"I am a Head of State and not a Hoodlum"

Cristina Fernandez de Kirstner

      Sorry, Cris, but if you quack like a hoodlum, and waddle like a demagog, and look like an old barroom Frida-commie....then Star Kist doesn't want you.    You will appreciate that El Gringo Viejo has used the above picture, that wore out 36 airbrushes and 6 silk screens twenty years ago, so that your mother could still be proud of you.   We all appreciate and remember your good work with the  communist guerilla movement in the 1970s.

Old Bolshies never die, they just turn into

sludge and hide in the Brea Tar Pits in California

and wait for the establishment of Ut0pia.

      The fact is that when you pushed the bill through the Argentine Congress authorising the expropriation of the Spanish oil company Repsol, you became more of what you are.   The confiscation of the private pensions, the demagoging of the Falkland Islands matter, the confiscation of duly entrusted foreign assets....all pretty much smell like a petty little tin-horn marxist dictator taking his/her people down the road to serfdom and the glory of the Cuban Revolutionary success for the little people.   You will continue to play the role of Evita and Isabel, but you are just another broken down old lefty, driving your country into the swamp and blaming the Spaniards, George Bush, American Imperialism, Global Warming, and Margaret Thatcher for all your ills.    You may be a head of state, but you are certainly also a hoodlum.

     But, Cristi, remember what the book says, when you hear the bells, ask not for whom the bells toll, they toll for you.

Thanks for your attention.

El Gringo Viejo

Cumbersome. Change for the sake of change!

Time Warner Cable suddenly advises that we must register with an entirely new package of name, emails, passwords, and so forth and that we must do it in this manner and before such and such a date.  While attempting to do as instructed, because the Gringo Viejo is a compliant man, we are notified at each juncture, at every fill-in box,  that our old email not only does not exist, and never existed, but it is also invalid.    The same goes for the password, the same goes for our zip code, address, and every question queried.

    So, we chat up a helper, but he can neither read, write, or understand the English language.   Literally.   Either that or he is on dope, drunk, mentally defective, or playing some kind of game (nobody could be that stupid).

    So we call the 800 number, and receive adequate service, although the first girl sounds like she is reading from a textbook of her first English course.    She was not Indian, Pakistani, or Arab.   She was Mexican, and doing a creditable job of speaking English, but she could not plug in the context of the problem into the reflex of the answer.   She needed to sit in on conversations for a couple of months.   She was not bad, or neglectful, or incompetent like the first....dolt.   She seemed very bright and very civilised, but just not tested under fire.   She might have been talking from a call centre in Guadalajara.    When I began responding in Spanish, she became very flustered and tried to "really, really try" to solve my problem, but her voice was breaking from nerves by that point and she pawned me off to a different division after consulting with her supervisor.

Larry, The Cable Guy

     Finally, Norton the Nerd came on and quickly referred me to the department that can actually control resetting passwords and security questions, etc.   That wound me up with Larry, the Cable Guy and he took care of everything.

     But!   Why did Time Warner have to change anything?  Why does Blogger.com and/or Google have to "improve" formats or design modules or anything?   Why?  Porquoi?  Porque?   Aaaaarrrrgggghh!

 In any regard:

Thanks to Norton, Larry, and the Mexican girl for trying and/or succeeding to put the train back on the tracks for El Gringo Viejo, thanks for honest and informed effort.    The first guy, though,  Mr. Vick the Chat Room Guy, really needs to look into a job as a hermit....somewhere a long, long ways from El Gringo Viejo.
Leaving for a bit.   All is well.  Much rain both here and down at our place in the Sierra Madre.   More tomorrow!
El Gringo Viejo

Transferred from the Web Page for the Quinta

THIS IS HOW OUR ADVISORY LOOKS AFTER BEING UPDATED DURING THIS PERIOD.   WE POST A FREQUENTLY UPDATED STATEMENT OF GENERAL CONDITIONS FOR PEOPLE WHO REVIEW OUR WEB PAGE, WHICH IS ACTUALLY QUITE A COMFORTABLE LITTLE HIDING PLACE ON THE WEB, AKIN TO LITERARY COMFORT FOOD.  ALL OROGs CAN ACCESS THE WEB SITE FOR OUR QUINTA HERE ON THE BLOG.   ALL VISITORS WELCOME.

ooo000OOO000ooo

Security Issues?

