is that the run-off election in El Salvador has devolved into a photo finish of the worst sort.  Both my side and the other are likely to not be able to restrain themselves from becoming offensive when in fact, the nation has acted in an indiscernible manner.

     The expression "kissed your sister" is apropos, except it might be "kicked your sister" when all is said and done.  Our guy, Norman Quijano , the previous mayor of San Salvador, the teeming capital where 45% of all Salvadoran live, has run a surprisingly effective campaign as the standard bearer of the Partido ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacional - National Republican Alliance).  His final count from yesterday's balloting comes in 7,000 votes shy of his opponent's total, out of over 3,000,000 casted.  That puts the margin somewhere in the zone of 50.1% to 49.9%.   There are still several score thousands of votes to come trickling in, and then there will be a Constitutionally required recount due to the closeness the race.   We understand that they have a 2% automatic recount law, and usually this will mean a ballot by ballot count.

     Why is any of this important?   Geo-political relationships.  Texas is close to Mexico is close to El Salvador.   To which the reasonable observer says, "So?"   The reason is simple enough.  The race devolved into a classic contest between a conservative free-enterpriser and an old lefty/commie "guerrilla freedom fighter" member of the Faribundo Marti frente de Liberacion Nacional. (FMLN) the communist group that fought a scorched earth war against almost everybody from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s.  The name of the presidential candidate for the FMLN is Salvador Ceren Sanchez, who old Latin-America watchers will recall as being one of the lower ranking members of the armed command leadership.  He was, like all the directorate, committed, dedicated, merciless, and fully willing to kill, burn, slash, and destroy any and all in the effort to establish a communist bulkhead on continental American soil.  He is peripherally associated with the assassination of the Roman Catholic Bishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero, although it is "proved, accepted, established, and written in stone" that Romero was killed by a "death squad" under the control of Roberto D'Aubuisson, the founder of the ARENA Party.   It is presumed, still, by people who did not wish to demagogue the death of the Archbishop, that a guerrilla band from the FMLN had entered the small hospital chapel where the Archbishop was celebrating a somewhat private mass, and shot him down as he was consecrating the elements for communion.   It was pointed out frequently by those on the Right that only one group could possibly benefit by murdering the Archbishop, who was an open ally of the communist FMLN movement.  The group to benefit?  The FMLN.   He was a benefactor of the stridently "teologia de liberacion" nutters such as the Mary Knoll Sisters, and other such "clericals", and his "murder by the Government" would provoke a sympathy wave back to the side of the FMLN.   It was and is a common communist and national socialist tactic.
     At the moment when the FMLN began to falter in the "street approval" so necessary to communist movements, suddenly Romero was shot, and the obvious explanation was sold by the very left-leaning world press, and there was no coming back.  Any reasonable talk about the issue was blocked by the same kind of people who think that the United Nations is a valid institution and that Barry Soetoro's Nobel Peace prise was earned by a diligent servant.  Suggesting that communist murderers killed the Archbishop is like saying, "Let us review a few aspects of the personal and not very private life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."   It is just not ......"nice".     We do not talk about Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vince Foster...it is not ...."nice".   We cannot say that "Archbishop Tutu" sounds like a mentally retarded rock when he talks, and apparently knows nothing or less about ecclesiastical matters or the Faith of his collar....but we cannot...because it is not ...."nice".
     Even Bush operatives in the second term Reagan Administration worked to have the murder of Romero condemned as a plot by the "rightwing death squads of ARENA.  Just get it over with...let the 'people' eat cake."  Regular folks and normal, sane people in El Salvador just shook their heads and said, "Get it over with"....and in the first elections after the FMLN was forced to admit its defeat, the ARENA won an overwhelming victory. electing  the much-maligned D'Aubuisson as President.

