Rockin in the 3rd World

Welfare Queens

2011-12-08T01:02:00.006-06:00

General Electric- one of the top ten most profitable companies in the world-got a net tax rebate of $4.7 BILLION dollars for the years of 2008-2010. Meanwhile, it spent $84 Million dollars lobbying the federal government

Full Story Here

And you may ask your self? Well, How did I get here?

2011-12-08T00:39:00.002-06:00

Six weeks bumming around thailand and cambodia , it's nice I like it

Countdown to Adventure Continues

2011-08-31T11:16:00.002-06:00

Moving sale was very successful but I still have all the hand tools & plants, I kept my bike ( the best one) but that will have to go away by Monday....From Granada Nicaragua to Nebraska USA To Thailand to Laos all before Xmas.......

GRINGO Moving Sale Aug 26,2011

2011-08-17T13:55:00.006-06:00

Saturday August 26-27, 9 till 12

Sunday Aug 28 10 till 12 deep discount day

Casa Baltic corner of LaLibertad & the arroyo at Puente PapaQ

More info eMail nicanutbutter@gmail.com

Electronics Etc:

Samsung 22 inch color TV with original remote…sold

Dell 14’ flat panel monitor …$35

Linksys Router Wireless G 2.4GHz with extended antennae & custom heat sinks…$sold

Bulova Marine Star #98H01 Men’s two tone 300 meter, analog alarm watch, new in box..$90…. over $200 retail

Sony Mavica Digital Camera circa 1999 uses 4’ floppy disks, complete..C100

25 foot Coax tv cable with splitter…$C100

GE Slimline corded phone (good for magic Jack) new in box..sold

25 foot two outlet extension cord…C80

Sony blank Cds 12 left…C100

Siemens A71 Cell phone in box…C150

Movies, DVDs,CDs

HouseHold

Potted Plants...

Victorian wall hung clothes hooks……$40

LED modern gooseneck metal desk lamp…$15

Nice standard double 400 thread count cotton sheet set, light slate blue…C200

1950s aluminum style green 2 ft Xmas tree in the box

with 6 1950s era glass ornaments …C400

Hamilton Beach Steam Iron…C150

German chef knives...wood handle, chef, filet, slicer...C100 ea

Oyster Rice Cooker with scratched up pan….$C100

Plastic 4 top table with removable legs…C100

Three antique Bell canning jars w lids ...$12

AC-DC 10’ fan…$C100

Big TFal fry pan & wok, BBQ skewers, ice pick, grill

Tupperware, salad spinner, plastic dishes, strainers, gadgets, can openers etc:

Sporting Goods

Toby Trek 26' up graded with alloy rims, raised alloy goose neck, handle bars, brakes…$55

BikePump,USA Bike repair paperback, patch kit,two spare 26’ tubes & bicycle misc parts ..$10

North Face 2 man backpacker camping tent, nice complete C400

Eddie Bauer Day Pack, old Samsonite, hard sided suitcase, duffel pack, shoulder bags, cloth shopping bags, etc

XL Gringo tee shirts, button downs, towels etc

MISC

Jewelers professional 10X loupe…C300

Barlow pocket knife wood handled…C100

Victrinox …Swiss Army Knife midsized promo Exl…C150

Old USA metal lunch boxes beat up Wild Bill Hickok or Cartoon Zoo with Wally Gator..C200 ea

Wooden Billy Club old & serious works great for the barrio drunk at the door….C200

Eddie Bauer blue Day Pack…C150

TOOLS: Choice $C45 each

Soldering Iron, hot glue gun, Eastwing all metal hammer…Exacto Knife Set, …Hand Brace, big bag of misc drill bits

2 x 10’crescent wrenches, 6’ crescent, wire stripper,

¼ drive sockets & drivers, 8’ channel lock,10’ vice grips, tin snips, screwdrivers,

2x wire cutters, pliers, needle nose etc, small file set, wood chisel,

6 in one screwdriver, tape measures 50 & 6 feet, utility knives, box cutter,

mitre saw,

Books:

Failed States ….Noam Chomsky…sold

What We Say Goes…..Noam Chomsky …C100

Waiting for Fidel...Christopher Hunt sold…

No Logo…Naomi Klein…C100

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man…John Perkins…sold

People’s History of the USA…. H. Zinn…C200

Nothing Scared, hardback…Lewis Black…C60

Pigs at the Trough…A Huffington…C50

Moon Guide to Nicaragua 2^nd Edition…C100

Carnivores of Central America…C120

Savage Shore…Ed Marriott…sold

Skinny Legs and All…Kurt Vonnegut…sold

Jailbird…Kurt Vonnegut…sold

The Fruit Palace…Charles Nicholl…sold

Monkey Wrench Gang….E. Abbey….C60

50th Anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Adventure from the Cuban perspective

2011-04-14T12:25:00.003-06:00

Playa Giron: The Mercenary Defeat in Cuba

by PL — last modified Apr 13, 2011 01:25 PM

— filed under: BAY OF PIGS

The 50th anniversary of the Playa Giron (Bay of Pigs) victory, is particularly important for the Cuban people: the 1961 defeat of an invasion of CIA-trained mercenary troops.

That armed invasion was approved by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who on March 17, 1960, ordered the recruitment of Cuban-born mercenaries to land in the western Cuban province of Matanzas.

Historical documents show that each of these soldiers for hire was offered 225 USD monthly plus 50 USD for his oldest child and 25 for other children. A total of 4.4 million USD was initially allocated for this purpose, and that figure later grew.

The CIA trained their newly-recruited mercenaries in camps in Guatemala, Nicaragua and the United States and on U.S. military bases in Puerto Rico and Panama.

Days after the U.S. elections, on Nov. 18, 1960, the CIA proposed the details of the plan to President-elect John F. Kennedy, and he approved the idea.

On Apr. 15, 1961, while the mercenary naval group was sailing to Cuba, escorted by U.S. Navy ships, eight B-26 bombers painted with Cuban Air Force emblems bombed two air bases and a civilian airport in Cuba.

At the memorial services for the victims of the air raids, the socialist character of the Revolution was proclaimed and a state of combat alarm was decreed nationwide. That date is celebrated every year as Militia Member Day.

Meanwhile, a media campaign was being created to back a future direct attack, demonizing Cuban revolutionary measures to benefit the people, such as the agrarian reform to give land to those who work it and the urban reform, doing away with landlords.

The United States concentrated the power of its propaganda on convincing the world through false information that the Cuban people had created an internal uprising, backing an exile government made up of traditional, corrupt politicians.

From : Escambray Cuban digital newspaper

My favorite holiday approaches

2010-10-21T08:02:00.003-06:00

Buy Nothing Day is your special day to unshop, unspend and unwind. Relax and do nothing for the economy and for yourself - at least for a single day.

Can you really buy absolutely nothing for just one day? You might say “Sure!” but can you ACTUALLY go one whole day without transacting ANY business? Are you totally debt free so that you can go a whole day without accruing interest on your mortgage? Are you off the grid so that you can go a whole day without paying the power company? Do you have ANY utilities? Water, Sewer etc? Do you have a cell phone? Do you have stocks or other investments that transact business in your name every day without your input? Do you have other debts, such as credit cards that accrue interest? Can you really go one whole day without buying anything? Try it!

http://www.buynothingday.org/buynothing.html

https://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd

Enjoy Yourself...It's later than you think

2010-10-20T10:15:00.000-06:00

Neighborhood Watch Nica Style

2009-10-09T15:32:00.002-06:00

The police aren't much help with day to day petty crimes in the neighborhoods so people take it upon themselves to police their block. ...better barrios like mine have some one's unemployed uncle ride a bike around the neighborhood all night blowing a whistle every couple minutes.

I thought the USA was too poor to pay attention

2009-10-07T17:28:00.004-06:00

Senate Passes Massive debt inducing $636 Billion Military Spending Bill

The Senate today voted 93-7 in favor of the $636 billion defense appropriations bill to provide funding to the US military over the fiscal year beginning this month.

The bill includes $128.2 billion in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bars President Obama from transferring any of the suspects at Guantanamo Bay to the US for trials.

Two of the Senators voting against the bill, Sens. McCain and Feingold, objected to the $2.5 billion in continued funding for C-17 military aircraft. The Pentagon has said it doesn’t want the aircraft, and the Obama Administration has sought to cancel the funding for them.

Sen. Feingold was the only Democrat to vote against the bill. The six Republicans included Sens. McCain, Enzi, Coburn, Demint, Barrasso, and Graham.

So if I am doing my math right that's about a dollar each for each person on earth? Where are these dangerous extremist liberals I hear about...I think Repub or Dem they are all nothing more than corpracrats, highly paid & perfumed whores in the temple of govt...

The oligarchy is pissed & peasant blood will flow

2009-09-28T13:30:00.003-06:00

September 28, 2009 Acoustic and Chemical Attacks on the Brazilian Embassy

The Sound and Fury of the Honduran Coup

By LAURA CARLSEN
Over the past few days, reports poured in from Honduras of the use of sound devices and chemical warfare in attacks on the Brazilian Embassy by the Honduran coup. The use of Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) has been confirmed by observers and journalists. Numerous photographers have also documented their use.

The UN Security Council today called upon the de facto government of Honduras to "cease harassing the Brazilian Embassy" and "condemned acts of intimidation."

These devices are described as a "non-lethal weapon" produced by the U.S.-based American Technology Corporation. They emit painful sound at 151 db. with a range of 300 meters on land, and are used in situations of war and to control demonstrations.

While acoustics weapons have been used over the past several days, on Friday the Armed Forces sprayed the Embassy with poisonous gases and by some accounts pumped them into the building through the drainage system. The Honduran News Network reports that First Lady Xiomara Castro de Zelaya climbed a ladder to ascertain the source of the attacks and was sprayed with chemicals. She and others in the Embassy are reportedly experiencing bleeding as a result of the effects of the chemicals.

Father Andres Tamayo described the situation to Radio Progreso, "Over a thousand soldiers in front (of the Embassy) left and returned with a cistern and helicopters spraying gases. There are also neighbors that lent their houses to spray these things and house the military. They have placed pipes to spread the gases. We feel a tightness in our stomachs and throat, vomiting, dizziness and some people are urinating blood. There are more than a thousand people around here and at this moment all we can do is drink a little milk."

A press conference was called to reveal the results of the analysis of the gas, done by public health specialist Dr. Mauricio Castellanos.

* Concentrations above normal of amonia, which is used as a base of pepper gas
* Concentration between 100 and 200 particles per thousand
* Hydrocyanic acid, which produces a rapid reaction on inhaling when it enters in contact with the iron in the blood, and produces vertigo, nausea, stomach pain, headaches and breathing difficulties

The report concluded, "This mixture is technologically purely military, prohibited under international treaties. Exposure for a prolonged period is lethal to any living organism."

Juan Almendares, a Honduran medical doctor and human rights leader, states:

"The occupants of the Brazilian Embassy that accompany President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, his wife and family, communities and protesters are the object of the launching of chemical arms from helicopters and airplanes or troops, and the use of sophisticated sound and electromagnetic equipment that have produced severe diarrhea, vomiting, nasal hemorrhages and gastrointestinal problems in both the Embassy and surrounding areas.
"According to the clinical reports, this could be due to the usage of toxic substances including: pesticides, chemical components of gases, radioactive substances like radioactive cesium and toxic mushrooms.

"It is urgent that an international medical team from the United Nations and the World Health Organization be sent. We are facing an irregular war against the people of Honduras. The Armed Forces do not allow the International Red Cross entry into the Brazilian Embassy, violating all international health treaties and conventions and human rights."

Numerous reports, including Honduran News Network sources, also mentioned radioactive cesium. If the use of radioactive cesium is confirmed, the consequences are very serious. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry finds that the effects of high levels include the symptoms listed above and even coma and death.

This is the notorious "day-after" effect of nuclear bombs. The agency adds that "it is reasonable to expect that individuals exposed to high levels of radiation from a source of radioactive cesium will develop the same types of cancer observed in survivors of the atomic bombs in Japan."

Embassies are protected under the Vienna Convention and any violation of this is an international issue. With the notable exceptions of Colombia and the United States, all nations of the region expressed concern about the Honduran situation at the 64th UN General Assembly meeting.

As the society breaks down into a coup-provoked crisis, the Women's Collective CODEMUH writes in to that workers in offshore assembly plants have been forced to work overtime to make up for time lost due to the coup's curfews, in clear violation of labor law.

The Collective notes, "According to Article 23 of the Labor Code, "Workers can participate in profits or benefits of the boss, but never assume the risks and losses," meaning that business cannot charge workers for the losses caused by the national political crisis, which the businessmen and women are key actors in causing. Ladies and gentlemen, you cannot force workers to pay for the losses that you provoked with the coup d'etat. "We call on transnational brands like Nike, GAP, Adidas, Hanes, HBI and Walmart, among others, as well as university students in the U.S. and consumers in general, who wear the products produced in the sweatshops of Honduras, to demand the offshore industry pay its workers for the days they did not show up for work due to the curfew of the de facto government, without requiring that they make up these days. And that the workers refuse to accept these extra days."

President Zelaya has called on “the resistance to maintain the fight that together, the people and the president, will achieve the constitutional reforms and fall of the usurpers."

With the no-holds-barred repression unleashed by the coup regime and the increasing militancy and organization of the resistance--still adhering to principles of non-violence, to their credit--the political ground has once again shifted in Honduras. The terms of the San Jose Accords, hammered out by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and consistently rejected by the coup regime, have become clearly obsolete. The demand for a constitutional assembly has grown in breadth and volume throughout the country. The urgent tasks before the international community are to recognize that the crisis requires structural reforms and not patch-ups, to halt the human rights violations immediately, and to take all diplomatic steps toward the reinstatement of the constitutional government.

Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Policy Program in Mexico City. She can be reached at: (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org).

2009-09-23T11:32:00.008-06:00

The Hollywood leftist elite asks us to support Corp CEOs

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Insurance Companies are no friend to me
Never have been, The latest screw was the greatest screw, while I was down here in Nicaragua someone broke into my house in Tacoma. Being a long time pro pack rat collector you just now I had tons of great stuff, gemstone and fossil collections, cash, herb, gold,pocket knives etc etc....Just the kind of stuff tweakers like....
So I been paying premiums monthly to Farmers Ins for maybe 15 years, and what do I get? A special agent and enough mistreatment & lies to eventually involve lawyers and the Wa State Insurance Commissioner's Office. So after 3 months and a mountain of BS those greedy weasels graciously paid me just a little less than half of what my things were conservatively worth.In the mean time a fierce wind storm damaged the house and it started again anyway. I don't think it's an unusual story. I'll bet most Americans have a similar tale to tell. But getting screwed by the corporatocracy is an everyday event. Every time they deny a claim they move one step closer to a ponzi scheme. Ideally in their world the would never be any money paid out, just sucked in. Just like Maddoff....lets leave these folks out of our heath care system.

2009-09-17T12:56:00.004-06:00

I was a dedicated RJR man for 27 years. Swiping lip stick stained butts from the xtal ashtray on my moms bridge table as a kid to boosting Lucky Strikes out of the piggly wiggly as a young punk in training. I loved to smoke and the stronger the better I wasn't happy until my middle finger was yellowed and sticky w tar.
Around the middle of my 42nd year after my second uninsured heart attack I decided that I had to put the smokes down and using DEATH and Financial Ruin as inspiration I haven't had a cigarette in 14 years...Best move I may have every made. I am ashamed that I was ever dumb enough to fall victim to the biggest scam in USA history..Led to slaughter like sheep...It's not about smoking good old fashioned peace pipe tobacco, it's about smoking modern American Cigarettes full of mysterious addictive additives...

What's Inside: For a Refreshing Hint of Tear Gas, Light Up a Cigarette

Some perpective would be nice

2009-09-14T16:51:00.002-06:00

I hear lots of USAnos shouting we're "number one". A popular phrase in use from town hall meeting to the hockey rink...Statistically speaking some one has to be number one so I googled. We're not the most educated that's Canada.
For the first time in the 11 years that the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal have been publishing the Index of Economic Freedom, the U.S. has dropped out of the top 10 freest economies in the world.
We aren't even the fattest country on earth anymore....If we are going to shout about being number one maybe we should try harder...Let's be Number One at Something....37th in Health Care

Escape from America

2009-09-10T13:36:00.004-06:00

If like me you dream of escaping and starting over some where, somewhere warm sunny and more human than the USA of today...It's a lot easier than you might think and way more fun. If it doesn't work limp back to the states a couple of years from now 20 pounds lighter and tan as George Hamilton... Joe Bageant is a far better writer than I am and he writes often of his experience living in a small fishing village in Belize...

By Joe Bageant

Hopkins Village, Belize

I lie in bed just breathing in and breathing out and feeling so free that I've laughed out loud a couple of times tonight, something I have never done in my life. At least not while simply looking at the ceiling. Tomorrow I will not worry about losing my ass in the declining real estate market. I will not commute three nerve grinding hours a day, or nervously engorge myself in front of my laptop for hours on end. Nor will I or wake up with the crimes of the empire running like adding machine tape in my head, annotated with all the ways I contributed to those crimes by participating in the American lifestyle. After more than two years of effort, I'm outta the gilded gulag, by damned, and tell myself that I have at last quit being part of the problem -- or at least as much as much as anyone can without living stark naked in a Himalayan cave and toasting insects over a dung fire.

The effect of moving was immediate. As one expat told me years ago what would happen, whole days go by when I do not think of America at all, much less rage against it, something I would previously considered impossible. But when you do, you do so more calmly and lose no sleep over the criminals presently running the enterprise up there.

In places like Hopkins Village you can still send your kid to the store to bring back cigarettes. Now the politically correct set up there in the States may be blowing soy milk out their noses at the thought, but it represents a degree of freedom from government control. And besides, it is not American's business how the black Garinago people of Belize run their lives. In Belize it is not against the law to drink and drive and there are no speed limits. Here in Hopkins you can build your house without a permit or inspections, sell real estate without a license, drink liquor openly while you happily burn trash in your front yard. You can peddle homemade darasa -- grated spiced banana wrapped and cooked in banana leaf wrappers -- or barbeque pork to the neighbors from your front porch with no interference from health inspectors.

full article and other great essay at Joe' site

Wow, Rush Limbaugh just had a stroke

2009-09-09T10:35:00.006-06:00

and Glen Beck is foaming at he mouth after seeing the pics of a Michael Moore Hugo Chavez meeting at the Venice Film Festival, Where Moore's new film got a huge standing O from those Euro lefties
more pics from Moore's Twitter

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class

2009-09-06T18:02:00.004-06:00

Larry Flynt

Publisher of Hustler magazine and free speech advocate

Common Sense 2009

The American government -- which we once called our government -- has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "economic royalists," who choose our elected officials -- indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment's hesitation, they took our money -- yours and mine -- to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame. They don't care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as "useless eaters."

But, you say, we have elected a candidate of change. To which I respond: Do these words of President Obama sound like change?

"A culture of irresponsibility took root, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street."
There it is. Right there. We are Main Street. We must, according to our president, share the blame. He went on to say: "And a regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th-century economic crisis -- the Great Depression -- was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st-century global economy."

This is nonsense.

The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did -- knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) -- was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight -- and we've all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems.

Instead, Obama wants to increase the oversight power of the Federal Reserve. Never mind that it already had significant oversight power before our most recent economic meltdown, yet failed to take action. Never mind that the Fed is not a government agency but a cartel of private bankers that cannot be held accountable by Washington. Whatever the Fed does with these supposed new oversight powers will be behind closed doors.

Obama's failure to act sends one message loud and clear: He cannot stand up to the powerful Wall Street interests that supplied the bulk of his campaign money for the 2008 election. Nor, for that matter, can Congress, for much the same reason.

Consider what multibillionaire banker David Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 memoirs:

"Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure -- one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

Read Rockefeller's words again. He actually admits to working against the "best interests of the United States."

Need more? Here's what Rockefeller said in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: "We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order." They're gaming us. Our country has been stolen from us.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, notes that esteemed economist John Kenneth Galbraith laid the 1929 crash at the feet of banking giant Goldman Sachs. Taibbi goes on to say that Goldman Sachs has been behind every other economic downturn as well, including the most recent one. As if that wasn't enough, Goldman Sachs even had a hand in pushing gas prices up to $4 a gallon.

The problem with bankers is longstanding. Here's what one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about them:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father's conquered."

We all know that the first American Revolution officially began in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. Less well known is that the single strongest motivating factor for revolution was the colonists' attempt to free themselves from the Bank of England. But how many of you know about the second revolution, referred to by historians as Shays' Rebellion? It took place in 1786-87, and once again the banks were the cause. This time they were putting the screws to America's farmers.

Daniel Shays was a farmer in western Massachusetts. Like many other farmers of the day, he was being driven into bankruptcy by the banks' predatory lending practices. (Sound familiar?) Rallying other farmers to his side, Shays led his rebels in an attack on the courts and the local armory. The rebellion itself failed, but a message had been sent: The bankers (and the politicians who supported them) ultimately backed off. As Thomas Jefferson famously quipped in regard to the insurrection: "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Perhaps it's time to consider that option once again.

