Sunday 26 May 2013

Making Contact: Brain beginning to function

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   The last few days have been a bit of a drag on the old carcass, but we are finally  beginning to hit on all three of the remaining cylinders.  There was a pleasant meeting with an old school chum of El Gringo Viejo's daughter.  He is a recently retired ranking sergeant who served both in Iraq and Afghanistan....multiple deployments, as it is stated. He was taken out of his beloved mobile artillery / armoured cavalry / Patton-tanker-man area of service and redeployed as a unit commander of a very forward base unit.....on multiple redeployments.
 
     He was and is a good and faithful soldier.   Patriotic and committed.   But.....politically correct mandates, orders, re-orientations became too much for this professional warrior.   Heavily decorated warrior.   The feminisation and homosexualisation  became, increasingly,  the mission, the tactic, the strategy, the existence, and the purpose of the United States Army.    Coupled with the notion that the Fort Hood Massacre is, to this day, classified as "workplace violence", it seems to me to be useless to risk further exposure in Afghanistan to a people who are inferior morally, emotionally, and in almost every other way except for a willingness to be proudly backwards and insane and filthy.
 
    Perhaps this story is being told throughout small, medium, and large town America, on an hourly and daily and weekly basis.   This particular soldier gave up his interest in serving further after suffering the torture of one thousand small cuts.   These little slits and small slashes were not caused by the enemies of our flag.   They were administered daily by the hierarchy's insistence in fighting, what to them, are the more important wars than the one composed of the various stated military missions called THE WAR ON TERROR.
 
 
 
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     Rightwing and Leftwing crazies....and as you all know El Gringo Viejo might be slightly lumped into one of those categories....howl and point at the sky, clutching their chests....that the War on Terror is a Bilderberger / Prescott / Council on Foreign Relations / Communist / World Bank plot to re-order free or nearly free societies into human anthills carrying wealth to the 1% control group.
 
     Steel Buildings Don't Burn!!   Bush Did It!!  Putin and the Mountbattens and the Japanese Royal Family Did It!!  The American Big Bankers allied with the Red Chinese Did It!!
 
     The problem with the logic of all these labyrinthine constructs is that the speakers pre-suppose that there is an established Control Group with an agenda that marches along, completely as planned, and it is an irresistible force.  That is why everything is hopeless.  So remember to write your Congressman so that we can stop "them"
     The illogic is palpable.   It states as fact that there are large conspiracies that have total control of everything.  And further, they are trying to establish control of everything.   Which of course begs the question:   If they control everything then why do they have to establish control over anything?
 
     It is like the fellow who spoke very convincingly on overnight radio back in the 1980s about how George Herbert Walker Bush flew over to Paris to meet with the ayatollahs ruling Persia at the time to make certain that they would keep the American hostages they had illegally detained until after the 1980 elections.   This would be done to help guarantee the election victory for Ronald Reagan against James Earl Carter.  George H.W. Bush even flew the SR-71 himself, with the help of a co-pilot, because Bush had been a combat pilot "ace" during WWII.
 
    Of course, a pilot of a lumbering Avenger torpedoe bomber could never achieve the title "ace", but who cares about facts?  Bush was, at one point, the youngest combat aviator in the Navy's service and he was awarded the Navy's Distinguished  Flying Cross.   He flew 58 combat missions, almost all against moderate to heavy resistance.
     And, of course, why did the ayatollahs wait until Reagan was sworn in to release the American hostages.   Why did they not just let them go after the election?   They were thinking, perhaps with Reagan, once in charge of the little red button, that Teheran would look like the "new Nagasaki" in the next twenty minutes.
 
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ALL OF MY POINTLESS COMMENTARY IS NEITHER HERE NOR THERE.   The fact is, if "they" have complete control, they would not have to lie at every turn. Think of the number of lies that were told during the establishment of the Obama National Socialised Medicine Initiative.  They called it "The Affordable Care Act"....and awarded exemptions by the barrelful to their friends in low places.   All we would have to do to find out what is in the Act is to pass the Act first.
 
     Think of Hillary Rodham's stunningly phony testimony and her arrogant statement, "What difference does it make?" As if she had been forced to condescend to the point of condescension in order to condescend to respond in a reasonable way to a reasonable question, asked to her by a nobody....a little person....Sheeeesh and oy veh!
 