Norman Quijano, ARENA Presidential
 Candidate for El Salvador
ex-mayor of San Salvador

    In any regard, during the past several years the FMLN party has steadily aligned itself with the equivalent of Obama's ACORN in the United States, that being the dreaded Mara Salvatrucha MS XIII.  The Mara Salvatrucha member's induction includes the murder of his mother.  They have been put into control of "high density oppressed peoples' neighbourhoods in the cities and towns of El Salvador, a small leap, in that they were already controlling all the criminal activity.   So that everyone will feel better to-night when the sun sets, the Mara Salvatrucha has operative gangs, organised and out extorting, raiding, drive-by-shooting, trafficking, in every city of over 250,000 in the United States and Canada.

    So, out of Honduras and El Salvador arrives the worst of the worst of the worst type of gangbangers.  The union of the FMLN and the MS XIII, hard-line socialism and total criminality, can mean nothing good for Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvadore, eastern Mexico and points north.  The MS XIII specialises in stealing, pilfering, robbing, and a bit of home invasion against the "common Gringo", and they are  expert enforcers in terms of killing, brutalising, extorting, and terrorising Mexicans, Central Americans, and Latins in general.   In Mexico, they had aligned with the  Zeta cartel group for a bit, but they are now pretty much  an independent group.  They are males with absolutely no souls and they are the worst thing that can happen to normal people.  They are presently the "community organisers" for the bulk of the "poor and oppressed" in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.


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Below you can review a bit of the Associated Press coverage.  All material below this line is attributed to AP, and it is evaluated as superior to their normal analysis, in that a least a modicum of effort has been given to maintain even handed  standards         

El Salvador presidential runoff election too close to call

Finest margin separates conservative former mayor from one-time Marxist guerrilla in presidential poll

 
• Email    

• Associated Press in San Salvador

          10 March 2014 

Presidential candidate Salvador Sanchez Ceren has claimed victory in the election despite the tight margin. Photograph: Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media

El Salvador's presidential runoff election has been declared too close to call by electoral authorities, with just a 0.2% margin separating a one-time Marxist guerrilla and the conservative former mayor of the country's capital.

The razor-thin margin led to competing claims of victroy from the two rival candidates.

Norman Quijano, the candidate of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), said his party was on "a war footing" and vowed "to fight with our lives, if necessary" to defend what he claimed was his victory.

But preliminary returns from nearly all polling stations showed him a few thousands votes behind Salvador Sanchez Ceren, the leftist candidate of the governing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The margin of just under 7,000 votes was just over 0.2% of the approximately 3m ballots cast.

Sanchez Ceren, who also claimed to have won, said: "The men and women of El Salvador are the ones who decide, and if you don't accept the result, you are violating the will of the people.

"I say to my adversary, to his party, that my administration will welcome them with open arms, so that together we can build a new country."

The result surprised many considering that opinion polls in the weeks leading up to the election had put Quijano, the former mayor of San Salvador, 10 to 18 percentage points behind Sanchez Ceren.

The president of El Salvador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal, Eugenio Chicas, said the race was "extremely tight" and said neither candidate could claim victory.

"This tribunal orders neither party to declare itself the winner, in light of results that are so close that only the final count can decide," Chicas said, adding that "the margin is so close that we ask for prudence". He said the final vote count would begin on Monday.

Quijano alleged fraud, and called on the army to play a role, a statement that carries ominous echoes in a country where 76,000 people died in a civil warthat pitted the army against leftist rebels over 12 years.

"We are not going to allow Venezuelan-style fraud, in the style of Chavez and Maduro," Quijano said, referring to the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, and his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro. "We have our own recount, which shows we won."

Quijano criticised the electoral tribunal, saying it "sold out to the dictatorship", and that "the armed forces are ready to make democracy".

The country's military leaders made no comment on the elections.

Sanchez Ceren, 69, had been widely expected to become the first true guerrilla to lead this Central American nation. Outgoing president Mauricio Funes, who won the presidency from Arena in 2009, was a journalist who was sympathetic to the FMLN rebels during the civil war but was never a guerrilla.

