“Gang-Rape of the American Dream”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Best article yet on the financial crisis.  Tells it like it all came down…in great detail.  I can see it all now.

Rollingstone.com

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

“As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. [Italics mine]

In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Speaking About Toilets

Posted on by Laughingnomad

When I was hitch-hiking in Europe in 1965, I came across the bidet…couldn’t figure it out.  Somebody had to explain it to me. It’s an extra “toilet” in the bathroom that looks like a toilet except that it has no water in it and has a little jigger in the bottom that, when you push a button, sprays water upwards and cleans your bottom after you have defecated in the “real” toilet and then you flush.  Many people over the world think Americans and people in the UK are unhygienic because they use paper.

Salon.com: Actually, we’re pretty disgusting, and we just don’t realize it.

We are kind of disgusting. I’m being polite about it. In water cultures like India, where you see all these people going to do their business with a little cup of water, they think we’re extremely dirty. They can’t believe it. Muslims, who have to be scrupulously clean according to the laws of the Quran, also think it’s kind of weird that we have this habit of using paper, and imagining we’re clean. We’re not.

Another thing. When traveling in developing countries, Americans come home wailing about the squat toilet. And actually, using toilets in the first place is physiologically” kind of impeding our normal bodily processes. You actually don’t want to be seated high up on the toilet. That’s not helping your evacuation processes,” says Salon. Read  Salon.com on this most untalked about issue.

And just think of all those trees not to even mention the most polluting of all processes…the making of toilet paper out of virgin wood which is another long subject entirely.

My son lives in Thailand and when he married his Thai wife he introduced her to toilet paper. But she would wind it around her hand a dozen times and they were going through toilet paper like, well, water, as they say. Toilet paper is expensive in Thailand.  I tried to show her how you use less paper if you bunch it up…not wind it…but she still used bushels of it. So now my son refuses to buy toilet paper.  They have a bucket of water that they fill when waiting for the shower to get warm. Then they have a little plastic bowl they dip into the water in the bucket and use that with their fingers to clean themselves…like all the other Thais do who are not as turned off about their body processes as we are.  Of course washing their hands well afterward…like we should all be doing anyway. In India, they only use their left hands…which is why they never eat with the left hand.

Think of it.  Women use about six times the paper that men do. Another reason (I don’t want to gross anybody out) but the best reason for using water to clean is that a lot of urinary tract infections in women are caused by wiping back to front.  This I was told by a urologist in Bangkok. ;- And afterward people put the paper in a basket because the sewer systems here in Mexico can’t handle all that paper.

And another thing about water.  It is the dry season here now and people in the city’s colonias don’t have water.  They have to buy 5 gallon jugs of bottled water for drinking and cooking from a guy who yells “AGUAaaaa” as he pulls his water cart down the street. My apartment has a cistern and water is delivered by truck.  When the “tinaca” (tank) runs out on the roof, it is refilled by pumping water from the cistern under the apartment house  up to the tinaca.  Also, to save water, we only flush every 2-3 times after urination.  As most everyone here says, “If it’s Yellow let it Mellow.  If it’s Brown Flush it Down.

Not such difficult conservation adjustments we can learn from the rest of the world. I feel like a sanitation officer for the CDC after writing this post…or a urologist. 🙂

I Used To Make Fun Of Rick Steves

Posted on by Laughingnomad

 I used to make fun of Rick Steves.  No more!

Here are a few gems from a Salon.com interview just in case you don’t want to read to the end:

Salon: “Steves wants Americans to get over themselves. He wants us to please shed our geographic ego. Everybody should travel before they vote,” he has written.”

So if McCain and Palin had won, what would we have seen abroad?”

Steves: “More and more Americans wearing Canadian flags”

LOL.  During 7 years of near constant travel, I used to say I was from Canada.  My husband used to say he was from Iceland.  I always said I wanted a T-shirt that said in 6 languages: “I didn’t vote for Bush.”  Election night there were parties all over Mexico. Now they are watching us.

Steves: “As a travel writer, I get to be the provocateur, the medieval jester. I go out there and learn what it’s like and come home and tell people truth to their face. Sometimes they don’t like it. But it’s healthy and good for our country to have a better appreciation of what motivates other people. The flip side of fear is understanding. And you gain that through travel.”

What’s the most important thing people can learn from traveling?

Steves: “A broader perspective. They can see themselves as part of a family of humankind. It’s just quite an adjustment to find out that the people who sit on toilets on this planet are the odd ones. Most people squat. You’re raised thinking this is the civilized way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not. It’s the Western way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not more civilized than somebody who squats. A man in Afghanistan once told me that a third of this planet eats with spoons and forks, and a third of the planet eats with chopsticks, and a third eats with their fingers. And they’re all just as civilized as one another.”