 
    The massive and stunning voter fraud pulled off by the IRS against the dull, common, regular work-a-day people who carry their own load and a little more....the Tea Party People....is essentially an Act of War against the common citizen.  The failure to account in any way for the heavy-handed, illegal excesses of the Fast and Furious debacle, the useless flying of Hillary Rodham around the world are offensive enough......Arab Spring indeed.    One of the characteristics of the totalitarian tactic is to be doing what you are accusing your  opponent of being "up to".    We remember well the incessant drumbeat of the Democrats....'voter suppression against minorities'...and the  absurd assertion that the presentation of a photo/thumbprint ID would somehow "intimidate" any or some significant grouping of people into not voting.
 
    The notion that the Democrat establishment, the Obsolete Press, the Peoples' Republic of Massachusetts, and the President...and the entire reality show that is the Democrat National Socialist Labour Party can foist off Aunt Zietuni and Uncle Omar  on the taxpayer is nothing less than an Act of War against the common man.   It is aggravated by a War Crime which now includes the IRS approving a non-profit classification for Barry Soetoro's brother...who is an imam....of a mosque in Kenya.   And the approval was retroactive...almost three years....and approved in less than two months.  And the mosque is not built, nor is it in operation as a mosque, and it is primarily staffed by Barry Soetoro's sisters-in-law....all 16 of them.
 
       I mean, why don't we whip-up a television situation-comedy, soap-opera, reality-game-show about an American president with no academic record except for diplomas, no publications, no classmates, no professors running to the microphones to say, "....I knew Barry when"....and see if we could sell it.  I guess if we could throw in the President's brother being a Kenyan imam, with a non-existent mosque in Kenya, doing non-existent religious/charitable work in Kenya, and that imam has 10 or 15 wives in Kenya, it would be more believable.    It would be more believable if the first pilot showed the imam in the IRS office, sweatin' to the kweshtuns, like any good Kenyan.  And then have a half-naked Beth Midler, playing the part of BeyoncĂ©, come out and declare, "Your IRS application has been reviewed and approved, and we have also approved your request for three years of retroactive effectivity of your mosque in Kenya, and the employment of your 'more than ten but fewer than fifty' wives as outreach workers and Sunday School teachers.  Your refund has been sent electronically to your account in Nairobi, the little bank, by your mosque.  You're good to go!  Good luck!"  (fade to tattered Che' Guevara t-shirt)
 
     What could the reviews be?   Pressure-cooker blowingly hilarious?   Throat-slittingly outrageous?   Work-place violently brilliant?  Suicide-vestingly intriquing?   Where did the real world go?  Why doesn't the Kenyan imam brother take Auntie Zietuni and Uncle Omar back to Kenya and "help" them?
El Gringo Viejo
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Friday 24 May 2013

Back in Town, Catching my Breath

  A few of the Flamboyan trees around our little place.   While there were numerous of these varieties of the class of trees known as jacarandas in really full bloom throughout the region, ours had only begun to bloom in earnest about three days ago. 
     The name for this tree in the English is Royal Ponciana, and there is a smaller type with the name Texas Poniciana or Pride of Barbados.   At one time, long ago, we thought that this particular type of tree was found only in the tropical lowlands and wetter mountainous settings  of the Mexican north and east.  But,  in fact, it is found far and wide, in Brazil, throughout the Caribbean, and almost anywhere in Central America, and the northern, and lower elevations of northern South America.

     The "regular" jacarandas come out earlier in the year, usually with an effusion of blue or lavender  blossoms that can cover the entire tree.   In the west of Mexico, jacarandas can be found with white flowers.  All of them, the flamboyan included, are famous for having the long sword-like, seed-pod.


here at our gate, one
can note a "reluctant"
Flamboyan that has just
begun its bloom, while
the one across  the street
is well on the was to
full bloom
     To the left,  is just another nice example of the famous old standby, the bouganivilla, which has been well established at the Quinta, with seven different colours being present on our grounds.

    To-morrow we can talk a little more about things that are going on in Mexico, in Washington, D.C.  and elsewhere.   My reaction to most of what is going on moves my inclination ever closer to dedicating my efforts more towards the benevolent withdrawal of Texas from the American Union.