I'm calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.

Let's set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn't effective -- if the politicians ignore us -- we do it again. And again. And again.

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It's time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.

Is Florida the craziest state?

2009-09-04T15:33:00.008-06:00

I have been thinking about buying a bottom market duplex in Florida soon. Fla has massive foreclosures, balmy tropical weather and I can already speak Spanish but the impression I get primarily from US Cable News is that all the crazy people live in Florida. The ex pat Cuban Oligarchy and paid off Latins bump uninsured fenders with Hillbillies from the deep south and crunkin brothers boomin' cruisin lo rides in the WalMart parking lot. Home to GatorLand Creation museum Burt Reynold's Museum Coral Castle The Holy Land Theme Park and and the grand daddy of American Corporate culture run amok Disneyworld attracting a constant river of crazies just coming for a look..It goes back to the 50s when even Circus freaks picked Florida as a place to wait out the grim reaper.....Now I know extreme heat and extreme religion tend to excite folks but I am more concerned with the dangers in Fl USA than I am w everyday life here in the 2nd poorest country in the western hemisphere.
Here's a handy man special, two houses big lot...ten grand, that's cheaper than here in Nicaragua
http://tiny.cc/slumlord

68 percent of Mexican adults are overweight and 29 percent are obese

2009-08-31T12:38:00.003-06:00

The American Way BABY

With fattier diets and changing lifestyles,

Mexico is packing on the pounds.

By Ioan Grillo - GlobalPost http://www.globalpost.com

MEXICO CITY — Dressed in the hand-woven red cloths of her native village and chatting away in her ancient Nahuatl tongue, Pilar Blanco and her family sit down to dinner in what looks like an age-old meal time ceremony.

But when Hernandez serves up the food, there is one major difference from tradition: instead of tortillas and beans, the family eats instant noodle soups, potato chips and fizzy soda.

“I’m out working all day cleaning people’s houses and I have no time to cook. So the instant soups are a big help,” Hernandez explains, sitting with her husband and three children in a cinder block home on the outskirts of this sprawling capital.

Such radical changes in diet have swept through Mexico in the last decade leading to an explosion of obesity. As families guzzle evermore processed food, hamburgers and french fries, they have piled on the pounds to make Mexico one of fattest nations on the planet.

Studies by the Health Department show that a startling 68 percent of Mexican adults are overweight and 29 percent are obese — just behind the United States, where 74 percent are overweight and 39 percent obese.

Only the tiny Pacific island nations of Samoa and Tonga have heavier populations.

There is particular concern about the rising weight of Mexican children.

The Mexico City government announced this month that an alarming 35 percent of school pupils are over the recommended bodyweight.

To try to fight back, the government has kick-started an anti-obesity campaign of sporting events and healthy-eating propaganda aimed at the young.

“We need you children to understand the importance of taking care of your health and the problem of obesity that is worrying to our country,” Mexico City Health Minister Armando Ahued told 1,000 children panting away in a running race. “You are the future of the capital, and we need you to avoid getting diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.”

The campaign is also encouraging young people to lose pounds by joining 11,000 dancers in the largest-ever routine of Michael Jackson’s song "Thriller," scheduled for Aug. 29 in Mexico City’s central plaza.

The changing dietary habits have come as Mexico has switched from a largely protectionist to an extremely globalized economy.

Since it enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, imports of processed food and drinks have soared.

The nation now consumes more Coca Cola products per capita than anywhere else in the world: a total of 635 eight-ounce bottles per person each year. The amount represents a threefold increase compared to 1988.

Ex Veep Dick Cheney has been appointed president of the RIAA.

2009-08-29T08:41:00.005-06:00

RIAA:- Former US vice-president Richard Bruce ‘Dick’ Cheney has been appointed president of the RIAA.
Cheney’s duties will include overseeing senior RIAA personnel currently seconded to the Obama administration’s Department of Justice, and liasing with US vice-president Joe Biden.

Cheney will be responsible for developing and implementing official DoJ copyright infringement and anti-file sharing policies in accordance with established music industry business practices

So that greedy old corpse and his gang has found it's way back into the White House

Does this mean that soon heavily armed Blackwater for profit corporate mercenaries will be invading the side streets and markets here in Nicaragua searching out unauthorized cds?

I guess it isn't that different from the old banana republic days...

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/27459

U.S. Dept of VA is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care

2009-08-27T16:28:00.004-06:00

5 Myths About Health Care Around the World

By T.R. Reid

Sunday, August 23, 2009

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:

1. It's all socialized medicine out there.

Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.

In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.

In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.

Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.

As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.

In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"

3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.

The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.

4. Cost controls stifle innovation.

False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.

Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)

5. Health insurance has to be cruel.

Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.

Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.

The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.

This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.

T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," to be published Monday.

a Bukowski day in the jungle

2009-08-25T16:48:00.004-06:00

It's as cool as it gets today on the edge of the jungle...gray and cloudy with just enough rain to keep things shiny and the folks inside..It's days like this that make me wish I liked to drink more:

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. "

"It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?"
—Factotum, 1975

"The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative."
—Sunlight Here I Am: 2003

http://bukowski.net/

Where can I find this "Liberal Media?" I might like it

2009-08-23T09:14:00.000-06:00

Click to view large

Download full size (34 KB)

I have the v chip set to block Fox News but still I hear of the liberal media and it's agenda of liberal fascism..

I thought their agenda was selling soap...

Ownership Chart: The Big Six

The U.S. media landscape is dominated by massive corporations that, through a history of mergers and acquisitions, have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and read. In many cases, these giant companies are vertically integrated, controlling everything from initial production to final distribution. Here is information about the largest U.S. media firms.

http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main

D.C. scumbag aligns w Honduran Coup Leaders

2009-08-21T14:09:00.000-06:00

I Debated the Honduras Coup With Lobbyist and Clinton Confidant Lanny Davis -- Here's How He Lied

By Greg Grandin, AlterNet. Posted August 17, 2009.

Last Friday, I debated lawyer-turned-lobbyist Lanny Davis, now working for the business backers of the recent Honduran coup, on Democracy Now.

It actually wasn't much of a debate -- in the way that word means an exchange of ideas -- as Davis was fast out of the box, pre-emptively trying to paint host Amy Goodman and me as "ideologues."

As Hillary Rodham Clinton's major fundraiser during last year's presidential primary, Davis is known for, among other things, leading the attack on Barack Obama for his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. "Why didn't he speak up earlier?" Davis asked in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, demanding to know why Obama didn't distance himself from Wright's remarks.

Recently, Davis has been hired by corporations to derail the labor-backed Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize. And all the while, he has touted himself as a "pro-labor liberal."

Davis was also the chief U.S. lobbyist for the military dictatorship in Pakistan in the late '90s and played an important role in strengthening relations between then President Bill Clinton and its de facto president Gen. Perez Musharraf.

Now Davis finds himself defending another de facto regime, in Honduras, that is engaging in "grave and systemic" political repression, suspending due process, harassing independent journalists, killing or disappearing at least 10 people and detaining hundreds as "constitutional."

And all the while he has touted himself as a (Honduran) constitutional expert.

The Honduras coup occurred on June 28, when soldiers working on behalf of a the small group of business and political elites who now control the country, kidnapped democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile.

Since then, the military-backed regime of Roberto Micheletti has argued to the world that it was acting constitutionally, even though nearly every country in Latin America, along with the European Union, isn't buying it.

Only in the U.S. is there a debate as to whether the Micheletti government is legal -- largely thanks to the lobbying efforts of Davis.

Davis's argument is based on a disingenuous description of the legal and political maneuvers by Zelaya's opponents in the Supreme Court and Congress prior to the coup. He calls these power grabs constitutional.

REST OF THE STORY:

http://tiny.cc/scumbag

Putting the wacky in wacky doodle

2009-08-20T11:37:00.001-06:00

This is some more crazy right wing fear mail, another boogie man from those Xtian wack jobs at Digital Minitries..
The Socialist Elite is going to declare martial law!!
YIKEs forced lattes and mandatory chablis...

Militarization of Swine Flu Preparations
By Alex Newman

The increasing militarization of preparations for an outbreak of swine flu is proceeding rapidly and without very much public debate, despite the relatively mild nature of the disease so far and the fact that many experts believe the panic has been overblown.

Earlier this week, Republican Representative Paul Broun of Georgia warned a town hall meeting that a “socialistic elite” may be preparing to declare martial law in the United States using a pandemic disease as the pretext. “They’re trying to develop an environment where they can take over,” he told attendees according to an article in the Athens Banner-Herald. “We’ve seen that historically.”

In another alarming development this week, National Guard troops are involved in a drill to take over a high school in Maine to deal with potential riots and panic over distribution of treatment for the H1N1 virus, the Maine Sun Journal reported Thursday. “The National Guardsmen will take on the roles of panicked citizens and military police and practice what they would do, such as using tear gas, in the case of a riot,” said the newspaper article entitled “National Guard Drill at High School to Prepare for Possible H1N1 Riot.” The story also noted that local law enforcement would be involved.

This is all despite the fact that the Maine Center for Disease Control has reported just one death tied to the swine flu, and the man actually died from “underlying conditions complicated by H1N1,” according to Dr. Dora Mills, the center’s director.

“This is just a component of moving the stuff from point A to B,” assured the director of Oxford County’s emergency management agency, Scott Parker. He told the Sun Journal that the plan would only be put in place “if needed.”

Apparently concerns about panic and disorder were raised during a conference in April, so the governor and the adjutant General of the Maine National Guard decided to formulate a plan to bring in military police.

But if state military police preparations weren’t bad enough, the federal government now wants to usurp state forces for domestic use under the Pentagon’s command. Though at least the states are fighting back on this issue.

The National Governors Association wrote a letter to the Department of Defense last week criticizing the proposals to take control of their National Guard units for domestic disasters. “Strong potential exists for confusion in mission execution and the dilution of governors' control over situations with which they are more familiar and better capable of handling than a federal military commander," the letter stated.

But no matter who retains control of the National Guard troops preparing to deal with swine flu, the federal government’s increasingly militarized “emergency preparations” for the virus are developing quickly and mostly under the radar. Just last month CNN and Fox News reported online that the U.S. military was drawing up plans to deal with a spread of the swine flu. “The Pentagon is preparing to make troops available if necessary to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency tackle a potential outbreak of the H1N1 virus,” according to a July 29 Fox News article entitled "Military Poised to Help FEMA Battle Swine Flu Outbreak."

And as early as last year, reports also began to surface that federal troops were preparing for “homeland defense” missions and would be operating on American soil — in what would appear to be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of military forces in domestic law enforcement.

“They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control,” noted the Army Times in a 2008 article entitled "Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1." The soldiers will also be responsible for things like knowing how to set up road blocks and the use of “nonlethal” weapons normally reserved for war-zones to subdue Americans.

Additionally, the Obama administration has recently resurrected the heavily criticized Bush-era proposal to “update” quarantine regulations, while the U.S. Army advertises jobs for “internment/resettlement specialists” on its website.

The federal government’s health authorities operate quarantine centers from Anchorage to Miami, and in 2005 George W. Bush used an executive order to add flu that has the “potential” to create a pandemic to a list of quarantinable diseases. Will the military be used to enforce the quarantines? It is appearing increasingly possible, if it comes to that.

This is all happening at a time when countless experts are warning that fears about the swine-flu virus have been blown out of proportion. In many places the disease even seems to be dissipating. “We'll probably see something that won't be that bad,” said Ontario’s former chief medical officer, Dr. Richard Schabas. “We would not expect it to be as bad as the flu year was in 2003 with the Fujian strain.”

He noted that a pandemic would be expected to kill thousands just in Canada, but so far the swine flu has claimed 66 lives there. “You tell me how overblown that is.… Our preparations always have to be advised not just by the sense of possibilities, but by a sense of probabilities.”

England’s chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, recently announced plans to scale back the National Pandemic Flu Service from about 1,600 call-center workers to less than 600 as the number of cases there continues to fall. He warned of the potential for a “second wave,” but so far the disease has been less deadly than even the regular seasonal flu.

Australian National University microbiologist Peter Collignon told ABC News the H1N1 virus was no worse than annual influenza strains. “My major concern about what's happening is the fear is out of proportion to what the data shows," he said, adding that the use of the word “pandemic” was creating unnecessary concern.

But here in the United States, the emergency preparations continue to expand along with the power of the federal government. There has already been discussion of forced vaccinations. And an inspection of so-called “executive orders” issued by past presidents and continuing under Obama reveals that the executive branch already claims sweeping “emergency” powers to deal with health concerns.

Unless Americans start demanding some transparency and accountability, the trend towards bigger and more aggressive government will likely continue. This time the excuse happens to be swine flu, but there will always be some “crisis” not to be “wasted,” as Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it.

The preparations currently under way to deal with swine flu are not only unconstitutional, they are probably more dangerous than the virus itself. It is time for Americans to take personal responsibility for their health and their government and to say enough is enough.

2009-08-18T16:15:00.000-06:00

Keep your sense of humor, my friend; if you don't have a sense of humor it just isn't funny anymore. .........Wavy Gravy

mz7vjyghbq

The coup in Honduras is a symptom of the underlying imperialist cancer eating away at Latin America

2009-08-17T21:28:00.000-06:00

Honduras : back to 1963

Monday, 17 August 2009, 5:23 pm
Column: Toni Solo

Honduras : back to 1963

by Toni Solo

The democratization of Honduran society - any society - requires a significant redistribution of wealth. Recognizing that, Manuel Zelaya tried implementing a programme of government to deliver the benefits of the nation's resources to the impoverished majority. Over 50% of Hondurans live in poverty. Zelaya's attempt at some moderate level of social justice brought a vicious response from the country's entrenched plutocrat elite. In Latin America, this is an ancient political motif.

Some history

The pattern of reform and reaction in the region became fixed in the decades before the Second World War. In Central America, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala were all ruled by brutal dictatorships through the 1930s until the mid and late 1940s. One reading of the murder of the reformist Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitan in 1948 in Colombia is that it defined the permanent rejection of reform by regional oligarchies allied to powerful foreign corporate interests, especially those of the United States.

But it took some years for that rejection to consolidate itself fully in Central America. The overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 was preceded by the great popular strike in Honduras of the same year. Moderate reformist programmes by governments like those of Arbenz in Guatemala and of Ramon Villeda Morales in Honduras were paralleled in El Salvador under the Partido Revolucionario de Unificación Democrática lead by army lieutenant-colonels Oscar Osorio and José María Lemus.

It was the violent United States government reaction to the Cuban revolution, especially after the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which ended prospects of broad democratic reform in the region. 1963 saw two clear embodiments of this reality. First, in September of that year in the Dominican Republic, reformist President Juan Bosch was overthrown in a military coup effectively supported by the United States. Then just a few days later, in Honduras, Colonel Lopez Arellano overthrew the Liberal Party government of Ramon Villeda Morales.

Lopez Arellano's coup was staged ten days before general elections in which the progressive Liberal Party candidate Modesto Rodas Alvarado was the overwhelming favourite to win the Presidency. US policy in regard to such coups has hardly changed at all in fifty years. Kirk Bowman writes of the coup by Lopez Arellano :

"When López went ahead with the coup, his conservative allies scoffed at the threatened suspension of U.S. aid and a break in diplomatic relations: The U.S. 'would be back in six months'. The U.S. threat was hollow. Numerous democratic presidents were ousted in 1962 and 1963 and all of them were friends of Villeda. Coups in El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador were followed closely in the press and the conservative opposition in Honduras could track the pattern: The U.S. in every case suspended relations, publicly exclaimed support of democracy, and then quickly renewed relations with the generals. The pattern would be no different in Honduras. "(1)

Little has changed. US policy remains almost exactly the same now as it was in 1963. The European Union and its member governments will eventually follow the lead of President Obama. Some formula in the name of stability - for rich country corporations and banks, not for ordinary people in Honduras - will be agreed. Foreign governments will probably make every effort to legitimize the practical anti-democratic effects of the coup so as to protect their corporate sectors' investments.

Specific local context in Honduras

Honduran indigenous peoples' leader Salvador Zuniga remarked in a recent interview that the coup against Manuel Zelaya meant a regression of 30 years in Honduran politics. He might well have said over 45 years, because Manuel Zelaya very much represents a return to the original sense of the rodista current of the Honduran Liberal Party. That is why descriptions of Zelaya as a "leftist" are ridiculous. Rodas, was a moderate reformer anxious to modernize the country and turn it into a successful capitalist social democracy similar to the Costa Rica of Pepe Figueres.

Manuel Zelaya's political project was an effort to take up again the meaning of the political programme that Modesto Rodas Alvarado originally put to the Honduran people in the election campaign of 1963. One can see this in the development of the Liberal Party since the country's tenuous, nominal return to electoral democracy in 1981. In Honduras, the National Party, whose members are called "cachurecos", has always been the party of the conservative landowners and their allies. The Liberal Party is disparaged by its opponents as the party of the "chusma", the rabble, the impoverished majority.

In Honduras, the effective period of military dominance lasted thirty years - from 1963 until 1993. Throughout that period, the armed forces dictated the acceptable parameters of political action. Political disagreements in the army high command were at least as important as political arguments within the two traditional political parties. Constantly overseeing matters was the United States government, regularly brokering policy arrangements and smoothing over fractious splits between its local corporate allies in the Honduran plutocrat elite and its proxies in the Honduran military high command.

Left wing political input into Honduran public life was completely marginalized until the victory of Carlos Roberto Reina in the presidential elections of 1993. Carlos Reina represented the centre-left current in the Liberal Party. One has to remember that the Liberal Party has always included plutocrats like Jorge Bueso Arias, Miguel Facussé and Carlos Flores Facussé and Jaime Rosenthal, among several others.

In 1982, Reina and like-minded Liberal Party members had formed formed the Alianza Liberal del Pueblo in an attempt to counter the pro-US government policy of the rodista Roberto Suazo Cordoba. ALIPO failed to counteract the "dirty war" and the terror war against Nicaragua waged by Nicaraguan Contra from Honduran territory, supervised by US ambassador John Negroponte. Largely in protest, Carlos Reina and his brother Jorge Arturo formed the Movimiento Liberal Democrático Revolucionario (M-Lider).

But it was the moderate rodista Jose Azcona Hoyo, a keen supporter of United States regional policy, who easily won the 1985 Presidential elections. Manuel Zelaya back then supported Azcona, not Reina. When Carlos Reina did finally win the Presidency his administration was hobbled by a dreadful economic situation and dramatically worsening social problems, especially violent crime. Reina's main achievement was to advance the subordination of the military to civilian control.

Under Reina, Manuel Zelaya was director of the Honduran Social Investment Fund, an entity whose primary purpose was to mitigate the socially destructive effects of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies like public spending cutbacks, privatization and deregulation. Reina was succeeded as President by another Liberal Party boss, Carlos Flores Facussé, a plutocrat oligarch determined to maintain the status quo. Flores Facussé, a leading conservative rodista , had been an enthusiastically pro-US minister under the Suazo Cordoba regime duirng the "dirty war"era of the death squads.

Very close to Flores Facussé, Zelaya was given special responsibility for reconstruction following Hurricane Mitch. In 2001, Zelaya formed his own current within the Liberal Party, called Movimiento Esperanza Liberal (MEL). It is worth bearing in mind what Honduran activist Lidice Ortega thinks of Zelaya's political position, "At no time has Mel's government been a left wing government." (2)

Zelaya as President

By 2005 Zelaya was able to win sufficient support from the other Liberal party machine-bosses to secure his candidacy for the presidential elections of that year. He campaigned on a platform of poverty reduction and greater citizen participation in decision making. The actual election was tainted by a long delayed count lasting almost a month with very obvious negotiation around the results between the leadership of the Liberal and National parties. Zelaya's resulting administration represented a mosaic of power brokers from the various strands of the Liberal Party.

For Zelaya, the make or break measure of his government's success was always poverty reduction within a context of political democratization and economic modernization. The energy crisis of 2006 led to a showdown with the corrupt monopolistic oil companies that had rigged fuel prices for years so as to inflate their profits. Around the same time, Zelaya refused to privatize the Hondutel state telecommunications company, as urged by the International Monetary Fund. In both cases, Zelaya antagonized local big business as well as foreign multinationals.

Initial US government acceptance in 2006 of President Zelaya's proposal to recoup for civilian use the US military's Palmerola-Soto Cano air base, turned to antagonism through 2007 and 2008. Zelaya took Honduras into the Venezuelan-led Petrocaribe energy security initiative in December 2007, beginning his engagement with Venezuela and Cuba. Zelaya had already completely normalized diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2007 by assigning an ambassador there for the first time since 1961.

In August 2008 Honduras joined the broader regional ALBA economic and trade bloc. That move made Honduras eligible for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of concessionary trade deals and lines of credit, valuable health care resources and participation in multifarious cultural, educational and sports programmes. That decision represented a challenge both to US government influence in Honduras and the control of the Honduran plutocrat oligarchy of important sectors of the Honduran economy, like pharmaceuticals or credit and other resources for small businesses and farmers .