The “ugly American” thing is associated with how big your country is. There are not just ugly Americans, there are ugly Germans, ugly Japanese, ugly Russians. Big countries tend to be ethnocentric. Americans say the British drive on the “wrong” side of the road. No, they just drive on the other side of the road. That’s indicative of somebody who’s ethnocentric. But it doesn’t stop with Americans. Certain people, if they don’t have the opportunity to travel, always think they’re the norm. I mean, you can’t be Bulgarian and think you’re the norm.

It’s interesting: A lot of Americans comfort themselves thinking, “Well, everybody wants to be in America because we’re the best.” But you find that’s not true in countries like Norway, Belgium or Bulgaria. I remember a long time ago, I was impressed that my friends in Bulgaria, who lived a bleak existence, wanted to stay there. They wanted their life to be better but they didn’t want to abandon their country. That’s a very powerful Eureka! moment when you’re traveling: to realize that people don’t have the American dream. They’ve got their own dream. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing.

That is certainly true of many people I have talked to around the world and most people I talk to in Mexico who have migrated to the north. The fruit seller speaks a little English. I ask if he has ever worked in the north. Yes, he and others say. Three years. Six years. Ten years, the guy in the tiny mountain village 7 hours from the nearest town in Guatemala says. The guy on the corner of my block whose wife sells tamales worked in the U.S. 30 years. But eventually they usually come back. If given an economic choice they would choose to stay in their own country where they can enjoy their own language, their own culture…and their families. One of my eureka moments. Read More

Costillas de Puerco en Salsa Verde

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I have a cleaning lady come to my apartment twice a month to mop up the polvo (diesel dust and pollen) from my floors and shake the rugs. She also will give me a cooking lesson for a few extra pesos. Last week she showed me how to make this:

Costillas de Puerco con Salsa Verde (Pork Ribs with Green Sauce)
Ingredients:
Several pounds pork ribs 2-3 inches long
Couple pounds tomatillos
Lots of chopped onion & garlic
Salt to taste
Jalepeno peppers to taste (3-4 for a large batch depending on how hot they are and whether they are deveined and de-seeded)
Bunch of fresh cilantro

Boil ribs in pot of water until tender (about 2 hours) Chop up other ingredientes and put in blender with some of the rib broth. Strain blender ingredients to get out tomatillo seeds. Saute blender ingredients in pan with a little olive oil. Add rest of rib broth to ingredients in pan and simmer down. Add ribs and simmer again for half hour or more. Amounts depend on how many ribs you have. I had a 3-4 kilos or more of ribs and couple kilos of tomatillos, one onion, head of garlic. Sauce is kind of soupy but you can simmer it down. Better 1-2 days after cooking. Will serve several people. Sorry amounts are loosy goosey…

You can make it with red sauce the same way only using Italian red tomatoes instead of the green tomatillos. Next time she will go the little market up on the hill with me and we’ll make Caldo de Res (beef soup).

Every Day In Oaxaca A Different Day

Posted on by Laughingnomad

My friends at home in the U.S. ask me “What do you do every day?” We expats find that a difficult question to answer.

Well, last week I walked all over town to find a rice cooker. I know, I’m spoiled. Wish I had the one that is packed away in my house in Salem…along with all the other stuff. I picked up my art pieces that I had framed and hung them. The apartment is really coming along. Everything is so nice…especially in the evening with Buddah Bar music coming from my iPod powered by the living room speakers and dimmers turned down on the recessed lights that provide a soft glow against the orange and yellow walls.  (Recessed lights are a luxury in Mexico…not to even mention dimmers! Most lights are just bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.)  Bright blue and purple pillows made from hand-woven Guatemalan huipiles (women’s tops) fill my white suede leather soiree couch. White woven Italian lawn chairs and a Mexican Rustica coffee table sit on big hand-woven earth-colored Guatemalan rugs in the middle of the living room facing the couch.  Against the opposite wall is my rustica brown leather covered round table for telephone with big comfy Mexican Rustica reading chair and light next to it.  On the end wall is a huge Rustica shelf unit with my metal Buddah head on the top shelf wisely overlooking all. Huge floor to ceiling windows face the veranda and park.  Found a huge ceramic flower vase with a big wide mouth for all the lovely flowers found in local markets. Being in a globalized world, it is made in Viet Nam. It is sitting in the middle of a beautiful dining room table that I found in a local woodworking cooperative waiting for flowers that I will buy in the Friday Market in Llano Park. Now I just have to find a small funky table for my long covered veranda overlooking Conzati Park. Conzati was an Italian botanist and teacher who contributed greatly to the city.  He catalogued the flora in the park that used to be much more forested than it is now and there is a monument to him there.