More Later.
El Gringo Viejo
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Wednesday 15 May 2013

Heading South

   The hour cometh and now is, that El Gringo Viejo will be heading down to our little adobe hideaway.   It is a pleasant thing to have rain, and the folks who are our neighbours here in Texas, coming to tell me that their ranch near Cerralvo, Nuevo Leon...somewhat mid-way between McAllen and Monterrey, received over 7 inches of rain during the past few days.
     Cerralvo is a city that during the colonial period of Spain in the Americas, was a capital of an area including most if not all of what is the Republic of Texas.   It is in a spring-fed pocket of good soil, near mountains that were store houses of lead and silver, and blessed with good ranching land for cattle, sheep, and goats.  Our neighbour, however, also wanted to confess to me that he did not believe me when I told him that in a contest of violence, the one who is controlled and knows how to use his weapons will almost always win the encounter. 
     I told our neighbour that during dark moments in the early days of what would finally become a war that good would beat bad.   It was my certain belief that the conflict between, good and bad, some kind of law against no kind of law, and against the cancer of quick riches as opposed to the development of merited wealth, the Mexican military would win.
 
     He declared that it had been months since they had had to shudder when the swaggering trash would drive by their ranch in their stolen, late model vehicles...sometimes Escalades, Grand Cherokees, and other types of SUVs.   They had not had to walk past them in Cerralvo  when doing basic shopping for the rancho.   The cockroaches had all but taken over the little hotel on the main plaza....as sort of an office for a couple of months....leaving it all but a ruin when they finally took flight at hearing from their "falcons" that the Army was approaching in force to occupy the city.
     What broke the back of the cartel people was that the Army and Naval Infantry came and, in a strategic sense, stayed.  Always hunkered down here, and on patrol there, always collecting information, and always choosing the place for armed encounter.    But my neighbour made an unfortunate mistake, thanking me for giving him the optimism to stay the course.  The fact is, of course, that I should thank him...because it is this nature of person who makes the quality of the populace worth defending.
 
     He was also advised by El Gringo Viejo that the War is in no wise over.   It never will be, actually.   But the excesses, the wantonness  and depravity, the making of so much money that causes so much death and destruction....by people who will never live to see their grandchildren or perhaps even produce them.....has been reduced very, very markedly.   Like the fellow said, when asked by a Gringo, "How come Ciudad Juarez became so peaceful all of a sudden?"
     The Mexican fellow, who lived in Chihuahua and had to travel frequently to the border city of Juarez, thought for a moment, then answered," Well, Sen~or, eet ees thees way,  They jus' ran out of pipples to keel."  Sometimes the best answer is the simplest one.
 
In any regard, we are going down to relieve Alvaro and to do a bit of engineering an re-engineering of the gardens.   Plus we shall be having clients in....another sign of the improving times....and we understand that it has rained a little to quite a bit almost every day for the last week and a half.   Lots of Birds.
 
We shall return sometime before the end of the month, but only for a week or so.   We are taking a client down to Mexico City and this should be interesting...in that I haven't been there for a few years....on purpose...but it is wondrous place to visit for a few days.
 
More later, perhaps before we leave in the morning
El Gringo Viejo
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While We Are At It

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    Would it be at all possible, now that there seems to be a few cracks in the wall, to have the Border Patrol, or BFI, or somebody go and pick up Auntie Zietuni and Uncle Omar Onyango to be removed to the detention and await their deportation.....tomorrow?
 
    Their possessions should be removed because they have lived, supported to a level they could never have comprehended in their homeland, by invading the systems of public welfare and assistance that is provided to slugs, dregs, and bums who want somebody to buy their lottery tickets, food, medical,  shelter, electricity, and manicures and hair extenders for them.
 
     Auntie Zietuni and Uncle Omar are illegal aliens and orders of deportation have been issued twice for each of them.  Highly paid attorneys from powerful and well connected firms have managed to obtain delays and/or appeals....while these two....who are actually furious that welfare and other public support has been insufficient for their liking....continue to rack up payments that are well on their way to 2,000,000 USD since their combined arrival in this horrid country that does not give enough to the immigrants who are the onliest ones who make this country great. 

    Please do your own research on this.   Zietuni Obama and Omar Onyango Obama.  Google them up....it is much worse than your humble servant states it here.
 
Thanks for your time and attention.
El Gringo Viejo
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Sorry about the sudden changes!

    We ask your indulgence.   The OROG will of course have noticed that our format has taken on the appearance of  an early Soviet government publication.  This is because we were trying to make a couple of small adjustments, and learned fairly quickly that google systems that worked at one time, now do not function.  The service that makes homespun blogger site so easy to set up have made other changes that do not permit a person to return to from whence he has arrived.
 