(updated, 15 April 2012)

Uppermost in the minds of all reasonable people is the issue of basic security. First of all, local, domestic, common criminal security problems remain all but nil. No change. Everything dull and boring. Jose got drunk down at the deposito de cerveza and cussed everybody out. Maria bonked Juan over the head with a skillet for flirting with Juanita at the wake for Tio Fidencio. Rosendo stole a case of Corona empties from his brother and took them down to redeem and buy some beer. Things like that , once every two or three months. Our section of the Municipio (County) of Hidalgo, Tamaulipas is almost entirely rural, but it is heavily populated. In our section (delegacion) the census tracts total up to about 49,000 folks in a 500 square mile area.

We reiterate the following:

A combination of vigourous military response and presence, a forensic approach that is a quantum improvement, and a judicial/penal process that is more open and forceful are all coming into focus in such a way that it could signal a change in jurisprudence of historical dimension. Recent episodes of tranquility have given the impression that the "War of the Cartels" is either over or won.      Neither is the case.        BUT, the Cartels have been severely debilitated by their own in-fighting, and more especially by what has proven to be an exceptionally capable Army and Naval Infantry. Much of the activity now being reported is being committed by dispersed and disorganised elements of Cartels that have been badly battered.

     During the recent "Easter shopping season" as it is referred to in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, a relatively strong peso and the much improved perceived security situation along the highways and byways, filled the bridges, then the parking lots of every shopping center....(several score) from Mission - McAllen, to Brownsville.    Bridge wait lines approached 4 hours, well beyond any previous record.   Sales records, sometimes surpassing even the Christmas period, were set in many retail outlets.   It was as we had pointed out in one of our late March, 2012 blog entries, that the princesses from San Pedro de Garza Garcia would be flooding over by unprecedented numbers.   My own return on Easter Sunday was dull, boring, and uneventful as usual.   I had to return on an emergency because my wife had undergone an emergency appendectomy early on Sunday morning.   Luckily, the bridge traffick was down, and mainly southbound by that time anyway, while El Gringo Viejo was northbound, and hoping for the best.

     As an aside, the next day, travelling back to the hospital, two large, white, new Ford pick-ups roared around traffic under the overpass at Mission, Texas's main street intersection with the Expressway US83, running every available red light, in very heavy traffic, turning left off the main street and onto the west bound access lanes for the expressway.   Each pick-up had one co-pilot who was shooting what appeared to be 9mm semi-automatics at each other.   It's the first time I have witnessed such a thing, and it had to happen in Texas.    In any regard,

Much remains to be done, but it can be said at this point that much has been accomplished and much is being accomplished even as we write these words.

     WE URGE INTERESTED PARTIES TO VISIT PRIVATOURING.BLOGSPOT.COM FOR RELEVANT ARTICLES    CONCERNING THESE AND OTHER ISSUES.

Nobody Myth'is Me Anymore - Military Fact and Myth and Reality

     As a pompous curmudgeon, El Gringo Viejo grouses about errors in grammar and spelling, demanding accuracy in each literary venue....while reserving to himself the right to spell words as he wishes  (potatoe, tomatoe), or adopting archaic forms of spelling, or fading in and out of English and American approaches to spelling and structure.    Part of that comes from having been raised on the Old Book of Common Prayer that came to me in the early 1950s from a place four hundred years before.   Some of it comes from standing by my man, Dan Quayle, when he was ridiculed by fools for urging a child to change the spelling of the word "potato" to the more archaic or British form, "potatoe".    Much of it, however, is just because El Gringo Viejo is a pompous curmudgeon and last born.    Therefore he is endowed with the right to be self-indulgent and judgemental of others.

     There is one place where his self-righteous wrath will flame forth in earnest, however, and that is in the area of the supercilious condemnation of the military when leftists, communists, and other anti-American interest like to strut their hypocritical stuff.    To mix up a good marble cake, some of this also applies to the Mexican military, so stand by and I shall try to be brief.

     The anti-Americans love to point out Abu Ghraib as a glowing example of what a horrid institution the American military is.   It must be a horrid institution because it is American, right?   And look, a terrible American Army sergeant has gone out and just shot up a bunch of poor Afghanis.    And is it not a monstrous tragedy that the Army would go out of its way to burn books that are sacred to the Afghanis?   What horror.