At the end of 2008, the decision to increase the minimum wage by 60% outraged the Honduran business and land owning oligarchy even more. Finally, Zelaya's efforts to try and work out how to hold a Constituent Assembly posed a fundamental threat to the traditional political control of the country's most powerful business and media interests in both the National Party and, especially, in the Liberal Party. The obvious support and domestic political autonomy Zelaya had accumulated by July 2009 destabilized the corrupt Liberal Party leadership, epitomised by sharp, suave corporate gangsters like the Facussés and mediocre bullies like coup regime leader Roberto Micheletti.

As Zelaya's Interior Minister Victor Meza has said, in 2008 Zelaya "became convinced that in order to change Honduras it was necessary to break with traditional bipartisan arrangements. His change of opinion has to do with, on the one hand his direct contact with ordinary people, which is intense and, on the other hand, with the obstacles created by the party leaderships and their economic interests to the reforms he proposed. Convinced that reforms, even minimal ones, would be impossible with the traditional parties, he bet on creating another party." (3)

Meza also makes clear that the conflict between Zelaya and the traditional party elites predated any relationship with Venezuela, "Zelaya's change predates his relationship with Hugo Chavez and conicided with the increasing opposition of the communications media who got more hostile by the day. So it is quite false that everything results from the influence of Chavez, as the de facto regime states, because the conflict had begun before the Venezuelan's arrival on the scene."(4)

Meza is absolutely clear that the coup d'etat originated among the business and media-owning oligarchy who then co-opted their political allies and the military. Along the way they seem to have readily secured permission to go ahead with the coup from the US government. Meza's view is confirmed by the Honduran sociologist Leticia Salomon, who asserts that the coup was "planned by a business grouping lead by Carlos Roberto Facussé" (5).

The never-ending story

The coup d'état in Honduras represents an attempt to prevent democratic change and economic renewal so as to benefit the country's tiny plutocrat elite of no more than ten or a dozen families. The United States government effectively supports the coup regime because it conveniently rolls back efforts at genuine social and economic reform in Central America, helpfully perpetuating US dominance in the region. A simple measure of this truth is literacy.

North American and European aid has poured into Central America to the tune of tens of billions of dollars since 1990. But literacy indicators have either worsened or stayed the same throughout that period. In 2006 Nicaragua joined ALBA. Three years later, UNESCO has now declared Nicaragua free of illiteracy. In Honduras, illiteracy is still around 20% in a country that never experienced the war devastation endured by Nicaragua and El Salvador.

The coup in Honduras is a symptom of the underlying imperialist cancer eating away at Latin America's natural resources and human potential. The complete cast of global corporate villainy nestles snugly within the interstices of rich country debt and trade extortion backed up by US militarism. The history of North American and European imperialist aggression and coercion applied to weaker, resource-rich countries, amounts to a never-ending war on the global poor.

The Latin American theatre of that war now pits the US and its allies - like Colombia, Honduras, Mexico and Peru - against the ALBA countries - Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Latin American ruling elites expect - and receive - foreign military and economic help to sustain their oligarchical power by denying their countries' impoverished majorities a decent life. In all the years since Simón Bolívar and Francisco Morazán, hardly anything has changed. As things stand now, the chances of defeating the coup depend almost entirely on the resistance of the Honduran popular movement.

Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings

2009-08-16T14:27:00.000-06:00

When a friend first introduced me to the writings and rantings of fellow expat Joe Bageant, he said:

"you'll like Joe he writes like you would if you could write"

I think Joe sounds like a lot of us....and there are a lot of us!

Cognitive capitalism -- just when we thought there were no new ways to get screwed

This essay was originally published on AlterNet.

By Joe Bageant 

A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:

"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.

"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."

My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.

I have indeed slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.

For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Savile Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.

The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.

For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.

Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.   DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"

"I am the Son of God."

"Grab a cross on the way out."

On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...

Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?

Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.

The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.

With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.

At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.

Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."

And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.

High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.

"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.

During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.

Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!

For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.

You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.

Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.

Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.

Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!

Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...

Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership. Rent a Life, Inc. (Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.

Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.

Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.

Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.

The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"

Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.

The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.

The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.

Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).

Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Virginia, Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"

Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?

How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?

"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."

I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.

Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.

After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.

Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.

Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."

Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.

Honduran Coup: The US Connection

2009-08-15T20:10:00.000-06:00

Published on Thursday, August 6, 2009 by Foreign Policy in Focus

Honduran Coup: The US Connection

by Conn Hallinan

While the Obama administration was careful to distance itself from the recent coup in Honduras — condemning the expulsion of President Manuel Zelaya to Costa Rica, revoking Honduran officials' visas, and shutting off aid — that doesn't mean influential Americans aren't involved, and that both sides of the aisle don't have some explaining to do.

The story most U.S. readers are getting about the coup is that Zelaya — an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez — was deposed because he tried to change the constitution to keep himself in power.

That story is a massive distortion of the facts. All Zelaya was trying to do is to put a non-binding referendum on the ballot calling for a constitutional convention, a move that trade unions, indigenous groups, and social activist organizations had long been lobbying for. The current constitution was written by the Honduran military in 1982, and the one-term limit allows the brass-hats to dominate the politics of the country. Since the convention would have been held in November, the same month as the upcoming presidential elections, there was no way Zelaya could have remained in office in any case. The most he could have done was to run four years from now.

And while Zelaya is indeed friendly with Chavez, he is at best a liberal reformer whose major accomplishment was raising the minimum wage. "What Zelaya has done has been little reforms," Rafael Alegria, a leader of Via Campesina, told the Mexican daily La Jornada. "He isn't a socialist or a revolutionary, but these reforms, which didn't harm the oligarchy at all, have been enough for them to attack him furiously."

One of those "little reforms" was aimed at ensuring public control of the Honduran telecommunications industry, which may well have been the trip-wire that triggered the coup.

The first hint that something was afoot was a suit brought by Venezuelan lawyer Robert Carmona-Borjas claiming that Zelaya was part of a bribery scheme involving the state-run telecommunication company Hondutel.

Carmona-Borjas has a rap-sheet that dates back to the April 2002 coup against Chavez. He drew up the notorious "Carmona decrees," a series of draconian laws aimed at suspending the Venezuelan constitution and suppressing any resistance to the coup. As Chavez supporters poured into the streets and the plot unraveled, Carmona-Borjas fled to Washington, DC. He took a post at George Washington University and brought Iran-Contra plotters Otto Reich and Elliott Abrams to teach his class on "Political Management in Latin America." He also became vice-president of the right-wing Arcadia Foundation, which lobbies for free-market policies. Weeks before the June 28 Honduran coup, Carmona-Borjas barnstormed the country accusing Zelaya of collaborating with narco-traffickers.

Carmona-Borjas' colleague, Reich, a Cuban American with ties to right-wing factions all over Latin America and former assistant secretary of State for hemispheric affairs under George W. Bush, has been accused by the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization of "undeniable involvement" in the coup.

This is hardly surprising. Reich was nailed by a 1987 congressional investigation for using public funds to engage in propaganda during the Reagan administration's war on Nicaragua. He is also a fierce advocate for Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, both implicated in the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1973 that killed all 73 on board.

Reich is also a ferocious critic of Zelaya. In a recent piece in the Weekly Standard, he urged the Obama administration not to support "strongman" Zelaya because it "would put the United States clearly in the same camp as Cuba's Castro brothers, Venezuela's Chavez, and other regional delinquents."

One of the charges that Reich levels at Zelaya is that the Honduran president is supposedly involved with bribes paid out by the state-run telecommunications company Hondutel. Zelaya is threatening to file a defamation suit over the accusation.

Reich's charges against Hondutel are hardly happenstance, as he is a former AT&T lobbyist and served as Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) Latin American advisor during the senator's 2008 presidential campaign. McCain has deep ties with telecom giants AT&T, MCI, and Qualcomm and, according to Nikolas Kozloff, author of Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge of the United States, "has acted to protect and look out for the political interests of the telecoms on Capitol Hill."

AT&T, McCain's second largest donor, also generously funds the International Republican Institute (IRI), which has warred with Latin American regimes that have resisted telecommunications privatization. According to Kozloff, "President Zelaya was a known to be a fierce critic of telecommunications privatization."

When Venezuelan coup leaders went to Washington a month before their failed effort to oust Chavez, IRI footed the bill. Reich, as then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's special envoy to the Western Hemisphere, met with some of those leaders.

Republicans in Congress have accused the Obama administration of being "soft" on Zelaya. Sen. Jim DeMint (SC) protested the White House's support of the Honduran president holding up votes for administration nominees for the ambassador to Brazil and an assistant secretary of state. Meanwhile, Zelaya's return was unanimously supported by the UN General Assembly, the European Union, and the Organization of American States.

But meddling in Honduras is a bipartisan undertaking.

"If you want to understand who is the real power behind the [Honduran] coup, you need to find out who is paying Lanny Davis," says Robert White, former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and current president of the Center for International Policy. Davis, best known as the lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial, has been lobbying members of Congress and testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in support of the coup.

According to Roberto Lovato, an associate editor at New American Media, Davis represents the Honduran chapter of CEAL, the Business Council of Latin America, which strongly backed the coup. Davis told Lovato, "I'm proud to represent businessmen who are committed to the rule of law."

But White says the coup had more to do with profits than law. "Coups happen because very wealthy people want them and help to make them happen, people who are used to seeing the country as a money machine and suddenly see social legislation on behalf of the poor as a threat to their interests," says White. "The average wage of a worker in free trade zones is 77 cents per hour." According to the World Bank, 59% of Hondurans live below the poverty line.

The United States is also involved in the coup through a network of agencies that funnel money and training to anti-government groups. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contribute to right-wing organizations that supported the coup, including the Peace and Democracy Movement and the Civil Democratic Union. Many of the officers that bundled Zelaya off to San Jose were trained at the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation, the former "School for the Americas" that has seen torturers and coup leaders from all over Latin America pass through its doors.

The Obama administration condemned the coup, but when Zelaya journeyed to the Honduran-Nicaragua border, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced him for being "provocative." It was a strange statement, since the State Department said nothing about a report by the Committee of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras charging 1,100 human rights violations by the coup regime, including detentions, assaults, and murder.

Human rights violations by the coup government have been condemned by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the International Observer Mission, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Committee to Protest Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders.

Davis claims that the coup was a "legal" maneuver to preserve democracy. But that's a hard argument to make, given some of its architects. One is Fernando Joya, a former member of Battalion 316, a paramilitary death squad. Joya fled the country after being charged with kidnapping and torturing several students in the 1980s, but he has now resurfaced as a "special security advisor" to the coup makers. He recently gave a TV interview that favorably compared the 1973 Chilean coup to the June 28 Honduran coup.

According to Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York University, the coup makers also included the extremely right-wing Catholic organization, Opus Dei, whose roots go back to the fascist regime of Spanish caudillo Francisco Franco.

In the old days, when the United States routinely overthrew governments that displeased it, the Marines would have gone in, as they did in Guatemala and Nicaragua, or the CIA would have engineered a coup by the local elites. No one has accused U.S. intelligence of being involved in the Honduran coup, and American troops in the country are keeping a low profile. But the fingerprints of U.S. institutions like the NED, USAID, and School for the Americas — plus bipartisan lobbyists, powerful corporations, and dedicated Cold War warriors — are all over the June takeover.

Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.

More Wacky Doodle Fear Mail "First 6 Months"

2009-08-15T12:10:00.000-06:00

My favorite is number one...What's more American than fkng w English Royalty..Wasn't King George her grandpa? I love the whole concept of monarchy "Oh hey everybody....did I tell you Jesus wants me to be big boss and give me all your stuff"

#2 I only wish an American leader would tell the Saudis to step off.

I am particularly puzzled by # 3 I've been living here in Nicaragua over three years now and that would have been front page headlines, billboards up and the the carretera Masaya..

Again #4 if Hugo and O'Bama had a petting party I would wearing a boot leg photo tee shirt of the occasion by now..

#5 how dare he support a popular freely elected president

#6 Against? Honduras see above freely elected president

#7 Not the good old days of the VietNam Peace(?) Talks when they argued for days about the shape of the table. Maybe we could request a Jesus shaped conference table in Iraq..

#8 The Corporatocracy aka The Empire gets what it want irregardless of which flavored president is in the white house

#9 See above

# 10 This one has puzzled me from it's inception...Anyway to hell w the retards if they can't take a joke...HEY not the Downs kids the wing nuts

#11 See number 8

#12 I ain't afraid of no ghost

# 13 Like foreign spooks don't already have Google

#15 WHAT? rich & powerful guys cheating on their taxes? Right Wing Left Wing Chicken Wing

I am still recovering from my flu and need to take a siesta in this aft heat...Feel free to help

"Obama's First Six Months' Accomplishments"

1. Offended the Queen of England.

2. Bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia.

3. Praised the Marxist Daniel Ortega.

4. Kissed Socialist Hugo Chavez on the cheek.

5. Endorsed the Socialist Evo Morales of Bolivia.

6. Sided with Hugo Chavez and Communist Fidel Castro against Honduras.

7. Announced we would meet with Iranians with no pre-conditions while they're building their nuclear weapons.

8. Gave away billions to AIG also without pre-conditions.

9. Expanded the bailouts.

10. Insulted everyone who has ever loved a Special Olympian.

11. Doubled our national debt.

12. Announced the termination of our new missile defense system the day after North Korea launched an ICBM.

13. Released information on U.S. intelligence gathering despite urgings of his own CIA director and the prior four CIA directors.

14. Accepted without comment that five of his cabinet members cheated on their taxes and two other nominees withdrew after they couldn't take the heat.

15. Appointed a Homeland Security Chief who identified military veterans and abortion opponents as "dangers to the nation."

16. Ordered that the word "terrorism" no longer be used and instead refers to such acts as "man made disasters."

17. Circled the globe to publicly apologize for America's world leadership.

18. Told the Mexican president that the violence in their country was because of us.

19. Politicized the census by moving it into the White House from the Department of Commerce.

20. Appointed as Attorney General the man who orchestrated the forced removal and expulsion to Cuba of a 9-year-old whose mother died trying to bring him to freedom in the United States.

21. Salutes as heroes three Navy SEALS who took down three terrorists who threatened one American life and the next day announces members of the Bush administration may stand trial for "torturing" three 9/11 terrorists by pouring water up their noses.

22. Low altitude photo shoot of Air Force One over New York City that frightened thousands of New Yorkers.

23. Sent his National Defense Advisor to Europe to assure them that the US will no longer treat Israel in a special manner and they might be on their own with the Muslims.

24. Praised Jimmy Carter's trip to Gaza where he sided with terrorist Hamas against Israel.

25. Nationalized General Motors and Chrysler while turning shareholder control over to the unions and freezing out retired investors who owned their bonds. Committed unlimited taxpayer billions in the process.

26. Passed a huge energy tax in the House that will make American industry even less competitive while costing homeowners thousands per year.

27. Announced nationalized health care "reform" that will strip seniors of their Medicare, cut pay of physicians, increase taxes yet another $1 trillion, and put everyone on rationed care with government bureaucrats deciding who gets care and who doesn't.

Bloomberg: Daschle says, "Health care reform will not be pain free. Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them," while former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm says seniors have "a duty to die."

If this does not sufficiently raise your ire, just remember that the President, Senators and Congressmen have their own special gold plated health care plan which is guaranteed the remainder of their lives and they are not subject to this new law if they pass it.

Please use the power of the Internet to get this message out. Talk it up at the grassroots level. We have an election coming up in one year and four months where we can reverse the dangerous direction of the Obama administration and its allies.

If you disagree - do nothing."
WORLD CLASS RIGHT WING SENTIMENT!

Fever and Flu in the tropics

2009-08-14T18:16:00.000-06:00

I don't get sick much but when a flu like fever kicks in here in the jungle it may be cause for alarm. Four days of bed rest sweating and shivering while dreaming of a hot water shower...The fever finally broke last night. After I broke my multi day fast with half a fruit salad and some tea I began to feel human again. This morning with some effort I managed to almost finish a plate of eggs and gallo pinto so I believe I have weathered another storm..
Dengue is the scariest thing to me. The mosquitoes that carry dengue fly and bite during the day...They are smaller than other mosquitoes and generally were hatched less than a 100 yards from where they bite...This is not reassuring to someone that lives directly above the natural storm sewers called arroyos... I figure Swine Flu is for places that can afford the vaccine..
Back soon with more WTF is wrong with you people stuff manaña... Ahh but where to start? Birther? Deathers? Death Panels? Xtians? so many idiots so little time.
I had two unexpected uninsured heart attacks in my very early 40s (have a smoke), went into foreclosure on my shack and came very close to losing everything including my life. Can you say preexisitng condition? ..So I may not be impartial on the health care issue...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever

Powerful not so secret right wing Xtian Cult,the new chosen ones seek sex power & money at everyone elses' expense

2009-08-10T14:48:00.000-06:00

"Totalitarians for God" Spread Poison Web

Chris Floyd http://www.uruknet.info/?p=56225

July 21, 2009

In a new piece for Salon.com, Jeff Sharlet has more on the domestic side of the militarist-fundamentalist drive to devour the state, which we wrote about here yesterday. Sharlet writes of "The Family" -- the self-described "Christian Mafia" centered on the "C Street House" in Washington -- which for decades has spread its invisible, insidious influence throughout the U.S. government, while supporting mass-murdering dictators, rapacious crony capitalism -- and providing convenient cover and absolution for the high crimes and sexual misdemeanors of its members.

Sharlet has written of The Family for years, in articles for Harper's and in his book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. He has described in great detail -- and from the inside -- a disturbing, decades-old network of big-time power players guided by cranks who push Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, and Stalin as worthy role models in the pursuit of the Family's ultimate goal: a militarized, unfettered "totalitarianism of God." You would think that Sharlet's earlier revelations would have brought intensive, horrified scrutiny to bear on this nest of democracy-hating accomplices of atrocity and corruption -- but the stories never gained much traction in the corporate media. Who cares about all that boring stuff?

But now that several of The Family's members and associates have found themselves caught in good old juicy sex scandals, suddenly the media has "re-discovered" the C Street House, and shined at least a little more light on that dark corner. Because as we all know, the only offense that an American politician must ever pay for is a sexual indiscretion. When it comes to murder, torture, oppression, war crimes, military aggression, tyranny, etc -- well, it's always best to "move on" from such unseemly doings, and stay "focused on the future, not the past."

Although truth to tell, even sexual indiscretions are increasingly unpaid for by our coddled, unaccountable elites. Look at Bill Clinton, swanning around the world like a rock star, swimming in his millions. And of course, all rightwing pols caught with their pants down can always play the "fallen sinner redeemed by God" card, and start all over again. Clinton also played this card for all it was worth, of course; recall his hilarious "counseling sessions" with various high-profile religious leaders, who, we are to believe, sat down with the President of the United States and gave him earnest, prayerful counsel on how to keep his pecker in his pants.

Even so, messing around in the sexual cellarage still causes a politician more of a spot of bother than, say, authorizing a drone strike (i.e., "targeted assassination," i.e., "extrajudicial assassination," i.e., "act of mass murder") that kills dozens of innocent people. The irony, of course, as Magnificent Valor points out, is that these sexual indiscretions are often the only interesting and vaguely human thing these time-serving, box-ticking, elitist automatons have ever done.

In any case, the wanton willy-waggling of Mark Sanford, John Ensign, Chip Pickering and other "Family" stalwarts has provided us with yet another glimpse at the truly strange and deranged power structure that governs our lives. You should read Sharlet's piece in full, but here are a few choice bits:

The Family likes to call itself a "Christian Mafia," but it began 74 years ago as an anti-New Deal coalition of businessmen convinced that organized labor was under the sway of Satan. The Great Depression, they believed, was a punishment from God for what they viewed as FDR's socialism. The Family's goal was the "consecration" of America to God, first through the repeal of New Deal reforms, then through the aggressive expansion of American power during the Cold War...
Historically, the Family has been strongly Republican [Sharlet includes a copious list of current power-players in the Family ranks], but it includes Democrats, too. There's Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, for instance, a vocal defender of putting the Ten Commandments in public places, and Sen. Mark Pryor, the pro-war Arkansas Democrat responsible for scuttling Obama's labor agenda. Sen. Pryor explained to me the meaning of bipartisanship he'd learned through the Family: "Jesus didn't come to take sides. He came to take over." And by Jesus, the Family means the Family.
Family leaders consider their political network to be Christ's avant garde, an elite that transcends not just conventional morality but also earthly laws regulating lobbying. ... Founder Abraham Vereide decided that the group could be more effective by working personally with politicians. "The more invisible you can make your organization," Vereide's successor, current leader Doug Coe preaches, "the more influence you can have."
...I met [David Coe, Doug Coe's son and heir apparent], when I lived for several weeks as a member of the Family... Attempting to explain what it means to be chosen for leadership like King David was -- or Mark Sanford, according to his own estimate -- he asked a young man who'd put himself, body and soul, under the Family's authority, "Let's say I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?" The man guessed that Coe would probably think that he was a monster. "No," answered Coe, "I wouldn't." Why? Because, as a member of the Family, he's among what Family leaders refer to as the "new chosen." If you're chosen, the normal rules don't apply.

