Sad end of year

Be it the tsunami disaster in Asia that keeps us in constantly renewed horror as more videos arrive, as the death toll spirals up, or our more mundane spiraling political violence that keeps unabated through the holidays, there is little to cheer this end of December. I even wonder if Chavez is not pushing this latest round while the world is busy looking elsewhere. I have noticed that not even cable TV is safe from this onslaught as the government is littering with paying adds the main cable channels (such as Warner or Sony). Until when for the cadenas to be mandatory for cable?

I will wait for my return to San Felipe to catch up this week end. Suffice to say now that it is revenge time in Venezuela, from the two year wait to finally sue unjustly the oil workers, to invading land for no real other purpose for the chavista officials to force it sale, cheap, and probably to the same chavistas through the usual testaferros (pseudo owners).

To close this brief post, I wanted to mention the death of Susan Sontag, the brilliant intellectual liberal writer of "Illness as Metaphor" or more recently "The Volcano Lover". I find it strange that Sontag died during the Tsunami that devastated an area rich in volcanoes. I wonder what she would have thought of the whole mess, made worse by the pro-tourist developed coasts whose environmental implications are only starting to surface.

I did like this quote on Susan Sontag work and achievements:

The life Susan Sontag lived was not one of an elitist icon, but of an ideal of democratic meritocracy.

This is so far from what we are saddled with in Venezuela. I wonder if any one in the government has even read one of her books...