    It is improbable that the repairs can be made before our departure to-morrow for our little mud hut on the side of the Sierra Madre Oriental.   We shall continue to work during the day on this, as time allows, but my technical ability is not such that I feel willing to open up the HTML code and perform surgery.   So this will probably take time....or we possibly will construct our own, made-from-scratch blog platform.
 
El Gringo Viejo 
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Tuesday 14 May 2013

Drifting in the Land of Memory and Adventure

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Suddenly....after dozing off, listening to the rain...finally....my favourite messenger can be heard.  His mount is striking hard ground still, in spite of the bit of rain. It has been almost four months since any significant water has been squeezed out of the skies.

    El Gringo Viejo bolts up and strides, fairly quickly for a geezer, to the gallery outside the front door. It is, to be sure, El Zorro but he is on a different mission....riding up briefly and reining Diablo to a tippy-toe stop.  He hands me his letter of commentary, declaring, "This is to set the record straighter!" He smiled, saluted, and whirled off, shouting, "....the tax people are shaking down the hacendados and even some of the vaqueros.   El Capitan says that they must pay another 25% because of the new medical coverage!  And he told everyone it would be cheaper in the long run.....!!  Wish me luck!!"
     In just a few seconds it was as always...as if he had just disappeared into the darkening dusk and the oak motts at the base of the hills. I unfolded the letter and saved the envelope back inside, turn up the lantern to fight the darkness a bit, and commenced to read.  It was an order of revision and extension of El Gringo Viejo's previous post concerning having been the lowest ranking  White House Staffer in history....lower than an intern.   But,  as usual, there are things said in this fleshing out of those days that should be said.
     It is well that two curmudgeons allow folks to know that each of us has seen it all...or almost all....and we have even made some of it happen to folks....and some folks made it  happened at us.   But, there is not a lot of fiction involved in these recountings, if any.
 
TO WIT:
 
                    
As to the first part, El Gringo Viejo is pseudo correct.
 
     As the lowest ranking White House Staffer, or technically shortly thereafter, he was assigned to the Office of Economic Opportunity’s (OEO) field office in Edinburg, Texas called the “Associated City County Economic Development Corporation (a non-profit)” of the Lower Rio Grande Valley (easier said the “ACCEDC”).  In the summer of 1971 El Zorro (pseudonym) was discharged from active duty and returned to civilian life to pursue his BA degree in the Government curriculum offered at Pan American University, now University of Texas at Pan American.
     While working at the community centre at PAU and as an intern working at the Hidalgo County Judge’s office to supplement the GI Bill for education he was approached by El Gringo regarding a not-so-minor position at the ACCEDC to participate in a “low cost housing project” study.  The actual purpose of the study was not to justify and deploy low cost housing for the below-the-poverty-line families but rather to justify massive funding.  Here is where El Gringo Viejo would arbitrarily be the second lowest ranking White House Staffer.  To be perfectly honest, El Zorro is not sure El Gringo was at that time still a White House Staffer, but he was the Republican plant at the ACCEDC with token credibility.  His position was third in command behind the Executive Director, Eliseo Sandoval and the Vice Executive Director, Luis Ramirez.
     So he did have considerable influence but, being inserted into the agency by a higher power against the will of the directors, he had to fight for every smidgeon of respectability.  That being said he made an mid-level position for a low-income housing-study technician.  The irony is that El Gringo and El Zorro very diligently prepared a study and justified actual low cost housing which, if implemented, would have actually been a worthwhile project that was affordable and practical.  The problem with the study is that it was too good and would not bring in the massive amount of federal funding that the agency had anticipated.  The Director and his sidekick thought that by hiring a "low level" employee with no background or expertise in the area of low cost housing they could just throw numbers on the wall with the uneducated and impertinent documentation and the money would come down.  Ultimately, at a final conference where El Gringo and El Zorro presented and argued for  the results of their study, El Zorro was interrupted by Luis Ramirez with, “Don’t you ever shut up?”.  With that El Zorro walked out of the conference room and the ACCEDC never to return.   El Gringo Viejo has much more insight into the workings and purposes of the OEO and the ACCEDC but this is an example of the attitudes and ideology of the elites.  They have all the money but dish out small amounts to the recipients.  When the projects fail the reasons given are “not enough funding” while the administrators still wear their sharkskin suits, Italian shoes, drive expensive luxury cars, live in the finest neighborhoods and look down their noses at the “proles”.
 