If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about our nation's rulers, then I don't know what will. And of course, this "three rapes--so what?" philosophy of unaccountability is not confined to members of "The Family": it permeates the entire power structure.

And as we noted yesterday, this drive toward "Christian totalitarianism" seeks to use the military as one of its primary vehicles of subversion:

Christian right leader -- and Watergate felon -- Chuck Colson, converted through the efforts of the Family, has boasted of it as a "veritable underground of Christ's men all through government." What do they do? Rep. Zach Wamp, one of Ensign's fellow C Streeters who's been in the news for defending the Family's secrecy, has teamed up with Family-linked Reps. Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla., and John R. Carter, R-Texas, on an obscure appropriations committee to help greenlight tens of millions in federal funds for new megachurch-style chapels on military bases around the country.

But of course, one of the main thrusts of The Family's business has been succoring murderous dictators around the world:

One needn't be a Marxist to find fault with the Family's mash-up of New Testament and unfettered capitalism -- Adam Smith himself would have recognized that theology as a disingenuous form of self-interest by proxy. Such interests have led the Family into some strange alliances over the years. Seduced by the Indonesian dictator Suharto's militant anti-communism, they described the murder of hundreds of thousands that brought him to power as a "spiritual revolution," and sent delegations of congressmen and oil executives to pray to Jesus with the Muslim leader. In Africa, they anointed the Somali killer Siad Barre as God's man and sent Sen. Grassley and a defense contractor as emissaries. Barre described himself as a "Koranic Marxist," but he agreed to pray to Grassley's American Christ in return for American military aid, which he then used to wreak a biblical terror on his nation. It has not yet recovered.

Needless to say, while this group of gilded sectarians leave mounds of corpses in their political gaming around the world, their main business is -- what else? -- business:

[In their Family-paid junkets, members are] representing "Jesus plus nothing," as Doug Coe puts it, the "totalitarianism of God," in the words of an early Family leader, a vision that encompasses not just social issues but also the kind of free-market fundamentalism that is the real object of devotion for Ensign, Coburn, Pickering, Wamp and Sanford, along with Family insiders such as Sens. DeMint, Sam Brownback and Chuck Grassley. At the heart of the Family's spiritual advice for its proxies in Congress is the conviction that the market's invisible hand represents the guidance of God, and that God wants his "new chosen" to look out for one another.

As we all know, one of the most dangerous creatures on earth is the bullshitter who believes his own bullshit. There is absolutely no doubt that Adolf Hitler went to his death thinking he was a swell guy, a worthy, righteous man more sinned against than sinning. The self-absolution -- and self-hypnosis -- of fanatical certitude is a deadly toxin; not just for the individual, but for the world. We see the fruits of Family-style fundamentalism all around us today, in the blood-soaked ruin of the Terror Wars, in the collapse of communities, families, individuals -- and the world economy -- from the rapine of "godly" market extremism, even down to the rise in teen pregnancies and sexual disease, which are, of course, most prevalent and growing in the very areas dominated by the Dominationists' wilfully ignorant, sexually obsessed sectarianism, as the Guardian reports. These are real lives, of real people, blighted -- or blotted out -- by the divinely-robed barbarism of their leaders.

What the elites reserve for themselves -- security, assistance, wealth, power, personal license -- they deny to others. Indeed, this denial is essential to their identity as the "chosen;" if others have what they have, how can they be exalted, set apart, special? Thus they must be implacable enemies of the very idea of the common good -- at home, abroad, at every level of life. It is, at its heart, a sinister vision of life -- yet it has become the unspoken, unquestioned ruling assumption underlying our society today.

not suggesting the U.S. government was involved. It is about business

2009-08-08T18:40:00.000-06:00

Conn Hallinan offers an article titled Honduran Coup: The U.S. Connection that does some dot-connecting. No smoking gun (yet) but more to think about. He is not suggesting the U.S. government was involved. It is about business which comes as no surprise.

A lot of this info we have already discussed here but here is one that was new to me.

An outbreak of Grisi Siknis, which afflicted 120 teenage girls is being blamed on a mysterious drifter who admitted to practicing witchcraft.

2009-08-07T20:07:00.000-06:00

August 13, 2009 | San José Costa Rica

KAMLA, PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua – The outbreak of an enigmatic illness that was tormenting indigenous communities with bouts of collective hysteria appears to have subsided after a lynch mob recently captured and nearly killed a man they accuse of causing the epidemic.

Frightening Experience: Joysi and Rafaela Chow, left and right, were able to identify the witch who they claim was responsible for the outbreak of grisi siknis.

The recent outbreak of grisi siknis, which afflicted 120 teenage girls and forced three schools to close temporarily, is being blamed on a mysterious drifter who admitted to practicing witchcraft. The man's confession came after he was captured by an indigenous mob in the town of Kamla, bound with rope and beaten for hours, according to witnesses.

“They were preparing a noose to hang him when I showed up and made them stop,” said Flordina Francis-Nihiwaya, the community judge of Kamla.

Francis-Nihiwaya said the suspected warlock, identified by villagers as José Yassir Fernando Joel Downs, had been in town for about six months and was reportedly taking care of a family member's house.

No one knew much about the stranger or suspected him of practicing black arts until three neighborhood women – Joysi, Rafaela and Alicia Chow – were afflicted with grisi siknis last May and identified the man during their hysteria-induced nightmares.

“He was flying on the wind with a knife in his hand and he was trying to kill me,” remembers 15-year-old Joysi, speaking in her native Miskito tongue.

Her sister Rafaela, 20, and her mother Alicia, 35, claim they had the same nightmare. That was all the evidence the villagers needed to organize a lynch mob and put an end to the madness.

Traditional healer José Manzanares, below, thinks the witch could strike again.

Grisi siknis – or “crazy sickness,” in the Miskito language – is a powerful and puzzling cultural-bound syndrome that affects certain indigenous and ethnic groups – mostly teenage women – on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast.

Also known by a the indigenous names “bla,” “wakni,” “bubulna” and “lasa prukan” – Miskito and Mayangna words meaning “cra ziness,” “dizziness,” or “possession by evil spirits” – the strange illness has existed perhaps for centuries, though few have studied it or been able to explain its origins and meaning.

There are various theories and beliefs a bout grisi siknis. Some think it's possession by the devil or dwarfs, while others think it's a mysterious cultural expression of stress, fear, anxiety and repressed libidinal feelings. U.S. anthropologist Philip Dennis, considered the foremost expert on the topic, says it's “a wild, orgiastic rite of sex and violence.''

But no one knows for sure. And to complicate matters, the syndrome appears to be evolving and manifesting itself in increasingly violent forms in recent years.

Victims of grisi siknis can be sick for days, weeks or longer. Their behavior alternates between states of hypnotic trance and manic rage. People afflicted with grisi siknis are often reported to have super-human strength, whereby a young girl can overpower five or six men twice her size.

In almost all cases, grisi siknis is an extremely disruptive and traumatic event for individuals, families and entire communities, some of which have literally been destroyed by outbreaks (NT, April 3).

In the case of the Chow family of Kamla, the attack was violent and frightening.

Family members said that during the grisi siknis nightmares, the three young women tried to kill themselves with knives, by drowning themselves in the nearby river and by jumping off the porch of their wooden-stilt house.

“We had to hide all the knives in the house; everyone was very scared,” said the grandmother, speaking through a translator. She said it took several neighbors to restrain Joysi, who is about five-feet tall and weighs around 80 pounds.

Joysi and her sister say they don't remember anything about the ordeal other than their nightmare of Mr. Downs riding on the wind. Several traditional healers tried to cure them with different herbal potions for wind spirits and dwarfs, but Joysi said she would fall back into madness “every time the wind would blow.”

That's when the lynch mob assembled to pay Downs at visit. At his house, the group found a book of black magic, notebooks full of the names of everyone in the village, potions and amulets buried in his yard. They also found limes that had the names of grisi victims stuck to into them with pins, according to witnesses.

As the suspected male witch was beaten by the villagers, he reportedly warned them that if he died his victims would never be cured.

That's when community judge Francis-Nihiwaya intervened to save Downs in exchange for his promise to cure the victims. By digging up potions he had buried in the yard of Alicia Chow, the Chow women were cured of their nightmares and hysteria

“He burned herbs to cure other victims,” Francis-Nihiwaya said.

Downs was then taken to the police station in Bilwi and thrown in jail. His spell books were burned in the courtyard of the police station.

Two days later, however, Downs was released from jail and fled town.

“Witchcraft is not a crime under Nicaragua's Penal Code, so the po lice couldn't hold him in jail without charges,” explained José Manzanares, of the regional government council.

Before disappearing, Downs reportedly told his captors that he had learned witchcraft in Orinoco, a Garifuna village in the South Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAS). Residents of Kamla, however, suspect the mysterious warlock was lying about his origins. They assume he is probably from a remote area near the banks of the Río Coco, on the Honduran border – the same area where the absent family member whose house he was sitting is apparently from, according to the townspeople.

Manzanares, a traditional healer for the government who has been dispatched to various remote communities to respond to grisi siknis outbreaks in recent years, says he thinks Downs was also responsible for last year's outbreak in the tiny village of Santa Fe, where 38 people were afflicted.

“When we got to Santa Fe last year, the villagers told me they had run a warlock named Downs out of town,” Manzanares said.

The healer noted that Downs' arrival in Kamla corresponds to the time Santa Fe claims to have run the witch out of town.

As a result, Manzanares and other authorities now think that Kamla, a small Miskito village 6 kilometers northwest of Bilwi, was ground zero for the most recent outbreak of grisi siknis, which started last April and afflicted more than 120 people in the surrounding area.

Manzanares says witches can provoke grisi siknis outbreaks even from a great distance, if they know their victims' names.

No one in Kamla or Bilwi has been afflicted with grisi siknis since Downs was run out of town and his books burned. Though his whereabouts are unknown and some villagers fear he will seek revenge from afar, most of the victims have reportedly made full recoveries in the past month.

Joyci Chow says she, too, is feeling better, but she's not 100 percent recovered.

“I still can't go in the back of the yard behind my house,” she said, motioning to the area where she first was afflicted with grisi siknis. “There is still something buried back there that we can't find. Every time I go there, my leg gets numb, I start to feel dizzy and I feel the grisi siknis coming back.”

Honduran Military Tells Protesters to like it or lump it

2009-08-05T09:53:00.000-06:00

August 5, 2009

Coup General: "We're Going After the Protest Leaders"

By Al Giordano

AUGUST 4, 2009, TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS: Five members of the Honduras coup regime's military brass went on the pro-coup Televicentro Channel 5 from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. this morning in the capital city to defend their actions over the past 38 days since they kidnapped the elected President and forcibly exiled him from the country.

There, General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, issued an exasperated threat to the leaders of the social movements organized against the coup:

"They lie and they lie and they lie forty times until it becomes the truth when they call us golpistas (coup mongers). Saying that we're golpistas is a strategy. They call us 'assassins.' It's an effort to demoralize the troops. When they do this, they are committing a crime, first and foremost, that of defamation. We're going to go after them. They are acting with impunity."

In sum, the coup's maximum military leader is apoplectic that the Honduran population sees the coup as a coup, and the military that enforces it as part of that coup, and he wants to seek scapegoats for the fact that public opinion has turned against him, as if public opinion might change or at least shut up if only enough repression could be heaped upon it.

Offering heavy doses of defensiveness and delusion, the coup's military leaders spent an hour this morning on TV 5's Frente a Frente ("Face to Face") program offering their spin on the events that are shaking this nation of 7.5 million people to the core.

Comandante General Miguel Angel García Padget of the Armed Forces said that the coup was necessary to stop "socialism and communism dressed as democracy." He referred to the right wing authoritarian governments that preceded the Latin American wave of center-left electoral victories as "the true democracies."

Rest of the story at: http://tiny.cc/loveitorleaveit

an arrogant and unrepentant ruling class, with close ties to the United States

2009-08-04T15:42:00.000-06:00

LATIN AMERICA - The right strikes back

The reason may well be the same - the combination of the decline of American power with the continuing centrality of the United States in world politics. At one and the same time, the United States is unable to impose itself and is nonetheless expected by everyone to enter the playing field on their side.
What happened in Honduras? Honduras has long been one of the surest pillars of Latin American oligarchies - an arrogant and unrepentant ruling class, with close ties to the United States and site of a major American military base. Its own military was carefully recruited to avoid any taint of officers with populist sympathies.
In the last elections, Manuel ("Mel") Zelaya was elected president. A product of the ruling classes, he was expected to continue to play the game the way Honduran presidents always play it. Instead, he edged leftward in his policies.

Rest of the story at alterinfos

http://www.alterinfos.org/spip.php?article3626

Iran's invisible mega Embassy in Nicaragua

2009-08-04T15:21:00.000-06:00

July 14, 2009

Iran's invisible giant warlike mega Embassy in Nicaragua

"The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in May. "And you can only imagine what that's for."

"Iran recently established a huge embassy in Managua, Nancy Menges of the Center for Security Policy told a House committee last year."

Iran's embassy in Managua is now the largest diplomatic mission in the city," wrote Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute. ."

But here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy.

Rest of the story from the Washington Post http://tiny.cc/CxEfx

A short history of why we eat oil, can't smoke pot, and why assault weapons are so expensive in our hour of need

2009-07-31T12:35:00.000-06:00

More inspired writing from my pal and fellow expat Joe Bageant
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/

July 31, 2009
The Bastards Never Die

A short history of why we eat oil, can't smoke pot, and why assault
weapons are so expensive in our hour of need

(With running commentary by THE SCREAMING MAN)

Well, for starters, the above title is a damned lie, since this little
screed is not a history. It's just rumination on the tilting point at
which Americans started the slide into the deepest sort of cultivated
consumer consciousness -- which is to say our corporate managed
engorgement and swinedom at the service of the rich.

Very rich families and corporatists, to whom, as in earlier articles,
we shall refer to as "the bastards," have always been with us. Even
Tom Jefferson thought periodic revolution against wealth and authority
was desirable to keep these bastards in check. Which implies that he
figured they would inevitably get us by the throat down on the floor
from time to time.

But the bastards scared the hell out of later presidents too. Abe
Lincoln feared the large corporations born of business profiteering
during the U.S. Civil War -- the military industrial complex of the
day -- easily constituted the greatest threat to the American
republic. Being president and all, he couldn't call them what they
were, and settled for the term "money power," and predicted that,
"money power will … work upon the prejudices of the people until all
wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

And as everyone knows, Dwight Eisenhower famously feared the same
military-industrial complex was busy taking over the nation. What we
never hear about though, is that Eisenhower's definition of the
complex included among the bastards, not only the military defense
industry corporations, but also right alongside them the news media
and the university and private research establishments.

If nothing else can be said for the bastards, we must admit they do
plan far ahead, (or seemed to anyway, before the latest meltdown) even
if only to screw us blind, which is usually the case. Since the early
robber baron era of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, just after the
turn of the century, the bastards understood that the key to national
domination was oil -- creating an economic culture based on petroleum
-- and planned toward that end. Big corps such as E.I. DuPont had
invested heavily in the oil industry since the turn of the century,
and especially since the 1930s creating synthetic materials such as
plastics, in which the public was decidedly uninterested in buying.
Then World War II came along, creating big demand for synthetics such
as nylon for parachutes, tires, tents, ropes. DuPont and similar
bastards had drawn a royal flush.

SCREAMING MAN HERE!: RIGHT! IT'S THE ONLY SURE RACKET. ASK ICE MAN
CHENEY. YOU MAKE STUFF, SELL IT TO THE PENTAGON MOB AND RAM THE PRICE
CLEAR UP THEIR ASSES. THEN THEY BLOW THE STUFF UP, INCENERATE IT, AND
COME BACK FOR MORE AT DOUBLE THE PRICE BECAUSE NOW THERE'S A SHORTAGE!
FOR A FAST DEPENDABLE BUCK, YOU CAN'T BEAT INDUSTRIAL SCALE WARFARE
WITH A GODDAMNED STICK!

(Ahem!)

Unfortunately all good things end, no matter how bloody profitable.
But those super-expanded wartime corporations that had cranked out
planes and tanks were not going to downsize just because we had run
out of Dresdens to bomb. They intended to remain dominant and even
expand. With the war drawing to a close, and with fewer burning jeep
tires on the battlefields and fewer parachutes left dangling in the
trees of Belgium, American citizens were going to have to eat the
slack. The bastards would have to stuff'em fuller than a Christmas
goose; make them eat petroleum based synthetics, if it came down to
that. Which it eventually did of course, in the form of petrochemical
agriculture, food dyes, etc.

SCREAMING MAN: YOU GOTTA A FUCKING PROBLEM WITH NUMBER TWO RED DYE OR
SOMETHING, ASSHOLE? DON'T BULLSHIT THESE PEOPLE, YOU FLAMING OLD
FRAUD! I'VE SEEN YOU EAT A WHOLE BOX OF PINK HO-HOS BEHIND A BOTTLE OF
JAY DEE AND SOME COLUMBIAN BUD! AM I GONNA HAVE TO TAKE MY NEEDLE
NOSED PLIERS TO YOUR LYING ASS?

Plastics, heralded as durable and everlasting (and today lamented for
the same reason) eventually gobbled up nearly every other material
market, in the from of jewelry, dashboards, dishes, clothing, napkin
rings, perfume bottles, knickknacks, flooring and carpeting, resin
building materials, vinyl raincoats and boots, molded furniture, radio
sets … America was remade in the image of open chain hydrocarbons.
That nine tenths of what was produced and marketed was unnecessary,
and downright shitty did not go unnoticed by the American public,
which had been deeply distrustful of plastics and synthetics from the
time they were first ballyhooed at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.
People were just not buying the sales job. But the combination of
wartime shortage frustrations and massive industrial public relations
delivered the one-two punch, and the consumer knuckled under. Or
perhaps they were just worn down by industry PR, which enlisted the
help of trusted figures such as Frank Capra and Walt Disney, among
others, along with in-school industry propaganda for the next
generation: "Our story of the miracle of plastics starts with an oil
well in a faraway place by the Persian Gulf … "

AND IT GODDAMNED WELL IS GONNA END THERE TOO! IN ABOUT 15 MINUTES, IF
IT HASN'T ALREADY! DOES ANYBODY REALIZE THE NUMBER OF SARAH PALIN
BLOW-UP DOLLS SHIPPED TO THE TROOPS IN IRAQ? IF THAT'S THE KIND OF
ARMY WE'RE SENDING TO KILL OFF THE PALM VERMIN, THEN WE'RE GONERS
ALREADY!

As I was saying, the bastards not only created an economy by and for
themselves, based on the black sticky stuff, they also built a
civilization. From the tallest building right down to the
petrochemical soaked dirt in which the food supply is grown, and all
along the chain through processing and plastic packaging and
distribution, The black stuff was cheap and it was plentiful, so long
as the bastards were willing to buy off the top dog sheiks like ibn
Saud, who would in turn keep the dusky peasantry in line through good
old perennials such as beheadings and public stonings.

SCREAMING MAN MISSES THOSE POST 9/11 BEHEADING VIDEOS, DON'T YOU? IT
WAS SO EASY TO TELL WHO AMERICA'S ENEMIES WERE THEN. BUT AT LEAST
WE'VE STILL GOT BEN BERNANKE AND BILL GATES.

During the 1940s AND '50S while ibn Saud was fathering some 60
children by 22 wives in Arabia and dishing out corporeal punishment to
the far flung wretches of his kingdom, here at home the corporations
were doing their own hit jobs on the this nation's peasantry -- the
farmers. Petroleum based synthetics, with legislative help, wiped out
one quarter of the domestic cotton market in the first few years
following the war, along with flax for linen, and hemp fiber,
replacing them with ugly but profitable synthetic nylon and polymer
textiles. Not to mention replacement of literally hundreds of farm
produced natural organic materials for medicines, cosmetics, milk by
products such as casein for glues and paints, with synthetic
petro-based commodities, all of which were mercilessly hammered into
the populace as "miracles of modern science."

Kings may croak, but cash lives forever

The fact that the bastards were corporate entities made them more
powerful than any robber baron's best wet dream, because their power
and reach extended beyond human mortality. Deathless corporations and
trusts replaced the mortal thieves such as Rockefeller and Morgan; and
despite the advent of income taxes, capital continued to aggregate in
the bastards' coffers, particularly financial bastards, at what was
seen then as an unimaginable scale. "Money for nothin' and chicks for
free ..."

Powered entirely by balance sheets, and existing for the sole le
purpose of wealth accumulation, parting with any assets was
antithetical to their very purpose. Not to mention the logic of the
wealth based stockholders. The majority of assets were held by elite,
whose main accomplishment was then and still is coming from families
that commandeered some substantial portion of the public medium of
exchange in order to derive more wealth.