My friend Max is giving me, today, a rose bush and some other plants…and I will plant a local vegetable (the Chayote)  that will sprout into huge long vines and by the end of the summer will block the sun from the southern exposure.  And provide me with mucho chayotes that are good in soup.  So I will have to take a bus out to this gigantic earthen pot factory and bring home pots in a taxi. Max’s roommates, Budd and Sandy are back from the states and it will be fun to see them again. Budd worked on a documentary of the fall of the Soviet Union for the BBC and was the photographer who took the famous picture of Yeltsen on the tank in Russia during the coup. He has circled the globe on a motorcyle and they are in the business now of buying motorcyles instead of a car to get around on in Oaxaca. She is 70ish and he is in his 80’s…with 9 marriages between them! Expats can be an interesting lot.

One of the five “neighbors” in my apartment building, Carlos, showed me his new purchase yesterday. He is the curator of the Oaxaca Contemporary Art Museum so I was interested in seeing what he had…maybe something from one of the world-famous Oaxacan painters? No. To my surprise he showed me what looked like a huge antique Chinese urn…made by a Mexican artist up north…and found in an antique shop in Mexico City! I laughed! Serves the Chinese right, I said! In China today, I told him, you can see a pleasure park with all manner of copied Mayan, Zapotec and Aztec ruins and pyramids all jumbled up in one big mess! He sighed in dismay. Actually, I like it (the urn), I told him. It’s kind of funky…made by a Mexican and displayed in a art aficionado’s apartment in Oaxaca. “I like funky too,” he said as he smiled ironically. Then I trotted him over to my apartment where I showed him my big purchase that morning. A beautifully matted black and white lithograph made by a relatively unknown Zapotec artist that lives a block up from me…up a tiny cobbled alley-way. His stark but tasteful adobe one-room home/studio leads out the back to a huge garden with trees, plants and flowers. But he is very poor and I wanted to support his work. You know…the starving artist. The galleries take about half the money of an artist’s sale and makes the pieces unaffordable for me.  Now I will enjoy many hours trying to figure out the meaning of this really interesting  piece! Actually, there is a story to how I met him. When I was in Kunming several years ago, I met a lovely 35 year old British woman in an internet cafe at the Camellia Hotel and have kept in touch with her since. After leaving China she traveled up South and Central America and stopped in Oaxaca for a month. She is an artist and wanted to soak up the huge local art scene. She hung out here with a local guy, she said, and there on her web page was this gorgeous Zapotec guy…not too tall…about 50 plus…with the typical big Zapotec nose, long flowing black hair and dressed all in white. OMG, I told her…he is beautiful! Then a couple years later I was walking down a street in Oaxaca and passed by this guy. I stopped him and asked if he was Heather’s friend. Yes, he said. Small world, as they say. Sigh…if I were only 20 years younger…

Incidentally, my other apartment neighbors are: a high-priced prostitute who works in the Oaxaca judiciary,  keeps her co-workers happy and travels a lot. (This chisme… gossip… is from my funny gay apartment manager from NYC who lives downstairs with his young Mexican consort in a gorgeous apartment he remodeled at his own expense). She is very nice, he says. Then there is a young couple on one  side of me…a Mexican woman and her British boyfriend, and a divorced Mexican woman who lives with her daughter downstairs and whose ex-husband uses my unused parking spot with out telling me…much to the consternation of the manager.

I won’t even try describing the trip to the mountain Mescal factory with Max, my friend Paula who is here teaching English, and Francisco and his new consort…Joan.  Max, an old sot, got more than slightly inebriated, along with the driver, and Paula, Joan and I threatened to get out of the pick-up and hail down a collectivo taxi.  Anyway, Paula and I ended up leaving Max in Tlacalula with Francisco and Joan. It’s sad to see this very intelligent articulate witty man this way.  He is very ill and shouldn’t drink but he doesn’t care since he’s really on his way out anyway. Incidentally, the driver picked up a young Mexican along the way.  He had been going to high school in the states…illegally of course.  His English was perfect so he obviously had been living there most of his life.  The police picked him up off the street and threw him in jail for 6 months without charging him and then deported him.  I asked him how many others were there like him in jail in the states.  “Thousands,” he said.  I am furious that tax-payers are paying for jail time for immigrants who instead should just be deported.