      El Zorro has been on the fringes of this inbred socialist system from the President’s staff on down to the lowest local level.  El Gringo Viejo and El Zorro (before they were El Gringo and El Zorro respectively) were conversationally acquainted to John Tower, Lloyd Bentsen,  locally in the Rio Grande Valley.   Later supporting George Bush the first, El Zorro offering insight to Marlin Fitzwater * (Vice-President George H. W. Bush's campaign in 1988) as El Gringo advised George H. W. Bush.  As El Zorro made a personal and professional change, El Gringo has kept his right index finger on the button and his right ear on the ground (having been slammed on the left side of his head with a water sprinkler by a low life… sorry for the divergence…) but he is and has been a great inspiration for me.  His journal is worth every word, whether you agree or not, you cannot refute the logic and truths.
 
Z
 
 
*minor addenda:
 
    El Zorro was an "on-call"  security-cleared "point-man" who could be used with confidence both as a partisan and as a secure contact in terms of moral, criminal, and psychological examinations to handle events such as a formal round of meetings, public and private, which in this event cited by El Zorro, included the Vice-President of the United States (soon to be President of same).   In truth, El Zorro's security clearance was higher than El Gringo Viejo's.
    My task was to make sure that the people to be closest both physically and in terms of socio-political situations...would be the most adept intellectually.  I had to turn in a list of names, and none could know the other, and I had to name the "lead-dog" of the group of names.   Modesty, perhaps keeps El Zorro from pointing out that in this particular case he was the chauffeur of Marlin Fitzwater, the Vice-President's press co-ordinator, spokesman, and closest advisor in those days.  He had the most "face time".
  During this particular episode El Zorro had to advise Marlin very closely, and very frankly, about the  stupid Elephant Cannibalism that the Hidalgo County and much of South Texas Republican Ranch was practicing.  El Gringo Viejo's problem was that he was a well-known rightwing crazy and El Zorro, although the same rightwinger, was/is more controlled and understated.    Far better he than I to orient Marlin, and to show him the various land mines to negotiate.  I had little or no contact with anyone except at the hotel....Mr. Fitzwater and the Vice-President were very complementary.   Fitzwater stayed up, we talked at the bar for a bit, both of us drinking tonic and lemon juice, and after 16 or 18 minutes we parted company.  That was the entirety of my time with the XO...and I had spent less time with the CO.   
    El Zorro did three calendar days of work...all of this stuff is unpaid, and worked magic without detracting from the Star.   In those moments, the governor of Texas was a Country Club Republican like GWH Bush, but had booked an event in a very large venue to purposefully interfere with the Vice-President's Campaign....and the VP (soon to be President) was a member of the same Texas  Country Club Republican faction!!!
     We had to really watch out because LLoyd Bentsen was from McAllen - Mission.  He was also fluent in Spanish and was a powerful, adored, and despised political personality throughout South Texas and the Houston Big Business arena. He had been put on the ballot by the Democrats as the Vice-Presidential nominee.  When all was said and done, Bush duplicated, almost, Reagan's 44% of the Latino vote...and much of that was due to holding the skilled, blue-collar, professionals,  and small business Latins in where they were supposed to be anyway.  Texas went heavily Republican   King George the First was actually unaware that we could do that well simply by being accessible.   El Zorro was a very successful cog in that wheel of success.   Among other successes.
 
     The matter of the housing thing was understated.   Luis Ramirez always felt threatened by anyone who was competent.   Neither he nor the Executive Director would have known what to do with our neighbours-building-neighbour's houses with a very simple construction format, relying on Master-level blue collar tradesmen and pre-prepared plans instead of contractors and architects.   Frightening...to jerks who want to "help the poor" by paying themselves tonnes of shekels while "helping the poor".  Later, the Executive Director Eliseo Sandoval, was convicted of fraud and misappropriation and made license plate for a couple of years.   He and another "Executive Director" of the County's employment training program (millions and millions flushed) set up a janitorial service for the night-cleaning of various public buildings, using totally subsidised "trainees" to keep their costs down.  El Gringo Viejo had people ask me to drop a dime on them, but someone else did it before I had chewed the cud on it.
 
A laugh...and a waste of part of my life for the Republican Party.  But it was all worth it!
El Gringo Viejo
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