     Little matter that the picture most often associated with the issue of Abu Ghraib was actually taken by Saddam Hussein's thugs to show family members of the person being tortured how he was being dealt with shortly before he was dropped into an electrified cauldron.   The antics of our dumboes who were briefly in charge of the prison were not inspired human pursuits, but this author would warn all present that if such actions were offencive to the reader, not to presence the locker room of any sport before or after game or practise, or of most sororities and fraternities on or near any campus during the early parts of the first semester of any academic year.

     And, yes, it is meant now, not a long time ago when people were meanies.   Every now and then we are treated to some depravity or another that occurs on some campus or another in our fair Nation, but in the main....many, many, many rites and rituals, most of them absurd, are carried out upon the unfortunate inductees to this or that club or organisation annually.

There are no physical or emotional injuries, as dread changes over to a feeling of being included, after the poor inductee passes through whatever curtain has been placed before him/her.

      As far as burning sacred books, the act was done as part of an order by a consulting imam who advised the Army that if the prisoners had used the books by writing upon them, especially for any singular personal use of purpose, the books had to be destroyed by fire.  Always misreported.   Even by FOX News.



One of the Cliff Buddhas
picture from 1976

     While the act of firing intentionally upon non-combatants, specifically for the purpose of killing or wounding them is reprehensible, there has yet to be any press recognition of the fact that the people in the area affected have been increasingly allowing Taliban murderers to use the cover of the Afghani familial hovels built around the base.   The cut-throat throw-backs to the 6th Century gain entrance by giving favours, or by intimidating, the occupants of the hovels that are located only a few hundred yards from the compound's edge.   Insurgents had been using the hovels as snipers' nests for weeks before the incident by Sergeant Bales.
    Once a guy has a head injury, and a foot blown off in combat, and is then returned to duty (why?), it is somewhat predictable that he might decide to do something foolish after a few beers.     But, instead of being a stupid error on the part of the Army Medical Corps, it is  put forth as a great example of how horrid Americans are and America is.  Little matter that the Taliban's form of respect for other religions is to immediately blow up the ancient Cliff Buddhas that, to any intelligent person,  were philosophically and religiously important, and an artistic and construction marvel (In a half-sane nation, could one even imagine the money, progress, and gladness of honest pursuit produced by maintaining the site for touristic, religious, and/or academic purposes?).    Or, that it is a national sport in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and such places to play the time honoured sport of "Let's go blow up the other sect's mosque!"   Another popular sport is "Shoot the pilgrims and blow up their daughters".   The best one, however, is the bravery of driving a Nissan Sentra packed withy 900 pounds of explosives into a funereal procession.   These sports have managed to kill more Iraqis and Afghanis than the efforts of the entire American military by several times over.

     The greatest killer of children in Afghanistan and Iran and Iraq are the madmen rulers and ayatollahs who have killed millions during their wars and purges.   Even the Russians could not match their depravity.   Really nice folks.

      WHICH brings me to the main topic.   El Gringo Viejo also monitors and lives inside of the events in Mexico.  He witnesses the calls for "peace" and the "marches for peace" and the recriminations by the leftists against the present administration because of its offencive against the cartel vermin.    It should be pointed out that some of the "Marches" are innocent of any motive beyond a call for sanity and peace.   Some are out and out demands to surrender Mexico to something far, far worse than organised crime.    Marches of the latter sort, such as around Apatzingan, Michoacan and a few other places have become markedly fewer in recent months.

     Calderon, to his credit, knows that if something quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it really, really is The Devil.  He knows that his popularity is neither here nor there.   He must defend, establish, and re-establish Mexico.   And, now the issue is drawing to something of a close.   All those who stated over the last two or three years that Mexico is a failed state were fools.   Mexico was a failed state from the time that the Constitution of 1917 began to be fully implemented from 1924 through about 1940.   That is because that Constitution was largely an organic law document, not a constitution, and was solidly based upon an anti-religious, socialist imperative.   It was a prescription for failure.