All last week I hosted, through couchsurfing.com, a beautiful and gracious young Iranian-American woman who was born in Austria but raised in Berkeley. She speaks Farsi and Spanish (she majored in Spanish/linguistics) and and is now traveling after teaching Spanish in Guadalajara for the last 6 months. Her love is salsa dance and danzon…a beautiful dance from Cuba with choreographed steps…which she had a chance to enjoy in the lit-up zocalo the other night. Afterward, we ran into Willy…my Swiss friend…in a zocalo outdoor cafe and who I treated to beer and mescal…much to his dismay. Willy is such a gentleman and never lets me buy drinks…which he can ill-afford…living on the local economy. Nearby, the nightly marimba band accompanied a few dancers who just couldn’t keep still. One night we joined my friend Judie, who teaches English here in the Lending Library,  to listen to her Mexican boyfriend play a wailing sax with his great 3 piece band in a tiny smoke-filled venue. But we wished the rude Chilangos (from Mexico City) would have kept quiet. There is no love lost between the Oaxacans and the slumming Chilangos who are generally considered by the Oaxacan Indios to be rude, demanding and arrogant. But I had a great time with Sepi and miss her…but alas she is not mine to keep.

Yesterday I was supposed to host a French journalist who has lived in Spain many years and is now in Mexico City developing a Spanish language radio web site. But guess he found more interesting ground to till. And the two German girls didn’t show. Ended up in a hostel with other young travelers. Next wednesday my friend Belle, who lived in the last apartment with me in 2006-7 will visit me with her husband and adopted Guatemalan daughter. She recently found her daughter’s birth family by traveling in two buses and on a donkey up to a Guatemalan mountain village. It will be interesting to hear about the visit…her daughter is about eight now. Next month two women ecologists from Estonia will stay with me several days.

Week before last, on Ash Wednesday, found me with my Mexican friends, Mica and Bardo, in Huayapam at the annual Ash Wednesday Fair. Celebrants leaving church were greeted with miniature plastic cups of Mescal. Only in Mexico we often say. The whole town participates. The crowded food stands were great. Mica sold her roasted coffee beans and her mother served up the traditional frothy Zapotec Tajate drink.  I enjoyed three chili roja (red sauce) tomales…and the banda music and fireworks.

This is the Lenten season. Every day there have been processions and music all over town. Here is the best to come:

Friday, March 20th – Good Samaritan Day – businesses and homes set up booths and give free drinks to passers-by, thereby, becoming Good Samaritans. Question is…are these soft drinks or Mescal? My bet is on Mescal. 🙂

Thursday, April 9th – Day of Our Lady of the Sorrows – traditionally Oaxacans visit seven churches that day where altars are set up with chía seeds sprouting green out of clay animals (symbolizing the Resurrection) and flowers and Maguey plants. A beautiful one is constructed in the Privada de Alcalá on the Alcalá south of Niños Heroes de Chapultapec.

Good Friday, April 10th – Procession of Silence from the Church of the Sacred Blood of Christ up the Alcalá and returning to the church via García Vigil. Easter Week will find Oaxaca full of tourists enjoying the daily processions and music.

And that is not all…by a long shot. Yesterday my son, Greg, sent me, via UPS, a new iPod Touch for my birthday so now I have a new toy to play with.

Now you know…sort of…what I do every day in Oaxaca…when I am not reading, on my computer, sitting on the veranda…or taking a siesta.

Critical Thinking Takes A Blow

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Greenwald, in Salon.com, describes how the Obama administration has passed the loyalty test when it allowed Charles W. Freeman Jr. to  step away Tuesday from an appointment to chair the National Intelligence Council — which oversees the production of reports that represent the view of the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies.     Grrrrrrr!

Says Greenwald: “In the U.S., you can advocate torture, illegal spying, and completely optional though murderous wars and be appointed to the highest positions.  But you can’t, apparently, criticize Israeli actions too much or question whether America’s blind support for Israel should be re-examined.”

Freeman later said in an email, referring to what he called “the Israel Lobby:” “The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views.” One result of this, he said, is “the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics.”

The Enemy That Almost Isn’t

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Iran: The Enemy That Almost Isn’t
Posted: 23 Feb 2009 02:00 PM PST

Crooks And Liars.com

“One of the things that I’ve found most disconcerting about American news coverage of Iran is the complete disconnect between what our own (and international) intelligence reports say and the almost rapturous assurance by the media and public officials that Iran is heading full bore towards our nuclear annihilation. Sean Paul Kelly @ The Agonist:

The Financial Times is reporting today that Iran has enough uranium for a bomb! Oh dear. Except their reporting is very, very lacking in the physics and engineering department.