WHOA THERE FATSO! WHOSE FAMILY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HERE? PARIS
HILTON'S? OR MAYBE ALICE WALTON'S? PARIS HILTON HAS EARNED EVERY JEWEL
ENCRUSTED THONG IN HER CLOSET! FROM TUSH TO TITTIES, WE'VE SEEN
EVERYTHING PARIS HILTON HAS TO OFFER. AND IT'S WORTH A FEW BILLION TO
KEEP HER IN CIRCULATION. GIVES THE MEN OF THIS MISERABLE WORKHOUSE
NATION SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN. SOMETHING TANGIBLE. SOMETHING THEY CAN
ACTUALLY SEE AND WHACK OFF TO. HER DIRTY FLICK, "1 NIGHT IN PARIS" WAS
A GIFT TO ALL MANKIND. LET THE LESBIANS FIND THEIR OWN PARIS HILTON …
BUT ALICE WALTON? SCREAMING MAN WOULDN'T FUCK HER WITH YOUR WHANG,
BUSTER! THAT MISERABLE DRUNKEN BITCH RAN DOWN AND KILLED A FIFTY YEAR
OLD WOMAN IN TEXAS. WHAT'D SHE GET? A $925 FINE! SHE HAS 20 BILLION
DOLLARS AND GETS OFF FOR LESS THAN A THOU. AND WHAT DOES ALICE GIVE
US? CHINK MADE FLIPFLOPS AND GODDAMNED PLASTIC PATIO CHAIRS THAT
BUCKLE LIKE OBAMA AT A BAILOUT PARTY! GIVE THE SCREAMING MAN PARIS
HILTON ANY DAY. NOW, FATSO … YOU WERE SAYING?

Hell, I can't remember. Oh yes, the bastards. Once you are born into
the Royal Court of the Kingdom of Bastardy and are issued your caviar
spoon, no further effort is required to amass capital. You simply keep
on withholding capital from those who had create it -- the working
masses -- keep captive the economic lifeblood upon which all others
depend. Observe, for instance, the banking industry's present refusal
to unass any money for credit, despite the hundreds of billions handed
to them as a taxpayers' gift, a bailout AFTER they'd ripped off their
shareholders and customers, and looted their own institutions from the
inside.

UPSET ARE YOU, FATSO? LET THE SCREAMER TELL YOU HOW IT REALLY IS. IT
WAS ALL AN ACT. THE FED WAS JUST PRINTING AND HANDING OUT WORTHLESS
WALLPAPER -- WHICH THE BANKING BASTARDS, WITH ALL DUE APLOMB, WILL PAY
BACK IN KIND. THEN THE BASTARDS WILL BE DECLARED SOLVENT, FAT AND
HEALTHY AS A BUNCH OF PARK BEARS. MEANWHILE, YOU GODDAMNED PEASANTS
WILL CONTINUE TO ANGUISH OVER THE BAILOUTS LONG AFTER THE REAL RIP-OFF
IS IN. THE ONE YOU NEVER SAW AND CAN'T EVEN WRAP YOUR SORRY POINTED
FUCKING HEADS AROUND. THE REAL DOUGH IS SPREAD ACROSS DUBAI, MONACO,
LONDON, AND FOR SAFETY'S SAKE, BEIJING. WHILE YOU ANGUISH, PATE OF
UNBORN VEAL CALF IS BEING SERVED TO THE REAL BASTARDS UP ON THE 50th
FLOOR. THEY POUR ANOTHER GLASS OF 1999 PERRIER-JOUET, AND CHORTLE AT
THE DISMEMBERMENT OF A NO-TALENT HACK LIKE BERNIE MADOFF. THAT HAPLESS
SMALLTIME JEW GREASEBALL WHO CAME INTO THE GAME WITH $5,000 IN PENNY
STOCKS THAT HE BOUGHT WITH MONEY HE MADE INSTALLING SPRINKLERS. NEVER
A REAL PLAYER LIKE US, EVEN WITH HIS BULLSHIT WALL STREET TITLES. JUST
A DUMB FUCK FROM QUEENS WHO DIDN'T KNOW WHEN TO QUIT A SCAM. LET THE
SERFS GNAW AT HIM. KEEPS 'EM BUSY AND OUT OF OUR HAIR. LOOK, THEY'VE
PULLED ONE OF HIS ARMS OUT OF ITS SOCKET. CHRIST, NOW THEY'VE RUINED
LUNCH."

THAT'S WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON, FATSO.

The bastards. Why have they lasted this long? Purely on their own
merits, most American corporations probably would not have survived
the 1930s. By then our wildly fluctuating economy was already
demonstrating the folly of overly concentrated capital and power. What
was needed, said the big players who'd wrecked the economy with their
uncontrolled speculation and greed, was, lo and beshit, a controlled
economy! One even more controlled by corporations. Problem was, the
only entity capable of such control was the government. And
unfortunately, the Constitution of the United States was founded on a
separation of business and state to the same degree as that of church
and state.

If the bastards were to run the economy, if Americans were going to be
pistol whipped down the road to "prosperity through unprecedented
consumption," then government authority by Constitutional law would be
necessary. As a 1937 shareholder's report of the E.I. DuPont Company
"the revenue-raising power of government [taxation] must be converted
into "an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas" and a
"social reorganization." Uh oh! Just whose sudden new ideas? And what
kind of social reorganization?

The report stated bluntly that to realize further extensive profit
from its wartime investments, the U.S. government "must be the primary
tool." While their plans to use the government were put into the
shareholder's report, they were never publicly discussed.

FDR saves the bastards' bacon

The chance to pull it off came ironically or maybe not so ironically,
with Roosevelt's New Deal. FDR was, contrary to the subsequent
hagiography that has grown up around his grave, was first and foremost
a capitalist and was determined to save capitalism. Given his affluent
background and times, he, like everyone else, could not imagine
anything but capitalism as the nation's economic system. Yet nowhere
in the Constitution is capitalism specified as America's preferred
economic system. His lifelong circle of friends and associates
consisted entirely of the elites of family and corporate wealth, which
meant that it also included some of his enemies. But together they
created a host of "emergency legislation," in much the same fashion as
911 let George W. Bush get away with so much under the excuse of a
national threat. Even allowing for the resistance of some wealthy
elites, FDR favored the bastards' plans toward a thoroughly
corporatized national economy.

The Supreme Court, however, a stickler for details such as the U.S.
Constitution, did not see things Roosy's way. It would take a
rewriting of the U.S. Constitution for the government to crawl into
bed with the corporations. So every piece of legislation FDR and his
cohorts created got snagged in Supreme Court and just kept piling up.

The key for FDR and the Princes of Bastardy turned out to be taxation.
To control society means to control individual behavior. The
Constitution prohibits that, except for those few powers granted in
the Constitution, such as the coinage of money or declaring war.
Throughout the 1930s the public watched FDR and the corporatists duke
it out with the Supreme Court. While the public was engaged in the
debate over FDR's threatened stacking of the court, FDR and the
bastards managed to accomplish their agenda in controlling opposing
social behavior -- taxing it to death. The government is granted the
power to tax by god! And the Roosevelt era saw the art of behavior
modification through taxation perfected.

Now in changing American social behavior through taxation there are
two rules. The first tax must be a very logical one. And the second
must be one created of whole cloth, a manufactured one to counter a
manufactured threat. So after the Supreme Court knuckled under to
FDR's threat to divide up the judicial limelight by appointing more
justices, a more compliant court happily passed a $200 tax on machine
guns -- the equivalent of $3,000 today -- the same tax, incidentally,
that allowed the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division) and the
FBI to invade the Branch Davidians at Waco. It was unconstitutional as
hell. But the court understood public relations. What kind of deranged
fucker needed a machine gun anyway? Well, there was There was John
Dillinger (whose penis was 14 inches long, according to folk legend of
the day, which was either threatening, or vastly intriguing, depending
upon one's sex or moral perspective on life). There was Seymour "Blue
Jaws" Magoon, Bonnie and Clyde, Pittsburg Phil, Baby Face Nelson, Al
Capone, Bummy Davis. And if there was any further doubt, there was
also the fact that the members of Murder Incorporated were Jewish,
Italian or Irish. Ah ha! More proof to the then-majority Anglo
Americans of naked immigrant depravity. So two hundred bucks per tommy
gun it would be under the 1937 Machine Gun Tax Act.

The second tax the court upheld was the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. Most
Americans had never heard the word marijuana. The tax act had adopted
a little known Mexican street term as a name in order to demonize it,
and differentiate it from the thousands of acres of government hemp
being grown for naval ropes, etc. Never mind that in the entire
previous year only a couple of pounds of the stuff were seized by
border police. A $200 an ounce tax had worked on machine guns, so a
$200 tax per ounce was placed on hemp cultivation without permit, and
no permits were issued. And so as an added bonus -- or maybe
intentionally -- the synthetic fiber industry and the plastics
industry saw its most threatening long term competitor, hemp,
eliminated.

And for the first time in the history of the United States the
bastards could use the government to tell farmers what seeds they
could put into the earth. In short order by way of the New Deal,
through various agricultural acts, corporatists, through government
policy, had control over the land even though they did not own it. The
chief competitors to industrial food giants and synthetics industry,
the small farmer producers of thousands of natural goods and raw
materials, were eventually taxed or regulated out of existence. At the
same time, subsidies for big-time agri-biz producers started
snowballing. A nation of consumers of synthetics was cultivated in the
next generation. The result we see around us, obese Americans
willingly wearing the bastards' brands on acrylic clothing … and
guzzling synthetic soft drinks, Americans who've never once considered
that the pizza crusts they gnaw at start out with a grain crop called
wheat.

Ten thousand years of agriculture was synthesized into money. The
soil-to-city chain of small farms, villages, and towns to the great
city markets was destroyed. Those ever more profitable compressed gobs
of humanity in the cities and suburbs could be cultivated for maximum
productivity and profit as the bastards increased their domination of
the needs hierarchy. If you made a movie of this, swapping out the
humans for some sort of large intelligent rodent or insect, and left
everything else as it really is in American life, people would call it
chilling science fiction.

Long story short: The bastards won.

This distillation of how they won, this little piece of feral
scholarship, is sure to be disputed by hairsplitting pinheads in
political science and history departments. The "Oh but …" crowd. Which
is OK with me. Everybody needs a job, I suppose. But that's the view
from here in the cheap seats among the non-players, the fuckees in the
great fuck-the-proles game of bastard politics and ever bigger money.
Call this a pulp comic summary of post war history. It's not a very
damned funny history. Maybe that's why we choose not to remember it.
Here in the United States of Amnesia. We cannot retain what happened
last week, much less history. But I'm trying here folks. I really am.

SCREAMING MAN: BULLSHIT FOLKS! DON'T BELIEVE A WORD FROM THIS
GODDAMNED BEER SOAKED, REDNECK WHO CAN'T SPELL AND THINKS HE'S A
GENIUS BECAUSE HE KNOWS HOW TO BRING UP WIKIPEDIA ON HIS BROWSER. IF
AND WHEN HE'S SOBER ENOUGH. THE SCREAMING MAN HAS BEEN TRAPPED INSIDE
BAGEANT'S BLOATED, DISEASED CARCASS FOR SIXTY TWO YEARS, AND THE
SCREAMER CAN TELL YA THIS: IF BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE BAGEANT WOULDN'T
HAVE ENOUGH POWER TO BLOW OFF A GOOD FART. YOU'VE JUST WASTED TWENTY
FUCKING MINUTES OF COMPANY TIME. NOW GO TAKE UP SOMETHING USEFUL, LIKE
NARCOTICS. FOR CHRISSAKE GET A LIFE!

hope it's not a burglar

2009-05-07T21:28:00.001-06:00

BAck to School Hurricane Season '08

2009-05-02T16:55:00.001-06:00

Back to School or Not
September in the tropics means more rain. The hurricane season has spun waves of big powerful thunderstorms from Corn Island in the Caribbean across Lago Cocibolca to the Pacific, across the width of Nicaragua. I believe over 20 this season…The garden is in hyper grow mode, lots of fruits and flowers. The birds call dibbs on the ripe red pitayas from the tree top and all that drops from the tree is scaly empty hulls. The eight foot tall accidentally chili arbor has hundreds of plump round peppers. About the size of a BB. They defy the chili rule "The Smaller the Pepper the Hotter". They have some bite but thay are non lethal. A pair of bright yellow FlyCatchers visit daily. They call out in defiance and in front of me and often my raptor cat, just feet away while the two dive bomb and roll in the tree. They break off whole sections and then alit and eat in the overhanging orange tree branches. Drives PeeWee the carnivore cat crazy…….This morning nature called pre dawn and I got out of bed to pee. I think turning on bright lites at night wakes me up so I clicked the back patio lite, dark in the bathroom but serviceable. My eyes get a little crusty from allergies this time of year and I wanted to wash them off. Glancing at the tiny little bathroom sink, I thought there was some thing laying in the sink but it wasn't till I turned on the water that the friggen BAT blew up in my face…YIKES…lights on! He was trying to escape down the drain hole. He had a compound fracture on his wing and was waiting for the end. I have a ¾ wall around the bath and he must have clipped the wall and hit the kohler. . The rubber plug was blocking his path down the drain and the cat didn't know he was there, so I left him till morning. In the morning he was cold ,looking like a drain pug with a tail. I left him out front for the ferals and it was gone shortly…..
Almost all working Nicas get paid on the 15 and 30th of the month, so most months the number of casual street vendors go way up twice a month. Handi Crafts, Home Made Ice Cream, throw rugs and lite bulbs.. My old neighbor takes his deluxe vintage chrome maybe even medical bath room scale up to the corner and charges people 6 Cents US to use it. He charged me 12 cents and like always I only understood half of most conversations I believe he tagged me double for being over 100Ks, but I happy as a calm to be losing weight…I get better lookin every day..
A lady was walking down my street last Sunday Morning shouting ESCoooooBas!!…ESCoooooBas!!…Llevo ESCOBAAAS…selling home made brooms and a luffa like bath mittens.
She sold me a three foot wooden mini broom for 10 cords ($0.50). It has a whittled wooden branch handle and some sort of green grass for the bristles tied on with pink plastic twine. It's good for cleaning the over head fan but I am afraid that all the seeds in the grass bristles will sprout when the broom (escoba) gets wet…
I was out shopping for a cloths washer last week. There is what they call a Costa Rica type washer that's kind of like the old wringer machines….You are more involved with the process but believe me less involved than by doing it by hand. I had a new lavenderia open right down the street and I was excited to bring my sweaty clothes to a place much much closer and far less gringo centric than my regular Fernanda's on the Calzada. They told me that even tho they had just opened they would be moving at the end of the months. Seems they just realized that their shop was down the alley and on a dead street. I should have taken the hint but I left my clothes any way. I was the only active customer and she suggested I come back later that afternoon. It's hot here in the afternoon. Some times it's so hot you can see it and smell it. Even the heat ripples stay in the shadows. And.. I have adopted the local custom of siesta time. She wanted my 60 cords ($3) to buy dinner but I told her I'd be back tomorrow.
I went by after breakfast the next morning, there are no friendlier Nicas than ones that have just started a business. So I chat for a bit, pay up and go home and again look for Nicas in the Olympic Games on tv. She did a swell job, my socks were tv commercial white but they were sooo stretched out I can wear them like a doo rag…I think they washed it all by hand and saved thier old mustard colored US Kenmore Washer for a bigger load. It wasn't till the next morning that I realized my fancy new USA pillow cases were missing.. I went over after coffee and no one was there…busy moving. After a walk and breakfast I went back. Relieved to see that she had my pillow cases. All folded and smelling like grandma…She had passed them to a gringo who had kindly returned them while on the quest for his missing pants.. He was in a foul mood and short on Spanish skills. I can sound like I know how to speak Spanish and locals tend to think I can under stand them when I comprehend less than half of most most of what I hear. She ranted at me for a bit…She was sure that I accidentally was in possession of the missing gringo standard issue 42' pair of tan cargo shorts and there was only one way thru the language barrier, I took her to my house and we double checked and still no missing cortas. She was upset because the gringo had accused her of stealing his pants. He threatened to file a denuncia with the police. And she said why should I steal his pants when I charge him 20C to wash them? I saw the old crusty gringo with the bad attitude and missing pants the next day loitering at a reputed Pedophile Perch chatting with turtle man and the cowboy. And the owner wonders why she doesn't get more gringo action…I rarely have reason to speak with any of this pack of pervs…Some times I go the long away around my block or even the wrong way a block just to avoid the head nod. It doesn't take long living here to realize that just being from the same country don't make any one buddies. But he was standing outside and not really inside this chicken hawk roost. I asked old man Cranky about his missing shorts, he bellows SHORTS.. it was f*ckng long pants….Like the ones on the laundry ladies front counter???? How do you say jerk in Spanish?
Anyway, that's why I was looking at washers. My favorite is from China (duh?) and it is Fuzzy Logic brand…What a country, you should see the info-mercials….Siempre a locura en esta pais, pues mis amigos, debo irme….hasta pronto…adios……Next time; shopping at the fancy new super Mercado, why do Nicas have such crappy taste in retro 80s pop music, why the sudden surge in nostalgic red metal hot dog carts on the street and where did all these old gray haired horn dogs come from?

I am hungry give me ten dolars

2009-05-01T08:50:00.000-06:00

Spend any time in the center of Granada La Gran Sultana and you will meet this granny.

The Hipica Aug 2008

2009-04-30T21:03:00.000-06:00

Ride 'em Caballero
Thursday, August 14, 2008

August is a busy month here in Nicaragua, lot's of political anniversaries from the revolution as well as Dias Patrias , los hipacas are a little like a rodeo or state fair. Last Sunday we had the running (dragging) of the bulls and this Sunday all the rich landed Nicas bring their horses to town and prance around on horseback. Lot's of cowboy outfits and drinking.
There is a pretty god sized parade too. The central park is crowded with carnival style games, flip a coin into the tray and win a bike. Most of the prizes on display were faded and the cardboard boxes held together with yellowed scotch tape. There are wheel of fortune type wheels set up as well. Seems to be straight out gambling but I couldn't follow the game's payout and they freaked out when I tried to snap a photo. I went to the crowded El Quixote bar and watched as one mounted cowboy, a few back packer types and a hundred drunk and stoned street kids chased, prodded, beat and dragged some un enthusiastic young bulls down the street. With enough name calling, spitting and water tossing the bull would lunge at the nearest abuser and cause 30 seconds of panic in the crowd. But the tired and confused bull just wanted to "chill" in the shade of the Gran Francisca Restaurant with the last two bulls who by now have caught up. It was after three in the afternoon, the temp was well over ninety and the humidity was off the chart as the daily afternoon thunder storm loomed in the east…The sweaty drunken cowboys and the crowd went ballistic, screaming, whistling, tugging on the rope, prodding with an electric cattle prod, throwing rocks and bottles, finally the reluctant mini herd took off again headed off the last few blocks down to the lake (and the carneceria)…Some of the tourists in the bar looked bewildered and disappointed in this not so noble, not so Hemmingway like moment of animal cruelty… It's hard not to root for the bulls and 12 people got sent to the hospital. Including a 72 year old woman, on her way home when the bulls and the crowd drove her into the pavement…
Last week there was a horrific fire in the giant sprawling Oriental Market. This is the biggest market in Nicaragua, maybe even Central America. It's about 20 square blocks of shops surrounded by narrow streets turned into shops as well. 2x4s and tin roofs, rabbit warren or rat maze. Hot, confusing, crowded and crazy. Lot's of hot merchandise and pawn shop outlets…Every tour book says to stay away. But when you need to find anything here the answer is always to look in the Oriental..
The fire burned for over 24 hours, estimates of 1500 shops and vendors out of biz…Some where around 8-10 acres of market burned. Nobody seriously hurt but their debt for the merchandise still exists even if the store and contents are in ashes…The local Managua tv stations had lots of live coverage…There was little to none water pressure, merchants waited patiently to fill up buckets of water to wet down their shops. The fire dept has tanker trucks. Old 1950s-1960s trucks from carotidal over the globes, all to big to navigate the narrow crowded streets around the market. So the bomberos strung leaky hoses for blocks…Losing pressure every foot along the way…
As a large part of Managua's business community burned to the ground. The town people danced and paraded in the streets to celebrate the Festival of Santo Domingo.
Apparently Santo Domingo years ago appeared near Managua as a diminutive figure giving advise and nowadays they have a life sized 11 inch tall statue under glass. They dress up as pre Colombian Indians but they look more like comical 1950s era stage play African natives with pierced noses, bones in their hair and they paint them selves black….
The local business scene here was brightened with a new thrift store.
It looks like they took an entire thrift store in middle town America and sent it south. Ski jackets, quilts, baby training toilets and electric bun warming trays are just some of the unknown treasures. It is probably the largest single store in town and right on the main street less than a block from central park.
I was there opening week and in typical Nica style they had a huge sound system inside the store with a DJ spinning mind numbing loud reggeaton (foul macho Latin Rap) and a staff out numbering customers.. three to one. They have two uniformed guards with billy clubs and hand held metal detectors to protect the overpriced cast offs. I did buy a baseball hat with nothing written on it, a rare find.. Later that night I talked myself into the chair cushions and went back the next day to find them gone, there is not a soft seat in the entire country.. But the still live dj was quiter in the morning and I could shop around a little….It looked like Sunday afternoon garage stuff, couldn't sell it in the USA and expensive…the white button down Polo dress shirt was priced at ten bucks (120 Cords)! And the used picture frames were 75 cords! Yikes…But still, it's on the way to my usual breakfast place and it's fun to look. I wonder if they will ever replenish the stock?
The other exciting thing is the LaColonia Super Market is due to open this weekend. Just five blocks from my house…
LaColonia is a privately owned chain of international style grocery stores. Right now in Granada, cheese as example there is only two kinds. An expensive fake bright yellow plastic like cheese individually wrapped sold at the Pali or quejada a home made salty white cheese made locally. Living in the tropics, food storage is a problem. And this cheese is an answer to how to save milk, it's not about "cheese"….I took some some smoked quejada home and soaked it over nite in water to reduce the salty taste then fried it up…It was still nasty.
LaColonia stocks white cheddar from New Zealand and Swiss from the Quaker farms in Costa Rica…They have a deli section and a health food aisle….Hopefully they will stock my brand whole peanuts and hence save me a long arduous bus/taxi ride to Managua.. I have really been losing weight since I returned from my USA trip in May. Maybe 3-4 inches off my waist…I attribute this to my Nica diet…No dairy, little meat, lot's of rice and beans, fruits and whole grain corn tortillas. This with the heat is an effective weight loss plan. It's easy not to eat meat after a trip to the meat aisle in the Mercado around 10-11 in the morning…La Colonia sells recognizable cuts of meat chilled and pre wrapped in plastic and there is a butcher staff too…with a deli dept….Good thing I still have my fat man pants…pues hasta nos vemos…adios