Sanchez Ceren campaigned on a promise to deepen the outgoing government's popular social programmes and govern as a moderate. He said he envisioned ruling like the Uruguayan president, Jose Mujica, also a former guerrilla who formed an inclusive government.

Quijano, 67, accused the former guerrilla of appearing to want to lead the country like Venezuela's Chávez, and he warned of a return of communism. He also promised to crack down on rising gang violence.

Sanchez Ceren was a rebel commander who helped negotiate the 1992 peace accords that ended El Salvador's civil war, in which the US supported the government against the FMLN to prevent communism from spreading in Latin America.

The results of this election might take a couple or three days, perhaps more.  To lose El Salvador into the Sandanista - Maduro - Castro - Morales - Kirchnere orbit would be very lamentable.  We shall keep our fingers crossed and our candles lit.

El Gringo Viejo

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A Swan Song from Trudeau?

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    While we have some trepidation in celebrating the absence of Trudeau comic strip from the newspapers of America, it is well that it be gone.  The nearly hysterical obsession with the horrors of normalcy for so long is probably the major cause of Winter Depression in the cultured of the bolshie - national socialist elites of the Hamptons.
    We hope, in any regard, that this leave is due to a lack of demand for the dull, unimaginative content, albeit with creditable artwork, and not due to any tragedy or illness of Mr. Trudeau or friend or family member.






Sometimes the little things can mean a lot.

We are grateful to whatever controller of the fates allowed us this respite from this icon of the comic section.

El Gringo Viejo has not read Doonesbury for over 20 years.   This shows the value of the comic strip, perhaps, and that the value must be to some account. And, perhaps, it shows the obstinance of EGV, because he just stopped reading anything that was so inaccurate in terms of its styling and presentation of personalities and issues.

Once again, hoping for the personal best for Mr. Trudeau, we retire from the field to remove and burnish our armour.

El Gringo Viejo

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The Promise to Pay

The following was a contribution to a private blog (for Vietnam veterans only):

“I dropped out of Texas A&M (Corps of Cadets) in 1965 to enlist in the Air Force. While in tech school at Lowry AFB, weapons control systems F4 Phantoms, I volunteered for Vietnam. At that time most of the kids my age had crew cuts and the worst thing they did was drink beer. I was, and still am, a proud American and I still believe we went into Southeast Asia for noble reasons. I volunteered for a second tour while in Vietnam and am glad I did. But after 22 months in the war I came home to a much different America. I am ashamed of the majority of people my age who ran away or hid. When I came back to the world at SeaTac I could not believe the trashy people who were there to "greet" us. I am a disabled vet with peripheral neuropathy from exposure to dioxin and apnea from a blow to the head and face. I have PTSD but thought it was made up until the VA started to explain and compensate for it. I did not claim PTSD for compensation but I probably should have. I still do not function in social situations and think often about my time in Vietnam. There I had buddies and I knew what I was doing. Coming home changed my life and outlook on Americans. The government is the perpetrator of our terrible treatment and the people who ran away are now those in charge. Too many drugs and free sex back then... those are the ones indoctrinating our kids, now. In 2009, the VA came through for me and I cannot really complain in any way with the treatment and compensation but it took me 43 years to get help.     It was mostly my fault because I was in denial, and looked on it all as help for some one who didn't need and help. Now our military officers are infiltrated and indoctrinated with progressives who are ruining it. The government is tearing the military and the VA apart. We have to fight tooth and nail to keep the government from cutting VA services and funding.      Our Constitution is being distorted. I do not know how we can get back the America I knew. I read a book, "The Liberty Amendments" by Mark Levin that is very informative and shows a way we can strengthen the Constitution to fix the damage that has been done by the progressives. I highly recommend it. Sorry for the dissertation but this is one of the only ways I can vent. God bless all you guys who were there with me and those who did not make it back.

You have the veteran's permission to reprint

           El Zorro