Here’s what El Baradei recently said about Iran and the bomb:

SZ: In your report it says that Iran is gaining an ever greater mastery of uranium enrichment. Can the USA and Israel accept the fact that Iran is on the threshold of becoming a virtual nuclear power?

ELBARADEI: The question is, what can they do? What are the alternatives to direct negotiations? As long as we are monitoring their facilities, they cannot develop nuclear weapons. And they still do not have the ingredients to make a bomb overnight.

How hard is it to google this sh*t?

Update: As Paul Kerr, from Total WonKerr, just wrote to me in an email: “Here’s the number of weapons you can make with LEU: zero.” Any questions?

Hurts your “Oooh…be scared of the bogeyman” fear-mongering when you inject actual facts and science into it, doesn’t it? Whirled View and my buddy Cernig look further.

Douglas Saunders at The Globe and Mail looks at how the way we view Iran affects our attitude towards them:

What if the world’s biggest threat, instead of growing in size and menace, simply vanished?

Imagine if Iran, after years of extremism, found itself led by a president who had been elected on a platform of women’s rights, a free press, foreign investment and closer relations with the United States and other Western countries.

Imagine if, in response, the U.S. government made a public, formal apology for the 1953 Central Intelligence Agency overthrow of Iran’s elected government, the act that had sent the country on the path to extremism in the first place.

Imagine if the Iranian people then began holding pro-U.S. demonstrations.

And imagine if that moderate Iranian leader offered to accept peace with Israel, to permanently halt funding of Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas and to submit fully to inspections as it abandons any nuclear-weapons programs in exchange for better relations with America.

Ah, imagine. It could never be so easy. But wait. Don’t I recall something from my pile of newspaper clippings? Ah yes, here it is, and not even yellowed. Amazing how fast we forget things.

Mohammad Khatami, the pro-Western reformist, was elected in 1997.

Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of state, issued the big apology to Iran in March of 2000. “Certainly, in our view, there are no obstacles that wise and competent leadership cannot remove,” she said. “As some Iranians have pointed out, the United States has cordial relations with a number of countries that are less democratic than Iran.”

The pro-American demonstrations, by all reports genuine (and unpunished), took place over several days in 2003. In that spring, Mr. Khatami sent a Swiss official to Washington to make the peace offer. In exchange for recognizing Israel, cutting off Hamas and proving it had abolished any nuclear-weapons plans, Iran wanted an end to sanctions, normal diplomatic relations with the U.S. and recognition of its role in the region.

So what happened? Well, nothing. George W. Bush was president, the Iraq war was just approaching the “mission accomplished” phase, and nobody in the White House thought it would look good to make peace with Iran, a country that only the year before had been made a rhetorical component in Mr. Bush’s “axis of evil.”

As one State Department official directly involved with the Iranian offer told me, “It was like we missed the biggest Middle East peace opportunity of the decade, just so we could keep saying ‘axis of evil.’”[..]

It was physicist Werner Heisenberg who found that the act of observing can affect the nature of the thing being observed. It is likely that simply by looking at Iran as a threat, we’ve made it one. Look again, and it might change.

Maybe it’s time to start looking at Iran a different way.”

Casa Raab Zapoteco Mescal Distillery

Posted on by Laughingnomad

My friend Charlie and I visited Tony this week at his Casa Raab estate, about 30 minutes north of Oaxaca City, where he has built a traditional Zapoteco mescal distillery.

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From the Casa Raab website:

“Mezcal is the traditional local distilled liquor. It is made, like tequilla, from cooked agave hearts. Mezcal making in Oaxaca is still a rather primitive process, and the excellent quality illustrates the difference between a careful hand made product and an industrial one. Drinking mezcal in Oaxaca is a bit like drinking wine in France; the varieties are amazing, and the quality can’t be found anywhere else.”

Casa Raab has been collecting hand made mezcal directly from the remote stills in the mountains for over ten years. We also grow maguey (agave) plants by the thousands. We have a medium size pottery still on the property where we process hand picked “pinas” that come from our fields. Once or twice a year we do a “run”, and try to produce some of the best mezcal in the world. Visiting during a distilling period is great fun, and really educational.”

Tony is also growing the rare Tovala agave which makes a more flavorful mescal. I bought 1.5 liters which I will age in glass bottles. Charlie, however, loaded up with about 5 gallons of regular 2008 mescal which he will leave in Oaxaca to age until he returns from Canada next year…providing no one gets into it first! 🙂

On the Casa Raab web site you will also see lovely pictures of Tony’s estate where they provide beautiful Zapoteco style lodging, tours and other activities. I guarantee Tony, levitating with help below, would show you a good time!
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