Fourth of July Nica Style from 2008

2009-04-29T15:45:00.000-06:00

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Fourth of July Nica Style

Free Hot Dogs and Burgers yesterday at Kathy's Waffle House to celebrate the 4th. The Granada Chapter of the American Legion hosted the event and the Granada cranky old ex military guys were out in force reminding everybody of how it should be up north and especially here. Lot's of young cute girl friends, cold Victoria beers and FOX News talking points. This crowd leans to the right and has more than a few missionaries. But there are a few lefties here as well. The ex hippie types cut a smaller profile than the hung over SUV driving, real estate investing crowd common at Kathy's.
I believe the fourth coincided with St Anthony day so the school kids band played a concert in the street before toting their San Antonio statue thru town, then they had a disco dance at the school that night, made it seem like the Fourth, even watermelons and bombas…It marks a two week mid year school break too, so my street will be kid free for a couple of weeks…Location wise it is the only negative about my block. We have hardly any porch side late night drunken baccanals and only the occasional street sleeping glue head..
I decided that I am just too lazy to pack up and move and unless some thing excellent comes along I will just stay here. It's a good street, close to places and PeeWee is half way to her goal over being Top Cat of the block…The garden and the country side knows it's the rainy season and most plants are growing as fast as they can, seeds and twigs going green in the garden. The garden is one thing that is special about this place, no Nica house this small would have a garden this big. It would have been paved in with a tin and concrete bedroom for tio juan……
With the storms we cool off some nights clear down to the mid seventies and it feels down right cold.
Avocados, mangos and flies are in season…lot's of all three but the flies are pesky, they and the little cute "cleaner" ants help keep my house keeping together.
I can leave the headless and footless body of a little lizard in the garden and the little ants will take it away bones and all overnight. I saw a video on YouTube featuring a video time lapse shot of ants devouring a dead lizard. Like a Sci-Fi movie from the 50's..
I am lax in blogging because I can get online from my place nowadays that and the power stays on most of the time. I am on line waiting for things to download and watching dvds…Seems I need the quietness of an outage and my lap top on the porch to write…So, the elec company ,those Spanish bastards at Union Fenosa cut the power around 6 am, then the water dried up too, before I could shower, but I have lot's of water stored under the sink for coffee...
The transit strike ran about two weeks until Ortega cut a deal with the drivers. They get subsidized fuel at around $4 a gal reg, but the cost was passed onto to other users so private vehicles now pay just over $5 a gal. There is a burgeoning black market in taxi gas out of 5 gal jerry cans.. Ortega continues to drive the ship of state aground, he has pissed off and lost all his old Sandanista friends and scared the big dollar right foreign investor wing. Since the transit strike there has been protests for democracy and against el pacto….Ortega and Alleman both crooks, both power mad and greedy. For stealing hundreds of millions of dollars Alleman is still technically doing time for his crime and he is trying to renegotiate a new sentence of one month for every million they can prove he took. This is the VP…Noam Chomsky called Ortega just "another right wing opportunist"…It doesn't matter really which political power is in office, It's the powerful families here that really control things on a daily basis the federal gov here is for begging foreign assistance and photo opp's…
One thing to come of the transit strike was no more fancy grocery store… I haven't taken the bus up to Managua since the first of April…Without the cheese, nuts and plastic wrapped breakfast sausage from the LaColonia I eat like a Nica and my mostly vegetarian fare has helped me lose about four inches in my waist…Good News / Bad News is the new LaColonia just five uncrowded blocks from my place is almost completed…Word on the street is they are trying to open by Aug…so maybe around Xmas. About 6 months late so far…

Fruits and veggies one the corner or sold door to door may not always be the top quality but always healthy and easy, I trade the old gals on the corner. I bring sour oranges from the trees in my yard. These oranges are green and very sour. You can use them like limes, the fruit and leaves are supposed to have medical benefits…I believe the street value of these naranas agrias is about three cords a piece but I sell them for one cord each, they were excited to hear that I have cocos and dragon fruit coming. I bought a four pak of garlic from them last week and I was surprised to see that the plastic web tube of garlic was from China. Sold on the streets of Nicaragua for 30 cents US… I guessed that it and most of what Inez sold was local production from north in the mountains….My chile tree is seven feet tall and has hundreds of small round dark green peppers ready to turn red. These always seemed to get picked off by these wren sized blue on blue songbirds as they ripen. This plant produces continuously and I have managed to fill a little mayonnaise jar with the firey little round peppers already…The humming birds have found my iris and the shrimp plant and those nasty crow like black birds come in the garden for cat food but they will eat the tree fall oranges if forced …
The tourist trade seems way down this summer and gringo centric businesses continue to close. Mimi's House and the Costa Rican chicken chain Rosti Pollo both closed . And soon my best peanut butter outlet Café Melba will close up shop too. She's just having movie nites at her new place next door. The gringo community has a pool to guess which place will be next.. But I hear rumors of a coming gringo owned donut shop, people come here to Granada from all over the world to lose money ..ing a restaurant. .. They have a little chain in the shopping malls of Managua called "American DoNuts", but here in Granada there is only an older woman around the Mercado who sells sugar glazed plump and sweet donuts from a tin tray on her head. She tries, but fresher is better during fly season, get them early. The Nicas hang clear plastic bags of water around to ward off flies. I can't say that it works but everyone has the bags hanging from the window sill or counter tops. The only good thing is a friend and long time Granada gringo is opening his own mini super corner store. It will be a good peanut butter outlet and he all ready has a baker making a heavy whole wheat loaf on an order ahead basis. Spendy at 35 cords but it's probable the best pan integral in town. Hard to get out the door with my profits…. He has tomato juice, Mexican beer and olive oil too, hard to find here in Gringolandia. Anthony Bourdain from cable tv was talking about New York City and how the immigrants brought their food and restaurant styles with them to the new country, like the gringo eateries and soon mini stores here, I guess. There are so many hotels and eateries here that it is impossible for them all to stay open. On the three block walkway called la calzada, there must be 15 places all with service alfresco. The true yardstick of customer service for a place on calzada is how efficiently the staff can't keep the beggars, hustlers and street dogs away from you. Even Fernanda"s Lavandaria where I get my laundry done has turned her front room into another juice bar..
Sony Cable tv here has US tv stars like the Orange County Choppers guys and Julia Luis Drefues doing Spanish language promos for their shows on Latin cable…Me llamo is Mikey, Funny stuff..
I have never visited South or even central Florida before. I was impressed with the area when I visited Ft Lauderdale this spring and lately I have been shopping the online real estate/foreclosure web sites with the thought of buying a duplex or ? In South Fla….Maybe later this fall or spring 09, there are plenty of properties available and I believe the bargains will get better. So far I like near downtown Lake Worth in Palm Beach County or maybe NW Ft Lauderdale. But on the hurricane free west coast with the nicest and by far the cheapest old style homes are found around St Pete's and Clear Water. Under $30,ooo small livable homes near the water? It's twice that here in speculative Granada…and that would be on the lake where 24 hour guard would be necessary… South Fl has to rebound, It's bound to come back. Every Nica I know wants to live in Fla. It amazes me that people can't afford to make a three hundred dollar bank note but they can pay eight hundred dollars rent…Maybe some thing in a detached separate unit? Two old 1920s little Spanish style bungalows in downtown Lake Worth? .It would be nice to have an income from the place in case I want to travel some more…According to a Fla state web site only 75% of Lake Worth's population speaks English, The only people poorer than the Nicas are the Haitians, and there are many living in south Fl. I haven't heard many nice things about them in Fla…Back in the 80s this Carlton Sheets guy had late nite infomercials about getting rich in real estate with no money down,,,, so he has wisely learned in the info super hiway world to offer his core courses for free. I am taking the foreclosure course….. I don't watch tv much since I got online en mi casa…
I have been downloading some better movies and tv shows , it's takes awhile and you are vested when the show finally loads. Daily Show and the Simpson's in English. I watched King Corn and The World According to Monsanto, scary documentaries about the future of food…All the farming programs here in natural because of being poor not "green" subsistence farmers here get new loans only if they plant hybrid seeds and apply the $$ fertilizers and pesticides required by the manufactures. It sounds like the corn may be too big and tough to process by hand and is only suitable for export… From down south looking up the US seems more corrupt and powerful. The US cable channel news conflicts so often with the local opinion and news coverage here. I don't know what will happen here, inflation is around 26% and rice and beans cost more every day…Few Nicas are happy with the country's direction and many are afraid that Ortega wants to be a dictator. I think all politicians wish that they could be absolute life long dictators but here in the banana republic belt its cheaper and easier to do..

helping fix the arroyo bridge,el puente PapaQ

2009-04-28T11:03:00.000-06:00

catching up this post is from last Easter

2009-04-28T11:01:00.000-06:00

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

If it’s Easter It must be Summer Time

The stores are stocked with thermos plastic coolers, bbq grills and beach towels as Easter aka Semana Santa is almost here. For the Nicas it’s all about celebrating the resurrection with booze and beach parties. It’s the official beginning of the summer season. Fun in the sun, all the beach towns are booked solid. It’s been mid nineties and sunny most days. Granada is blessed with a strong breeze coming east of the lake…
Today on the way to breakfast there was a school parade. A hundred or so secondary school kids dressed in matching crisp white uniforms marching down the street with a marching band and a horse drawn float. The float had some faux rockery and featured a ten year old boy in loin cloth and wig getting nailed to the cross, but so far I haven’t seen a chocolate bunny anywhere.
A new friend of mine died here last month before I could visit her butterfly farm. I think a lot of people come here with serious diseases and hope to have some fun before they go some place really really hot.
She makes five in a year.
Some where around the middle of March is my two year anniversary of quitting my last jewelry job and starting to spend time down south here. And so far other than some odd rashes and sinus adjustment my health is fine. I was losing weight for a while but now a days I think I might be putting some back on. It’s easy to eat well here with a little ingenuity. Tonight I’m grilling a filet mignon and some choyote squash with a mixed greens salad…Even figuring the charcoal in this lovely meal will set me back less than 2.50...Most all the beef is tough. All scrawny grass fed mixed Brahman texas long horn type critters so the choice cuts are worth seeking out. I used a filet to make an Irish beef stew yesterday. The carrots here are as big as a turnip. The corn is for drying and grinding into masa for tortillas. Not for eating off the cob, there are vendor grilling ears of corn in the park. They have a grill made out of an old tire rim and stoke up their coals with melting plastic bags. The near incinerated cobs are the best. Still tough like field corn..
The jumbo watermelons are back. I got a great deal on a 12 kilo watermelon from a street vendor about ten blocks from my house. I regretted buying it after walking all the back to my place in the mid day sun with a kid sized melon balanced on my shoulder. It was sweet but I’ll stick to the little round melons instead. I bought a mid sized 28 pounder in the Mercado because the crop was in a farm truck and farm fresh. The melon was heavy and dark green but when I cut into it the flesh was pink and the seeds were white.. It was ripe, not sweet but not bad, an albino….. Mangos are in season and after visiting some friends new place I was given a grocery bag full and again today I got another dozen or so. These today are smaller and are called Indio Mangos. When Nicas talk about fruit or veggies being Indio I think it’s an old variety like heritage tomatoes.
I peeled a bunch of the two and blended up a jug of mango juice, maybe I’ll put some on my steaks later.
Papayas are huge three foot long critters but still cost about a buck or so. They have a small green oval fruit coming into season that they call tiny apple but it’s not any kind of apple. It’s tart with a pit. All the leaves fall those trees at the beginning of the dry season and then the fruit rains from the bare trees.
The fruit lady on the corner had some new (to me) fruits that look like kiwis. It seems ever since the 1700s they have been mixing and matching tropical plants and fruits. Planting helter skelter all over the world. I don’t know what’s indigenous to any where.
I went to Managua to met with the manager of Naturealaza Foods about buying whole sale from them. He was a sharp bi-lingual guy and was happy to set me up with a whole sale account. It’s still more than I used to pay at Trader Joes for nuts but here is so not there. These peanuts are clean, unsalted and the quality is consistent. Natureleza raised the price of roasted peanuts about 80 percent a month ago and I was hoping I could get a better price direct from the source.
I bought about 40 pounds of peanuts and a couple pounds of cashews as well as some tahini, a hand full of almonds and an odd Chinese Ginseng Soda.
I had two cloth grocery bags and my mochilla (back pack) with me all stuffed with bags of shelled peanuts around noon when I left Naturealiza and was looking for a taxi. I was only six or so blocks from a giant shopping mall called Metro Center. Even tho Metro Center has the best coffee shop in Nicaragua I had the driver take me straight to the La Union grocery store. The grungy little "super" that I shop at in Granada, the Pali is mostly owned by Wall Mart but La Union is 100 percent Wall Mart based out of Costa Rica. They strive to be a North American style store. Nice produce and bakery stuff. They have excellent imported meat too. They have lot’s of odd USA stuff like Jack Daniels Steak Sauce, Miller Beer and TGI Fridays frozen pizzas and stuff. Well except for it’s not even close to frozen. The giant ten dollar bags of Ore Ida frozen onion rings felt like a slurpee in a sack. I bought some filet mignon ($2.50 lb), local made garlic sauce, pita bread and some other hard to come culinary odds and ends..
This area is near the old pre earth quake/ war Managua not much of any age left standing and all the new first world style buildings are clustered around 6 lane rotundas or round abouts. The traffic gets up to speed and they was no bus stop on the Carretera Masaya so I flagged the first mini Toyota bus back to Granada. These tiny busses are taking your life in your hands kind of stuff but it was sooooo hot. The drivers of these tiny 14 passenger mini vans are the kamikaze pilots of the Nica road way. First bus to come along gets the passenger dollars so they race each other to stop lights and swing over two lanes in order to screech to a stop, push a another rider on and then pull out in front of bike taxi and a slower old school bus packed with riders… Horns blast on and on again. I was scrunched in the middle of the backseat with my three bags. The seat next to a chubby and sweaty gringo is the last seat to go but we filled up fast and the sun was roasting the van. When we got crammed full the chofer fired up the under powered ac and we raced on to Granada..
The streets are nearly deserted from noon till three or four in the afternoon. Businesses open around two but it’s still quite. Road construction in front of a multi story gringo palace forced the bus route a few blocks closer to my place so I saved a couple of blocks…..
We survived Easter Week with only 61 fatalities nationwide. Lot’s of drunks drowning and 16 country folks hacked to death with machetes.
Like most holiday here the actual day is eclipsed by the week leading up to it.. And beer, rum and moonshine figure in to all the events and parties. It’s not all unusual to see men sleeping it off on the side walk and public urination is widely practiced. Mostly by drunks and little kids. This is the first year that the alcadia (mayor’s office) has arranged toilets for the estimated 70,000 people partying lake side….
With every one at the beach the city has been quiet. The shops were all closed from Thursday on. It seemed the only people on the street were gringos and street hawkers….But now the tourists will fade away and the temp goes up every day…It was over a hundred a few days ago. I am hoping to enjoy some spring like weather next month while in the USA…
So more tales and misc from 12 degrees north of the equator next month….hasta nos vemos….Steve