Porfirio Diaz Mori
President of Mexico, 1875 - 1912

      Mexico lanquished in a penumbric, zombie-like stumble from the administrations of Miquel Aleman (1946 - 1952) through and including the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988 - 1994).    This period was one of successes and disasters, like a very successful Olympics Summer Games (1968), followed by the 12 An~os Tragicos of the regimen of the essentially marxist Luis Echeverria Alvarez (1970 - 1976) and his successor, the equally stupid and arrogant marxist Jose Lopez Portillo (1976 - 1982).   These latter two were probably the most famously corrupt presidents in the history of Mexico, including the notorious Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and the ruthless but effective Porfirio Diaz.    Diaz was more of a self-entitled strongman than a corrupt person, but he was an autocrat who probably did have Mexico's interest above his own as he saw the issue.
     Coming back closer to the present, Carlos Salinas is much maligned, but he did begin to slay many of the Constitutional sacred cows that had kept Mexico mired in a statist private - public  "partnership" of industry and commerce, and the automatic corruption of having only the "official" labour union, the Confederation de Trabajadores Mexicanos....a sure ingredient required even for a "soft totalitarianism".     Full, measured, and stready conservative reform really went on a roll after the heated elections of 1994, and two conservative candidates actually won about 80 percent of the vote. It was determined that Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon of the old, official government party had barely won the election, and thus began the PRI's best moments.   Those moments included increased privatisation and the opening of the election process up so as to make future elections as substantially less predictable.  Those best moments  also, thankfully, brought us the end of the automatic hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional. 
     Two successive conservative party (PAN) administrations have brought Mexico dangerously close to being a place that still cannot be described!  So, in a way, with all the change, Mexico remains true to its motto..."Ay! Mexico!  Como tu, no hay dos! (Mexico! That such as thou art, there are not two!).


     But this returns us to the use of the military....the Ejercito (Army) and the Infantria Naval (Marines).    It was ploughed into the disorders brought on by contentions between the several drug trafficking cartels.   IT WAS NOT A WAR THAT WAS INITIATED IN ANY WAY BY MEXICAN AUTHORITY, military or civilian.  It was thrusted upon Mexico by madmen who fought their battles on the streets, who slaughtered whole and extended families of opposing cartel members, who sequestered innocents so as to extract ransom to finance their operations when they had suffered losses, who terrorised and forced people with no way to resist to do the cartels' wishes.
      The cultural plague was thrust upon Mexico, during the 1990s and gradually, like an aching tooth becoming worse and worse in the period around 2005 -  2006, when it became obvious that there was no way to avoid going to the dentist.
      During this time, the Mexican military, the most highly regarded institution in Mexico, was enjoying upgrading, re-equipping, advanced training and general overall improvement like most public facilities, institutions, and organisations in Mexico under the new, less corrupt, Conservative governments.    The military especially prospered because it had always been, more or less, very honest....at least to a 97% level.    So it started off from a higher position, and forged on to greater "purity" and professionalism.
      There were three or four glaring, structural breakdowns, such as the corrupt 65th Battalion, a fairly small unit, (for a batallion) operating in northern Sonora State below Arizona.   During the 1990s and early 2000s, it was associated with collaboration with cartels and with American drug traffickers.   Suddenly, one fine day, the two commanding general officers were vacuumed up and court martialed.   One has since died while incarcerated, and the other remains in the main military prison, under semi-solitary confinement.   All in all, there are slightly less than 700 prisoners, post-courts martial, in this facility.   About 10% are officers, the rest are non-commissioned officers and lower ranking. 
All of the original deserter sergeants who trained in special operations at Fort Bragg in the early 1990s, and became the nucleus of the notorious ZETA group, have been killed or incarcerated (almost all are dead).
      This figure of 700 is for a military, naval and army,  that is numbering an estimated 240,000 active effective soldiers and sailors.   For the term of issue, since the year 2000, there have been 315,000 (app) combat and combat support personnel in honourable service to the Flag.  This note:   In Mexico, the air force is still integrated into the Army.
       Complete casualty numbers are not released, but by summing up the military's own reports and observations made by reliable civilian observers, it is estimated that the military has lost 420, plus or minus, killed in combat or combat support during the past 12 years.   The great majority of those have been in the last five years.   Wounded warriors are harder to tabulate, but reasonable estimates seem to centre around 3,000 requiring more than three days' hospitalisation.

       The point behind all of this is that the enemy we have fought and the enemy the Mexican military has fought has no RULES OF ENGAGEMENT.    They have no scruples, no rules, no laws, no procedures, no sensibility concerning non-combatants, no concern beyond anything but self....the almighty, narcissistic, all-consuming self....