Bus Numero el Seite

2009-04-24T15:03:00.000-06:00

another old post Costa Rica Visa Turn A round Trip

2009-04-24T14:45:00.000-06:00

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

20 minutes in Costa Rica

Super Bowl Sunday in the jungle… Granada's gringo sports bar The Zoom bar is having the Flor De Cana go go girls and chili, El Quito bar has chicken wings and a taco bar and Jimmy 3 Finger's "Bama Rib Shack has live music and a Harley show. There are 17 Harleys in Nicaragua….Black leather and baby powder in the tropics…It was over cast today till noon so it's a cool 89 degrees.
Just before the month ended I finally got on the bus and got myself to Costa Rica. My 90 day visa was expired. In Oct I went to the immigration office here in Granada and for 50 bucks they sent my passport up to Managua and got me a 90 day extension but this time I was forced to leave the country. And neighboring Honduras and Salvador are part of the C4 with Nicaragua so they won't work, Costa Rica here I come.
This is common practice here for expats that don't have resident status. I expired around the middle of January.
So I had a fine to pay….a dollar a day..
I woke up at five a.m. and was walking over to the Ed's for a hearty breakfast of gallo pinto (Nica rice&beans),fried cheese and eggs by six thirty. I went past the old market around seven on my way to the bus lot. It was a bee hive of activity with every one setting up for the day's business. The Rivas bus lot is tucked in behind a fruit stand and a bike repair hut. Seven or so tired old yellow school busses form a co-op running south along the lake to Nandiame and Rivas. The road is bad even by Nicaraguan standards and has lot's of construction zones. Transportation and infrastructure here are among the biggest problems they have here. Lot's of roads and bridges were damaged during the Contra era and have never been rebuilt…Rivas is a busy working town about sixty miles south of Granada. They even have a four way stop light there and a brand new bus stop in the chaotic market place. It's the bus hub, go east to San Jorge to ferry across to Isla Ometepe, west to the beach surf town San Juan del Sur or catch a local south bound bus to la frontera. There is also a tiny little muraled purple mini van there that sells a Sopa Marinero. This is a seafood soup with a little 4' long purple crab served in a big paper cup. The locals time their lunch breaks around this vans arrival.
The luxury bus lines have stations on the edge of town but all the other transport meets in or around the Mercado… Tiny little Toyota express mini vans, three wheeled bicycle taxis, pick up trucks with wrought iron roofs and wooden benches mix among the crusty old fleet of "chicken " busses.
The horse drawn working carts are my favorites. Old unpainted wooden two wheeled horse drawn carts. They use old rear axles from old cars so the carts have the suspension and car tires….shiny spinner style plastic hub caps with old dvds as reflectors. Most of these work for or with building supply or hardware stores to delivery the goods. Some even have dump beds to bring sand and such. When I bought my wooden chair and table in the Mercado I had a cartero bring me and my new stuff it to my place. Cost ten pesos (0.52). Both the drivers and the horses are thin and grizzly. Three kids and the driver all dressed in rags with NY Yankees and NIKE hats. Some of the drivers seem carefree and comfortable while some seem to take out their frustrations with their lot in life on the horses. Whipping on their sway backed beasts of burden with wood handled whips.
Any way… I was tempted by some big greasy home made glazed donuts but I bought some mandarin oranges and a bag of cold water for the second half of my bus trip and then got on the local to Penas Blanca on the Costa Rican border. It was a typical tired old yellow retired US school bus. Tiny little seats and windows that only go half way down. It has been modified with a full length roof rack with access ladders, a powerful sound system, air horns and many religious decals and statues. Some even have complete shrines. The Virgin Mary is big but they have lot's of mysterious patron saints too..
I got one of the last open seats and we rumbled out of the market and down south along the west side of Lake Nicaragua. How the bus helpers lean out the open door shouting the names of the destinations before they wiggle thru the standing room only aisle of the bus groping the girls and collecting the fares while the bus is barreling down the hiway is some thing to see. Most of the younger ones remind me of Burt Reynolds from Smokey and the Bandit. Funny little mustaches and all. They remember who has paid and who has to receive change all while talking on the cell phone and singing along with the radio…I paid about $1.20 for my passage to Rivas and this leg costs a buck…It's only an miles to the frontera but we stopped all along the way to take on and off passengers. Every thing from giant baskets of fruit to squawking and squeaking live stock can be among the carry on luggage, hence the name chicken bus..I have heard rumors of a Sunday only market there with a heavy emphasis on gray market goods.
When we got to Cardenas the end of the line I expected to see the border but there was just a little town and lot's of semi trucks parked on the dirt road. A teen age kid wearing an "I Survived Andy Winkleman's Bat Mitzvah" tee shirt sensed my surprise and hired himself to assist me thru the border. He was a true professional. We cut thru lines, handed some one a dollar as we slipped thru a gate, sneaked in thru the trucks and some how avoided paying my fines. Good work, then right on the actual border when he couldn't go any farther he asked for 100 cords (5.20)… I balked at that and we settled for 50 cords plus a dollar bill. Now I was legally stamped out of Nicaragua and standing in the heat at high noon on a two lane tropical dirt road with semis parked for about a quarter mile with no other pedestrians only narco police. I found a proper border check point building with dogs and a snack bar after a while. Lot's of activity with little organization but I found the line for entrance and I had my entrance stamp in no time….
I had heard that Nicaragua required a 72 hour absence before returning but a lot of people said that like so many other things here " No One Cares" so I went out side to watch the customs agents tear up some long haired surfer's van and figure out what to do next…Maybe I should take a local bus fifty or so miles south and visit Coco Beach on the pacific maybe San Jose to shop for computer stuff. But neither my heart or wallet was into a road trip…. A big line of people had backed up to leave Costa Rica on the shady side of the building. The crowd was chatting, I heard Japanese and Italian…then I looked back to see the super deluxe international TICA Bus pointing to Nicaragua…I jumped up to stand in the exit line and twenty minutes later my Costa Rica adventure was finished. In and out of C.R. in twenty minutes with out ever holding any colones$….By now the mighty behemoth TICA bus had pulled forward and was loading passengers back on, headed for the Nica side of the border. I showed the driver a ten dollar bill, he smiled and popped open the shiny silver door, I jumped up and entered the tinted air conditioned splendor of the deluxe Eurostyle bus. I got a seat towards the rear. Ten minutes later the steward collected our passports and entrance fees for Nicaragua. Before we stopped at the border we drove thru a big car wash like building with "sniffer" hoses, then while the steward went to immigration to have our passports stamped, customs had us pull all the luggage stowed below off for inspection. I only had a small backpack but I joined the line….I chatted with an American couple living in Costa Rica on a "Visa" holiday too. Very typical Costa Rica gringos, but integral for the tourist biz in Granada. C.R. does enforce their 72 hour rule so many expats living in C.R. visit Nicaragua twice a year on VISA vacations. Then the steward stood in the door of the bus and called out names. Foreign pass ports with hard to say names were called last but he had the best Stephen Vermeulen pronunciation of any Spanish speaking person I ever met…When we got back on the bus, they brought cold drinks before dropping the Tvs down to watch The Departed dvd in English. It was hot outside in the middle of an equatorial day, but on the darkened bus the ac hummed and most people drifted off to sleep with Jack Nicholson shouting profanities on the tv. By three pm the massive bus was threading its way thru the narrow colonial streets of Granada. Back home before four. Good for another ninety days.
My neighbors/landladies have been here for about a week and the drama/interaction level is way up. They are kinda suckers and lot's of people make a living off them. They bought a big cute black lab puppy last week. Their place is pretty small and they have three cats already but they wanted a big dog to hang out with them in the bar for protection. Yap, Yap , yap all day…
They have the internet now but they seem to be reluctant to share as we have discussed… then this morning at seven Terry was pounding on my front door. The puppy had died in the night..
The way the house has been split in half their side has a swimming pool in back and my size has a 26x26 foot garden remnants from the original yard. They needed to borrow my shovel to bury that big sad dead puppy in my garden…Sobbing middle aged butch lesbians in boxer shorts in my garden cradling a cute but rapidly stiffing dead baby dog before coffee…And a good morning to you… I had wanted to put a passion fruit where the doggie is now planted..
The drop in comfort level here at my place has got me looking at real estate here again. The colonial center is expensive but it expensive because that's where the action is. The calzada, a cobble stone street leading east to the lake is lined with café's, hostels, tour companies, bike rentals etc. In the evenings hundreds of tourist from all over the globe sit at the out door tables drinking bottled water and beer while waiting for their over priced but lovely meal…..In the four or so block long stretch of calzada that is finished there is a lot of food choices, a couple of good Mexican, Thai, Italian, Spanish and Argentinean places, even a USA style sports bar.
The most USA looking place is called The Roadhouse and is owned by Miami Nica's. They have air conditioning and football jerseys hung on the wall.
The Spaniards are footing the bill for this pedestrian style street renovation.. It's a very nice focal point tying the central park and cathedral to the lake. It's taken almost two years to build the four blocks thay have now and they have six more blocks to go. They have traffic diverted and the streets torn up for months at a time coating the surrounding businesses with dust and bad business.
The other big tourist attraction here is the Conventa. Across from the overly hip and purple Third Eye restaurant and kitty corner from the gringo movers and shakers hang out "Kathy's Waffle House". I saw a small house right around the corner from there and in a gringofying block. It's about 26 by 56 feet and it's nothing more than a walled in lot right now. They are asking 65,000 but seem vaguely interested in my 45,000 offer. They bought it about 3 years ago for 30,000..
The renovation (rebuilding) process here is expensive and crazy. One of the original gringo remodelers here just got prison time for his business practices. It's mostly concrete walls with roofs made of red tiles and tin sheets. The deluxe version has cane to hide the metal on the inside. They are simple constructions with lots of open garden space. That little place would cost at least 20,000 to make livable and another 10,000 to gringo up….But I am still tempted. It would be a small but central spot for the business and walking distance to every where….There really do seem to be a never ending stream of people moving here. And even with Nicaragua's short comings, Granada's a warm cheap sunny and safe place to live with lot's of cute girls. Granada is not like the majority of Nicaragua. It's a city state of it's own…Else where in Nicaragua 20,000 or less will buy any house in town and up north in the mountains top flight green and scenic farm land is less than 500 an acre…A friend here built his wife the prettiest house in Boaco for less than this empty shell of a colonial will cost me…Competing with the boom in India and China the price of building materials here has doubled at least and workers here demand at least $5 a day not the 2 bucks you pay in the sticks for workers…But it's still the gringo in between contractor that really drives up the prices. Places bought 5 or 6 years ago for 65,00 are priced three times that now and in high demand… Ten years ago big colonials could be had for twenty thousand and now a days some renovated palaces are up to a million dollars…
Granada claims to be the oldest city in the Americas and is due for U.N. historical city status. That would make the colonial center historically important and triple the price. Crazy stuff, Yesterday I made an offer to buy the pulparia across the street and todays project is to find a lawyer and a contractor so wish me well. adios

3rd world root canal from 2-08

2009-04-24T14:34:00.000-06:00

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Third World Root Canal

January Up Date
--I just got back from a late afternoon bike ride up to Sandino Park near the Police Station and the old rail road station. A gringa woman I know here has an affordable remodeled house for sale near there and I have been checking on the neighborhood. It's about 8 long blocks to the town square….When the fancy new USA style grocery opens here it will be right near that park as well…Even riding on the shady side of the street with a nice breeze I soaked my favorite shirt. I rinsed it out and have it hanging off the red tile roof drying in the sun while I eat water melon and watch the Daily Show Intl Edition. I see all that sub zero blizzard icy dark and gloomy winter weather up north in the states on the morning talk shows. I can't even imagine it. It was 75 the other morning and I had to put on socks with my flip flops. There are even some morning when I have to turn off the fan…
My visa is expired and I need to leave the country and then re enter. I am just going chicken bus it to Rivas and then another local used up old school bus to the border….Pay my fine and cross to Costa Rica, I don't want to leave the garden and cat unattended for days just yet, but the rule is 72 hours out of Nicaragua then return straight away to Nicaragua with another 90 day visa. Right now I am running a 20 cord a day fine up. I have been putting it off all month, just a long hot and sticky bus ride interrupted by some bureaucracy….
January has been busy.
It's been in the 90s with 60% humidity The rains are finally starting to stop and the temp goes up a little every day. New restaurants seem to open every week and the tourist season stays strong from Xmas. Big groups of wealthy Europeans fill the restaurants and herded groups from the cruise ships fill the central park. All the vendors, street merchants, teen hookers, touts and tour guides know the schedule and eagerly await the tourists like bears at salmon season…..Old men on ancient three speed bikes wait on the cathedral steps to watch and pick up loads of tourist police get trucked in to baby sit the glue sniffers..
--Mandarin oranges, mangos and musk melons are coming into season. The hibiscus and shrimp plants are in bloom……In a month or so the mangos will be so common that piles of over ripe fruit will cover the ground at the base of the tree and monkeys and those squawky parrots will gorge them selves. Right now the vendors have the green mangos sliced up and served in a clear plastic bag with chili powder. An acquired taste but a highly effective laxative…The mandarins are big and juicy and make excellent juice. I bought 6 for 10 cords. They were so good I am saving the seeds…
….--I lost a filling from one of my molars months ago and I have been putting off a trip to the dentists. It felt like it was broken but it hadn't hurt at all until Xmas when Santa brought the pain. By New Years I thought it was time to seek professional help. I asked Ed, a cranky hard to please Dutch restaurateur to suggest a dentista. Ed has been compared to the soup Nazi on Seinfeld. "No eggs for you"…I figured if you can please him you must be good. I was right, Leonard Grant the dentista had a clean modern office and a gentle touch…Even paying for the root canal and new filling didn't hurt much,. $92 for everything. I am going back for a cleaning and maybe a bleach job soon.
--As a reward I finally bought my very own Chinese Mountain bike, a shiny red 24" Lynx….65 bucks with a carry basket.
It's a pretty crappy bike but it's fun to ride. Hard to do in the heat and I am very out of shape. But it expands my neighborhood geography and luckily the town is mostly flat. Locals routinely ride two or three to a bike. Special pegs for the axles and carved wooden planks down the top tube. With the baby safely tucked in between mom and dad. No one seems to have a bike that fits or even the seat adjusted. The small Sting Ray type bikes are popular with the older folks. Easy to mount and dismount and the high handle bars and sissy bar are handy to hang bags from…Most of the mature riders pedal slowly and I tuck into the pack.…. My new bike is like an old car.. every time I use it I have to tighten every nut and screw when I'm done and I need to up grade the brakes.
I met an old timer here who has a garden full of old bikes and parts. I want one of the old 28 inch Euro black lite weight three speed black bikes from the 1950s…. And he may be able to find me one.
I've explored every other place I have lived by car. Here my world is basically the 15 or 20 bock colonial center and maybe the bus route up the Pan Am Hiway between Granada and the edge of Managua…I get car lust every so often but not strong enough to dare drive in this place..
Insurance is cheap at under a hundred bucks a year but every accident is considered a criminal act and some body is either going to jail or going to pay,,,, usually the gringo. There is not a lot of traffic but what is out on the road is a crazy mix of horse drawn carts, Chinese Motorbikes, pedestrians, bicycles, big clunky push carts, stray dogs, drunks and the occasional free range cow…Every body just beeps a lot and trusts in the lord… Most Nicas on bike or at the reins will not turn their heads to see what bus or big truck is coming up behind them. I don't know if it's trust or stupidity. Nicas are not good in traffic… they even bump into each other on the sidewalks. In the center of town on the blocks surrounding the market, the side walks are packed with shoppers, watch repairmen, cobblers, open water meter holes, all manner of vendors blocking with their tables of fruit, towels, coco nuts, and racks of pirated DVDs, baby strollers, blind old beggars (some of whom can see fine), mangy old sleeping dogs, chavalos mixing up concrete, money changers with thick wads of cash, lottery ticket hawkers, and eighty pound abuelas (grandmas) toting 100 lb bags of corn meal or rice on their heads and grasping a suckling pig by the leg. After a while you get to know where the missing sewer grates and other big holes are…

I am going to fall into temptation soon and buy my own clothes washer. I use the built in wash board and a bucket to keep my shirts clean. And I don't do a very good job. So I am looking at a Samsung Lavaropadora. Not a USA style automatic but a much cheaper two tub non automatic. They call them Costa Rica style here. Kind of like a wringer machine with out the ringer. They roll around like those old portable dish washers did and drain into the storm sewer. It cost's about $150 but with the 5 bucks a week that I spend at Fernanda's Laundry, it'll pay for it self in no time. Used but nice things here can command 80% of their retail price…
My land ladies are living next door now. So far I have had it all to myself. But as a condolence they assure me that we are getting our very own internet cable connection…Yeah, even though I have all these months in vested in bucking my internet addiction. Maybe checking my eMail here once or twice a week, not every twenty minutes. I found that if you leave the internet alone it will leave you alone too... That'll change as soon as I get the hook up here. It's a whole different thing to use it at the eCafe And just how dirty are those key boards and head phones?…..I had a young German back packer sitting next to me shouting into the head set using skype phone last time...
PeeWee went into heat at maybe 5 months old and she spent two nights up on the roofs before I got her to the volunteer vets to got her spade…I donated 200 cords to the clinic and an old t shirt. Lucky they were here, PeeWee slept all afternoon and then hit the roofs later…Good as new and not able to add to the giant feral population here…
Peanut Butter biz is doing well. I am up to 60 jars a month (10 of which I eat) I am getting new 16 oz standard plastic jars with a new name and label. I am changing the name from Cocibolca to "Smuggler's Brand". I want a peanut in shell with a big mustache and aviator style sun glasses with an old DC3 in the back ground as a logo. It proves the gringo orientation of the product. It has a sexy outlaw quality, and it has the potential for a great fake back story about the founder.. The stuff of folk tale and legend…Cocibolca is so standard for tourist stuff here. I have been playing with special flavor peanut butters and I am real fond of El Vez a Chile crunchy style and Mexi-Candy a spicy honey peanut butter…Both cheap and easy to do. I think I have a lot of regular customers among the ex pat community
When the new colonial super market opens here I will have to compete with the three or four brands they carry. So building some brand loyalty with the resident gringos is a priority now.
The city is hosting a international poetry festival next week and my best distributor has a vegetarian café right around the corner. We are hoping to sell a lot mantiquilla de mani…
I met an couple from from Penn. area. She has a ten acre butter fly farm here. Just 2 kilometers from the cementario. She is also an avid gardener with a lot of garden.. I am planning a visit next week before the dry season takes it's toll on the plant life. It will be dusty and dry by the end of the month. The mosquito inspector came by house to house today. He scattered some anti larva powder here and there and I got a warning to clean my storm drain. It has no real purpose since the remodel but I raked the leaves and dirt out any way….The MINSA guys from the UN only come around when there is a problem in the neighborhood. Some one probably got the Dengue fever. Seems like one or mosquitoes get my hands or feet every night when I'm asleep. I can't sleep inside a mosquito net, makes me feel claustrophobic. The floor fan strategically positioned keeps most of the little blood suckers off me at night..
School has been out since before the middle of Dec, The Purisma and just started up again. Lot's of note books, back packs and school uniforms for sale on the streets. Even the fabric and zippers to sew your own…Most of the jobs out side of tourism here in the Zona Franca (Sweat Shops or Free Trade Zones) are seamstress type jobs so lot's of people can stitch up a pair of Wranglers or Dickie pants… We haven't hade a marching band rehearsal since New Years but from the sounds of it…They're back! Too hard to type and rock to the drum beat at the same time so Hasta Nos Vemos…

Can you hear me now?

2009-04-23T16:26:00.000-06:00

the land ladies declaw my garden

2008-05-26T13:47:00.000-06:00

Culture Shock and the land ladies declaw my garden

PeeWee the cat was crying like a baby and batting me about the head and shoulders early Friday morning.
I was so jazzed to be back in Nicaragua that I stayed up till after three smoking, unpacking all my new stuff and drinking water and now just three hours later PeeWee was hoping to force an early breakfast out of me and it worked. I rolled out of bed to pee….I came out of my front room onto the back porch and saw the garden. I felt like I had come home to find my son with a big black eye. Even in the soft mosquito filled light of early morning the garden gasped for life. I was warned of a forthcoming orange tree trim, the oranges were falling in the pool across the fence. But evil doer had scraped up all the baby ferns, ground covers and grasses that have been struggling thru the dry season, down to bare packed dirt, the palm frond / compost heap was gone, the palm fronds had been trimmed off the coco tree and and worst of all, the potted plants looked like it had been months not weeks since they had been watered. The once circular sour orange tree was now a perfect half circle, allowing more sunlight than every before and new scenic vistas of the big two story house behind us. Dead leaves drifted on the still morning air and formed small piles at the base of the plants….
Even potted plants right near the door were neglected. The plants must have screamed for water while they were overlooked while feeding the cat. PeeWee had found her pace and was snapping up the wiskas..I got out the hose and started to soak the garden and potted plants. It was clear that most were goners. Some of these jungle plants have great recuperative powers and this is the end of the dry season, a natural time to die back. It still seemed a real violation of my space, rented or not no one cared about that space till me and I have 3500 cordabas planted back there, watered with sweat….
It really is time to find a new place. This was an easy option for a place when I needed it.
But I think I can find a bigger / better place for more money. And since the land ladies have moved in next door it seems like I am living on the fold out couch at my aunts house in Fla….They are cheaper than me and there is a 60 day notice and a months deposit to deal with…..But as the idea sinks deeper into my heat baked brain I care less about the dough and more about the move. My neighbors across the street moved out around 11:30 at night, seems to be a tradition .Maybe the girls would like me to leave, but I am not looking forward to telling them. But I have been holding back so feeling and I might enjoy venting a little. Unlike so many of those stool moisteners at the El Quixote bar, I don’t need them to salve my aches and pains with cold beer and cheap rum..
So Saturday I meet with Don Victor, a small Indian featured gentleman of some advanced age. Don Victor is the human equivalent of the rental section of your local paper or maybe Craig’s List. He has a list of available properties for sale or rent and seems to know half the town by name.
We had an appointment for Saturday morning at 11 near Tres Mundos Plaza. It was around noon when I came back to the house to get my cell phone and give Don Victor a call. He speaks real fast typico Nica Spanish and all I understood on the phone was five minutes so I headed back to the center of town. Saturday is a half day of work for most people so the streets we getting quiet in the mid day sun. We went to just around the corner from my current place and looked a two bed two bath for 250. It was long and dark, Nicas are not impressed with the sunny blue skies and like to burrow in like turtles.
There was lot’s of room and a funny smell. It had a dropped ceiling and was just to cave like for me. A good value and the Miami Nica land lords seemed nice enough, the son even claimed to be related to “A Rod” the baseball player by marriage? Do I want to see their finca (farm) for rent just outside of tow. I regret that I said no.
The next place was around a few blocks west of my place. It is just behind what is touted as the oldest house in Granada and has been home to a succession of tourist based businesses. I have noticed this house from walking by. It has a modern façade and is painted gray with black trim. Not a typical color scheme for these parts. It was a big square inside place with a caged in open roof section overlooking the arroyo. New kitchen and tile, roman columns and five sinks, three showers and no furniture or utilities paid. Still impressive, at 4 hundred it’s fifty more than I pay now and then the utilities. If I can find a place for 250 or less I can get my own cable and internet connection, maybe satellite tv….The last place turned out to be a ways out of town but only a few doors done from Michael and Carina new place. This place had the gringo palace feel. Two story with big wide wooden doors and a second story patio. Furnished with a full kitchen, nice beds and even a spiral stair case up stairs…for the same price I pay to live in the back room and tend the garden….It was to enclosed for me. A big part of living here is the being outside and feeling the breezes. And this place would have seemed at home at a Spanish themed development in Wisconsin. But still, great bathrooms and brand new stuff, another Miami Nica landlord. Pudgy guy with sandals and Gucci sun glasses..But again no outside space of any kind. I’ve seen some 2 and three bedrooms places but they rarely have appliances

the quest goes on….

So, I have looked at a few more places for rent but it’s been a rough week here. Every day seems to get hotter. 85 this morning at seven thirty, that’s when the school marching band fired up and rehearsed a few tunes before heading off to celebrate The Virgin Mary’s appearance at Fatima. Mary appeared here in Nicaragua as well and she is probably more important here than her son. As I type it’s a little over a hundred this afternoon. The power and water outages are back. And we now have a full blown transit strike. The fares for busses and taxis are set by the government. Gas here is over $4 a gallon, diesel fuel just over $5 and how any taxi or bus driver makes a living is beyond me. Last time the government raised bus fares 12 cents there were riots in the capitol. They drivers are wanting the gov to freeze fuel prices….But the strike has forced almost all motorized traffic off the roads leaving only the horse drawn. They don’t care so much about the price of gas. But I go to Managua 3-4 times a month on the bus to buy food and the peanuts for my peanut butter. All the food here is brought in from the outlying areas as are most essential items. Private vehicles belong to the upper class. Today I saw a Hummer and a Ford Explorer parked by the Zaquan Steak House….If the strike goes on for more than a week, things will get ugly. Stores and restaurants will run out of merchandise and food. The gas stations will run out of gas….People commute on the express busses and the town to town chicken busses haul people and freight all over the country. Even the private busses that take the well off kids to their better schools are parked. Around 7:30 a.m. the streets leading to the Mercado are lined with taxis bringing the vendors and their wares to the market place. Not this week.
The strike has gotten a little ugly, picket lines with burning tires and rubber bullets. The talk is of a month long strike.
We had some rain one night last week. First rain since mid March and the tv predicts the first big tropical depression of the year will pass thru Nicaragua on Monday. Thunder and lightning of biblical proportions. Thunder so loud and close that the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up and three or four inches of rain fall in an hour to wash the streets and arroyos clean. The rains will bring back cooler weather with overcast skies and strong breezes. The plants have died back and they too are waiting for the rains…
I don’t have stomach problems here but I must have gotten a bad egg for breakfast on Wednesday. Two in the morning came and I felt like a toothpaste tube being flatten by a steel toed boot. I was explosive but ever so glad I had scrubbed down the bano earlier in the week. I couldn’t keep anything down for the next day or so. I just laid in bed and drank water. It’s better today, I had half a breakfast today and a litre of this nasty tasting “Suero Oral” It’s like a medicinal Gator Aide powder, helps you rehydrate. It’s says Strawberry Flavor on the packet but only people who have never tasted a strawberry would believe that.
Next time I’ll just get a bright blue bottle of Power Aide….

Black Balloons in the Tavern

2008-05-07T10:05:00.000-06:00

Black Balloons in the Tavern
My brother in law turned 50 and the half century mark was celebrated at Casey’s Tavern out on old West Main. The surprise was truly a surprise being almost a week after the actual birth date. My sister was too drag him down to a favorite track side watering hole around six thirty. The place was open to the public but sis and her pals had bought a keg and brought in a huge steamer of shredded beef with greasy old fashioned twin packed boxed ripple cut potato chips and chex cereal party mix. I was hoping that the usual cliché “over the hill” jokes and gifts would be kept at a minimum. I am after all, older than the birthday boy. I gave him a medio of 7 year old dark FDC Rum from Nicaragua. But he also got a plastic dust cover for his dick, an over the hill t shirt and a for some mysterious reason a giant carved wooden Mexican chocolate whip? I caught the food saver analogy but the molenera? There was a newly effected no smoking law and many trips were made out side to “have a butt”. It was good to have the door propped open. I noticed this week that in the tropics the temp is gradual, slowly up and down. But here, it’s in and out…the store is cool, the car interior is hot, the outside air is frosty, the apt is 80 f, my body doesn’t know what to do, so I sweat. …..Anyway we all had a swell time joking about Rory, drinking beer and eating sandwiches. Was that Garrison Keeler?
My 17 year niece and her acned young boyfriend from the farm collected car keys around 9. I think she likes driving different nicer cars and she was disappointed about rentals cars rules and a little surprised that I was drinking water on the rocks. Drinking is a bit of a family tradition. Rory kept up the family honor and had a terrific time. But when the keg ran out the crowd so did the crowd. We took down the balloons and shiny aluminum decorations, wrapped up the giant left over B Day cake and my niece and I soberly drove everybody home.
Next morning things moved a little slow till we went to a Mexican restaurant. A popular spot. Good American style Mexican classics. My niece was concerned about me having eaten too much Mexican food living in Nicaragua. I explained that they were two whole different countries and while there are two Mexican owned and operated Mexican restaurants in my town. Most Nicas eat Nica food. Her teenage pal from high school asked what country Nicaragua was in? I think what impressed these modern mid western teens was that their wacky old uncle living some where in the jungle had a my space page….We went to another massive grocery store, bought more food and ate it while watching the Minn hockey team lose a play off game.
On Sunday my brother in law grilled up a bunch of chicken breasts and we had a big old fashioned Sunday dinner…We argued a little politics and I hope I impressed on him that you vote with your money everyday and that being anti corporate is very much about being pro small town mom and pop, all American blue collar down home stuff.…Around two I tanked up the rental car with ethanol at the Super America… I was off to visit a long ago friend who lives on a scenic 150 acre spread near Rochester Minn. Beautiful huge log home, wild life and horses on a spring feed duck pond. Okay I am jealous…But I know It took him 28 years on the job to swing the mortgage and I have not that much dedication to any job I have ever had …I haven’t seen him or the other guest of honor Donna in over 20 years. Some serious nostalgificaton going on now,…With photos. Great dinner, roast pork with wild rice and fresh little green beans, field green salad,…mmmm and new to me, Sulfite free organic red wine….All good to me. Red wine here in Nicaragua comes in a dusty old room temp wax box from Chili. I had heard decades ago that she had married a cult type reverend. They are still together, 2 kids and 20 plus years.. her husband reminds me more of my the bearded and cardigan wearing Presbyterian Pastor I had as a therapist than any kind of Jim Jones. Nice people, looking for answers and trying to help.
I headed back to Nebraska early next morning. It was 6:30 am and the sun was starting to thaw the brown farm fields. The wild turkeys were strutting around down by the pond and the donkeys brayed a fare well…Small town America on a Monday morning, I looked for a breakfast place but only saw McDonalds. Just a coffee, please.
I was 20 miles north from Rochester and had I went south at the twin lane dirt road intersection leading off the farm I would have been having eggs at a hip mom and pop near the fairgrounds. Great flea markets the Gold Rush and Orinoco, back in the day.. But I went north towards St Paul and Monday morning rush hour. Two lanes full of suburban commuters in Honda pick up trucks and Range Rovers. I had no real idea how to connect to the free way or even what freeway to take. I followed the plethora of state route signs till I saw one that I recognized.. Ft Snelling State Park…Kind of far north and east from where I am heading but I had heard the name some where back in time, park board dances dressed in fringed vests and bell bottom jeans. Sting ray bikes and John Lennon glasses so, I head west singing “When I Was Young” by Eric Burden, my eighth grade class’s song of the year…. I ended up finding my way from St Paul to Mpls using age old memories of riding my hi rise death mobile bike around the park system. Ft Snelling to Minnehaha falls…Little ways further to Lake Nicomas and my old neighborhood. It may not be direct but it was scenic and I headed out at 66th Street, the same way I had meandered in…A scenic hour and a half detour but it all down hill from here. South bound on 35W, 80 mph rolling with the big rigs and excellent public radio from Mpls. I got to Omaha in the afternoon and did a little computer printer shopping in Council Bluffs and Omaha, I was in a Target store, a Super Target, it looked like all the others but the plastic smell was like huffing gas from a plastic bag. I started to feel queasy and stepped outside. No more shopping. This gave me an excuse to have Runza for lunch. When I came back from India tanned skinny and penniless, I lived in my folks basement for 18 month while saving money to go to LA and attend the Gemological Institute of America. That’s another story.
I discovered Runza a Czech baked meat roll. A nice state wide chain, clean with great crinkle cut fries…I got to the folks round 5:30 and the meat loaf was ready..
I surfed the net on mom‘s AOL dial up, confirmed my tickets on SW and Spirit, finished an Ebay deal on a Nicaraguan Hanna Barbera Ricochet Rabbit bank and found a small b&w laser printer on Office Depot‘s web site. Next morning we went to a brand new barely shook open Office Depo store were a sweet, erstwhile missionary minded asst manager got me hooked up and on my way happy.
Mom was making lunch of home made vegetable beef soup and grilled ham and cheese sandwiches when we got home. Time to pack for real. The 50 pound airline weight allowance is my challenge now. The new printer w extra cartridge, my old hand tools, clothes, food, books and more had to be broken down to two fifties, a forty-four and back pack. We got out the scale and got both checked bags to around 48 pounds and ready to fly…
Dad was happy to help by cutting town the original stryo packaging to fit my suitcase. Man, when did he get soo old…Still sucking the cancer sticks while the stryo foam pellets stick to his face. In my head I am far younger than I really am. So seeing my almost 80 year old parents and funeral arrangements is quite the realty check. They take about asst care homes instead of Cruise Lines. They appear to have made a concise decision that they are too old to do anything anymore and that they will sit patiently waiting for their turn in the tunnel. A little fatalistic but Dad even circled the day he will live longer than his evil old Dad did. So, apparently he is free to pass after he outlives my grand pa. Only a few months away. Most of my friends parents have passed and they understand the hanging sword that is having old parents. They are like eight year old now and I fear the day they start to act 4 years old. I wish they come down here, they can smoke cogitates and watch the wheel of fortune, we have casinos and soon a fancy grocery store but it’s too much for them… They will make a poor estate sale, unlike the country club set in Ft Lauderdale. My bargain basement ticket on SW Air stopped in Chicago at Midway for an hour and then just a few hours later we left for Ft Lauderdale. Moods were a little ugly before we finally boarded two hour late mid day flight. And this time SW’s boarding scheme, C stood for center seat I had a liquored up yankee on one side and a sneezy wheezy corporate gal with Crackberry on the other, kicking and screaming new agey kids behind. Luckily I didn’t notice who was in front. I have never been to south Fl before and it is some thing to behind, clean and breezy, million dollar yachts and top less Ferraris.
An old buddy was eager to show me his adopted town and he had agreed to meet me at the Air Port, back in college Jim and I dated Mary & Lisa best friends and room mates for years. Has a creative out side the box thinker and was inspirational for me, introduced me to a entrepreneur spirit. Later he moved out east. He started the Needle Exchange in dark and staid Boston…But nowadays I didn’t recognize him at the airport. It has been maybe 20 years since I last saw him and 20 more since his last haircut. Down to his butt, still a rocker at heart…We rolled in his classic mile wide Lincoln Town Car so while moving we had automotive camouflage with the silver haired set in their Town Cars. Great food, great thrift store…pretty people showing off in a scenic way.. I like this Ft Lauderdale. It’s like a shiny post card. His newly divorced ex wife is a hot 30 something Russian woman who works for a liquor distributor. She has Central America for a territory.:. Insert your own joke here*
The faded 1960s upstairs condo is facing the waterway and the cool evening breezes were a treat.. Blue Crab enchiladas for lunch and later after more thrift storing we had some neighborhood Chinese food before Jake went to his gig playing piano and I headed off on the short last leg of the USA trip. First time on discount carrier Spirit Air, the staff seemed a little surly and a club soda cost 80 Cordoba’s. But my bags and I safely landed an hour or so late at 12:30 and with Paxoes Shuttle Mitsubishi SUV waiting I was back in my Granada apt before 2am.….Home sweet home…the ceiling fan had been off for a week and the sala (front room) smelled like opening an attic door in August, you could smell the heat like a sauce gone bad. Still good to be home? Lizard poo on the pillows and How many dead mice are there? Is that plants I hear screaming? Where‘s PeeWee?….next time:
Culture Shock and the land ladies declaw my garden

1 year in third world, now 2 weeks up north

2008-04-30T11:21:00.000-06:00

Smell the Heat not the Plastic

By mid march the daily temps were nearing a hundred, by noon the heat radiated off the old clay bldgs of colonial Granada like the chrome exhaust pipes on those cheap Chinese motorcycles.
I had the back half of a round trip ticket on Continental. I changed it from Seattle to Omaha and went off to visit family and friends in the heart land of the USA.
I was hoping for cool , green and spring like story book spring weather but when I landed in Omaha the freezing rain was blowing sideways and the mercury stalled near the 32 degree mark. My elderly parents had braved the 75 mph I80 freeway to come 40 miles north and pick me up at the airport. The bad weather didn’t phase them nor did the tailgaters continuously trying to pass the old folks in the fast lane…
Back at the apartment we played Scrabble. We watched Wheel of Fortune the Weather Chanel, Deal or No Deal and we ate (a lot)….Both Beef Pot Roast and a Pork Roast for dinner one nite. Asparagus, cranberries and walnuts. Fritos, Doritos and Cheetohs, shrimp cocktails and breaded catfish. Fancy Belgian chocolates and tiny Mars bars, Crown Royal, Jim Beam and Tequila….What a country.
My folks like so many older folks have discovered Casino Gambling and food hoarding as their main hobbies. They have converted the hall closet into a pantry. Bags of oyster crackers and instant pudding, lo sodium Campbell’s and cans of tuna and other fish. Piles of bagged snack foods from the Aldi’s and pyramids of toilet paper and paper towels.
Dad knows I don’t share his interest in “gaming”, but he had to show off all his “Harrah’s” booty. Free gifts from the various Harrah’s he has chosen to be his beneficiary. He had decks of cards and Xmas cards. He had imprinted shirts and hats and watches. Comped hotel rooms and free buffets. All for “free” .
My mom is not a player, she likes to sit in the room and decide what to watch of the tv…Dad can stand on his feet all night…smoking a pack of Indian cigarettes and pulling handles or pushing buttons till the breakfast buffet opens..
I can’t help to feel that modern computer games with my dad’s Harrah’s Personal VIP card deeply inserted in them can push his buttons and work him like a two dollar whore. It knows how long he will play with out winning and how much money he can and will leave behind. Dad is a geriatric zombie, dazed by the colors and the seamless technology.
I gladly jumped in to the other past time of shopping. Mostly grocery stores, Walgreens and a few big box stores.
Here in Nicaragua there just isn’t that much to buy. Even the big international grocery stores in Managua couldn’t begin to compete with the mighty Super Saver in Lincoln, Neb. The Super Saver is huge, a massive temple to edible excess. Aisles of just pet food, even refrigerated fresh food for dogs. There is a giant Willy Wonka like wall just filled to the ceiling with self serve sweets, aromatic fresh donuts and tortillas coming off conveyor belts in the back of the store. Wide frosty rows of freezers blasting off chilly air and stocked with instant corporate miracle food as well as a thousand flavors of ice cream. I stood gaped jawed like Jethro Bodin watching fat people push not one but some time two carts packed full of prepared packaged goodness around the wide spotlessly clean store. They had Hot Pockets and frozen Italian meats. They had Mexican cheese and Greek olives, egg roll skins and all natural skin care products. The kids dripped fudgicles on their Sponge Bob t shirts while linebacker sized moms shopped for cheese in a can micro wave ready pot roast dinners, complete with potatoes and broccoli…Temptations abounded… I craved smoked turkey breast , pita bread with pretzels and a big Kosher dill pickle, Steak Ums, frozen White Castle burgers, tato tots,,,, maybe the spicy blue corn chips with fresh pico de gallo, Swiss cheese, edam, Colby and jack, but I bought Tom’s natural tooth paste, big jars of Omega 3 vitamins, stir fry sauces, curry paste, Cajun seasoning before I hit my luggage weight allowance.
The north west suburban side of Lincoln is spreading like weeds. Giant shopping complexes, big box stores and car dealerships line miles of wide new smooth roads. In one three block area there are two different home stores and three different office stores…For some reason Lincoln has always seemed richer and whiter than other mid western towns. The state capital and home to Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Kawasaki Motorcycles and the University Of Nebraska….Go Huskers…
Lot’s of big shiny trucks driven by rosy cheeked professional people complaining about paying $3.35 for a gallon of gas while piling carts full of over packaged pseudo food, new plastic electronic doo dads, low use lite bulbs full of mercury, gadgets and the latest Hollywood toy fad into the cavernous cargo area of their massive Ford Explorer. But ….Be Green, Bring your own cloth bag…What a country
I love my ancient parents but after 4-5 days I needed some grown up time.
I rented a Nissan and hit some thrift stores and even a couple of old antique malls in the area…It was in the thrifts that I first heard anyone speaking Spanish…
I had a big shopping list but even with a third of it done I started to feel the economic burn and I tightened my purse strings…And besides I was going to have to buy some of that 4 dollars gas now too.
I took off the next morning to visit my sister and her All American family in Red Wing and then for Mpls. I lived there from the 7th till 10th grade and back again for college a few years later. The freedom of the road kicked in right away. I am not used to be cooped up in a small apartment with my folks so, rolling done the hiway with some rock and roll on the radio was a tonic. Only one thing missing to make it like that Tom Petty song…..
My folks had lead me to believe that it would take much longer than it did to reach Minn. Dad lent me a state map of Neb and a map of the USA in case I got lost. They don’t smoke in the car and they need to pee a lot so for them freeway driving is a tour of rest stops. Some of them down right spectacular. The Iowa Rest Stop near the Minn border has the fastest free wi fi I have ever seen. Down loaded some Amy Winehouse and made reservas at the near by Motel 6.…It was only 6 pm when I checked into to my old home away from home, the Motel 6. They had left the light on for me. I went up stairs and took a little nap and a hot shower before looking for a mom and pop eatery. I drove around for awhile but never found the town of Lakeville. Near the hotel was a McDonalds and a strip mall Mexican café called TacoVille. I opted for Minn-Mexican and ate hi school cafeteria sloppy joe style burritos for dinner.
Score on tv, a great documentary on PBS called Illict, Bill Maher on HBO and then the Simpsons in English. SWEET
In the morning I snagged a breakfast burrito and coffee at Mc D’s. The coffee was excellent, the burrito haunted me all day…. Good thing I didn’t have the steak.
I thought it would take an hour or so to reach south Mpls but I was forcing a hard exit off 66th st even before my coffee cooled down. I came off the exit and saw the once important Lynndale Home Nursery shut down and for sale. I worked there in the spring and summer in college. I new where I was now but back in the day I rode busses and bikes. I needed alleys and shortcuts to find some spots. I was riding the nostalgia wave now, 25 years or more since I graced these tree lined blvds. I passed Debby Dale’s house and Pearl Park (where my grade school band had it’s first gig) turned at Diamond Lake and passed the grocery store were I got caught by the cops taking a break from my early morning paper route and swiping dozens of fresh donuts from the outside delivery door. The folks got a wake up call and continental breakfast that morning.…Just up 58th and I passed all the neat older houses that my old 8th-10th grade neighbors and friends lived in. Living in 1960s South Mpls was the most Leave it T Beaver time of my life. It all came back and the cold gray day seemed warmer.
I cruised all the lakes, and the west bank near the river, Washburn High School, Resurrection Catholic School and Church, my old house at Lake Nokomis and the warehouse downtown where I lived as the nite watchman. I even saw the Mary Tyler Moore statue downtown…
It seemed so big back then but now it’s just over there.
The grey city was just coming out of winter, dead leaves and dirt covered everything with just the earliest of bulbs trying to poke out of the hard ground….It made the city center and old commercial streets look drab and a little forgotten. But the in town lake areas still house a flourishing middle class. These great two and three story homes built at the turn of the century expressed a erstwhile Lutheran optimism that happily still exists. It always been a nice town, pleasant blue eyed people, lots of book stores and employed folk supporting a music and art scene. But man is it cold…There was ice on the lakes and snow flakes floating in the air.
I was to be guest of honor at friends that nite so for lunch I only ate three White Castle Burgers and a small fry at one of the sleaziest places in the world.
If I had only had the stomach space for a trip to Falafel King…
I went to my college girl friend’s home for dinner with her best friend and her hubby that night and we had a lovely slow roasted pork roast on family china with wine in crystal glasses.
My friends in hi school and college are best described as the smart hippies. Whether any of us every were hippies is hard to say… But kids and car payments will keep you on the job…Most all of my old friends left standing are doing well….Lisa bought the house she grew up in from her folks estate. It freaks me out to visit. I knock on that big old oak door and fully expect her mom, the culture vulture old Mrs. Rotegard to answer. The oriental rugs and furniture still look the same and even includes my old monster stereo from the 70s and assorted odd old things from when we lived in sin. Mrs and I didn’t get along that well. After all I was the wild haired neer do well that had seduced her daughter and now we shared a tie dyed love nest. But Mrs R introduced me to estate sales with art and antiques. She and her pals in The Culture Vulture Club knew all about Oriental Rugs and sculpture, artists and 1920s craftsmen. She may have never blessed our cohabitation but she helped us furnish with wrought iron bridge lamps and Parrish prints. Her introduction to collecting influenced me more than maybe any other person. And It was her uncle Herbie that sold me my first car…a huge white one owner 1948 Suburban style truck called a Carry All.
The nostalgia wave is giving me a little motion sickness now. For me, Mpls is a place and a time but for those who never left it is only a place… So like so many 50 something’s I ask myself Where did the time go? When the heck did I get to be the old fart with 20 year old socks and a tattered bagful of war stories? I had wanted to ask specific questions about the time line of my college years. I have selective and some times purple hazy memories of the old days. But as I talked to my grayer and chubbier pals I realized everyone remembrances are subjective, it’s the flavor and the spirit of the events not the chronology that’s important.
But I still plan a questionnaire…….All for now,,,, part two:
Black Balloons in the Tavern coming soon…….

HEY ,,,,what's this

2008-03-22T11:57:00.000-06:00

I have been posting stories and pics from my living in Nicaragua adventur on My Space but I wanted a grown up web site.
So stay tuned and I will start transferring and posting some tales from my Gaugin period right here