      But effete, impudent Mexican leftists and effete, impudent American leftists trundle forth to moan about how the two military organisations are "causing" the violence, the civilian deaths and injuries, and are performing in a authoritarian and brutal way.....primarily because, according to theme,  the personnel of those military groupings simply like to hurt people and brutalise them.
     It is presumed that they prefer the imams and Taliban and cartel people who take children and dismember them and deliver the pieces back to the parents and the village from whence the children were kidnapped....just to show them who is in charge.    By the hundreds upon thousands these activities have been conducted...and similar activities....in South America (less now in Colombia)...in Mexico and Central America....in almost every large city in America.....throughout Africa in the Christian/Muslim conflict zone, almost always by Muslim nutcases....and throughout Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and all such places that practise the fundamentalist rule of Sharia law.    There are no courts-martial for those perpetrators.  Nay, there are only rewards and congratulations for blowing a woman's head off at mid-field during a soccer game while the gathered crowd watches....after all,  the woman had worn a green bhurka on Wednesday....what else were we to do with her?

     FINALLY,  so that all OROGs know, a reliable polling firm releases the results a few days ago.   No press agency picks it up....not even FOX....and there are two questions of interest.  One is "Do you like the war against the cartels that is being conducted by the Calderon Administration?"    The answers  come back, 74% no..... 15% yes, the rest have never heard of Calderon.
     The other question is, "Should Calderon stop the military offensive against the cartels?"   The answers come back,  70% no.....20%yes, and the rest are slumped over the bar...it's late, almost noon already.\

      In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, I think the reasonable elements within the American populace recognise that Obama and his administration has bumbled and stumbled into a mess of their own making by announcing withdrawal dates and by ever-more-restrictive rules of combat.   Obama, who loathes the military and American might as do the Clintons, is surprized that his fellow America-hating brethren have not taken the signal that we are leaving the field back to the slime who wish to remain mired in their Satanic, 6th Century sludge field, growing poppies and beheading heretics.    It is time to leave and let them just kill each other.  The sooner the world is rid of them, the better.
     In the case of Mexico, most of it is worth saving, and Calderon is doing what is necessary, like the Orkin Man, to get rid of the counter-cultural vermin.    This last "shopping season" of the two "Holy Weeks" associated with the Feast of the Resurrection, saw a quadrupling of the flood of Mexican shoppers.   The Reason?    The roads are 99.999% safe....the military is winning....busses are full....traffick is up....Wait a second...It's stopped raining....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea2EuozaJ7s

Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem.   Pray for final victory in Mexico.  Light a candle for hour men at arms, and for the Mexican military if you would.
El Gringo Viejo 

Not Exactly George and Martha

We were so pleased to note that Golfcourse Barry and Suitcase Michelle have trundled into the comfortable amniotic confines of the Mainstream Media to condemn one of the comments, of hundreds upon thousands made daily by the marxist machine, this time by an obscure, but very highly placed National Socialist Democrat operative.

     Their "apologies", as usual, follow the same tired formula that marxists always use.  "If someone took offence for something I have said, then I am truly sorry."    That is usually followed by a caveat, such as,"It still does not change the fact that Republicans want women to be tied to the bed post, denied contraception, and Negroes to be hanging from every tree, as we all know".

     Beyond being "sorry" that someone took offence, instead of "I apologise for the pain and suffering that my stupidly chosen words and works have caused.   It is my fault, and I should not have done it.  I recognise that only one person is wrong in this issue, and (he, she, it) is I."

     But, Michelle of a thousand aeroplane rides, does take the ridiculous blather statements even one step better.  "All women deserve respect."    Unless of course, they are pigs with lipstick that are referred to in the most basal, disgusting ways possible.....or unless someone wants to use her daughter for a convenient "knocked-up" joke.    Now, that's not really disrespect, that's just having a little joke among our closest  three or four million fellow National Socialists.   Heee, heee!

     But, Suitcase Michelle, your blather is banal to the extreme.   El Gringo Viejo points out in terms the left can understand thusly:

           The crack whore who is on complete public assistance and has 4 illegitimate babies a la stairstep, none of whom who have had a  diaper changed in two days, does not deserve my respect.
          The "clean" waitress who pays for child care and works 10 hours per day, and who pays taxes, does not take food stamps, volunteers to work the extra banquet, returns the lost purses and wallets, and gardens up her nice little rental cottage, does deserve my respect.   She does deserve my respect.

           The crack whore does not respect the waitress, and El Gringo Viejo does not respect the crack whore.   He does recognise, however, that she is the daughter of Lucifer and the socialist welfare system, which creates multi-generational depravity and dependency into which she was born.   Father, forgive some, for they could never imagine what wounds they do to themselves or others.

          And, Madame Suitcase Michelle,  She of the Extra Airplanes because I am too good and important to be delayed for three hours from my vacation time,  we can try something like the three lesbians who go into a lesbian saloon in a fancy, superior, more sophistacted urban environment that red-staters cannot understand, and drag out another girl, and haul her to a previously selected place where she is brutalised, beaten, sex-toyed, and then finally driven over to a convenient Dempster Dumpster and thrown in like a piece of garbage. 

         Here in the red-state zone.....those girls who would do that to a friend are not worthy of my respect just because they are women.   Not all women, men, children or anyone is worthy of any respect unless it is earned.   Mrs. Romney, Mrs. Palin, Mrs. Bachmann, and scores of millions of other women have earned my respect.   You, Suitcase Michelle, have not.
       And, Golfcourse Barry, Mrs. Romney does not "seem" to be a "nice person".   She is a nice person.   Your wife is the kind of person who takes a job that pays 300,000 dollars per year and has a desk with no telephone, no Rolodex, no computer, no nothing in some hospital.   She is that kind of horrid person who tells America one Summer's night, that "....for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of America".....solely on the basis of a racial measure.   And, Golfcourse Barry, that is for a person who is definitely running to be a "Black President" when he has not one drop of  Negro blood that is derived from the American Negro experience.    He never had his Jim Limber moments, his Frederick Douglass moment, his Willy Mays or Jackie Robinson moment, his Nat King Cole moment, his Booker Tecumseh Washington moment....ever...once....in his chromosomes.   Golfcourse Barry has never suffered any of the cheap tripe that American Negroes had to go through, and he never did anything to justify any especial reward.   Golfcourse Barry is unaccomplished, a paper-tiger of the lowest sort, who has to have people ghostwrite his "profound" tomes about his favourite topic....he, himself.
    Golfcourse Barry is an insulting, low-class slacker who could not even hold a job in the carnival, because he is so over-disposed to mendacity, to sloth, and to being  smarmy white-trash like most communists and other extreme leftists.    He would even lie about his mother's insurance coverage.   About his dead mother.   Saints preserve us.

      Facts are facts.   The Democrat National Socialist Labour Party invented the "contraception issue" in order to say that the Republicans have a "War on Women", it rode the Limbaugh slut-statement into the dust, and then continued to do their victory lap, all the all the while spitting on women who are either Republican, conservative, or (gasp) both.    This time, thankfully, the Democrat - Socialists  rode their horse named "Hubris" straight into the muscilage machine.
      Therefore, and finally, Suitcase Michelle and Golfcourse Barry....There are women and there are women.   There are Negroes and there are Negroes.   There are White folks and there are White folks.   There are Japanese folks and there are Japanese folks.
       You are the ones who say there are women's issues and assume that you know what those issues are.   We are the ones who say that women's issues are largely, if not exactly, the same as the issues all people face.    To us there is no such thing as "Hispanic Issues"....because the Latins among us, are us.   There is scant or no difference in the issues that affect all peoples' lives.   It is people like you and Harry Reid who think that it is impossible for an "Hispanic" to reasonably vote Republican.  It is you people who are the racists.
       You are the ones who want a large dependent, consumer class.   We are the ones who want a large, independently self-supporting skilled and professional producer class, based upon normalcy, natural law, and family organisation.   We fear the man who comes to the door and says, "I'm from the Government, and I am here to help you"....We fear him because he is you, Golfcourse Barry.


As always, thanks to all the OROGs for their patience and indulgence.   Diana continues to compose, and we are looking forward to a return to normalcy for her soon.
El Gringo Viejo

Required Reading and Review for OROGs

This will require about two or three minutes.   Very solid, very understandable charts and graphs done for literate people by literate people.  Two or three minutes, promise!

http://blog.american.com/2011/12/the-7-most-illuminating-economic-charts-of-2011/

This was distilled from the site of The Anglican Curmudgeon, an immensely readable, reliable, and refreshing refuge for our ships during these stormy tymes.

El Gringo Viejo