Acknowledgment

I am writing a long postponed note to thank my ghost bloggers. I think that they did a great job, pleasing a lot of people and making a few miss me. Which is exactly the point of having ghost bloggers.

A blog is a personal page, where as a writer I am only limited by my conscience and my education in polite and civil behavior. But these being subjective values, what can be polite for me can be grossly offensive for others, or just plain wimpy. Ghost bloggers of course allow for people to compare and I am surprised at how well it worked, how many people were induced in expressing themselves on the subject from begging me to retain the ghosts to give it up (which seems to have been the real objective in those cases, not me, to close the blog altogether).

There is a lesson to be taken. A multi hand blog can be indeed a good thing, revitalizing an old formula. The trick is to find a way to still maintain the overall flavor of the original blog while letting new airs flow. Not easy, unfortunately.

As of today I am recovering full use of my blog. That is, I will cut today access to Mora and Jorge. A symbolic thing since they have stopped writing. And I will think about changes, many changes actually. But all in due time.

Mora, to my political right, was a clear example that the opposition voices can be quite more radical than me, or Mora for that matter! In fact, we are both placed in the same camp because we are both democrats and we equally dislike extremes. Putting Mora was to remind folks that oppose me that I am much more liberal than they thought I was. Yet, I have a fine relationship with Mora, simply because we share the same basic social values of tolerance, respect and democracy and we see in chavismo the same authoritarian evil. In a normal world we would be opponents, but in today's world there is much more that unite us than separate us and we are lucky to appreciate this and become friends. Freedom accepts no compromises.

Jorge was put there because we come from a similar scientific formation. But that I wanted to keep a scientist in was not the only reason to put Jorge in for a few weeks. For that I would have put Miguel if he did not have a blog of his own. I thought that Jorge has the ability to write a blog but does not have the time and this ghosting experience would be a nice way to try out. I think that the results speak for themselves.

I will, if Jorge requests it, re extend on occasion access to my blog. Not that I do not want to do so with Mora. But Mora has already quite an exposure elsewhere and does not need this modest blog when Mora can write in blogs with much larger audiences. However I will be honored if Mora wants to ghost blog again in the future as I might travel lengthily later in the year. After all Mora seems in the way to become an Internet star of ghost blogging!!!!

Finally a note. Someone of course wondered whether I could not find a pro Chavez person to also enter. I must confess that I would love to find a rational pro Chavez to ghost blog once. That would have been possible as late as 2002. But I think that it is not possible anymore. Since late 2002 it seems it has become difficult to establish a dialogue with the chavista camp. There might be many explanations but mine is very simple: this blog is about independence of criteria and chavismo has become all about submitting your free will to a leader or cause, as in "no questions asked". This is simply intellectually repulsive for me, not to mention offensive as it tries to pretend that I am submitting myself to other "forces". I do not mean to offend anyone with this and I would love to be proven wrong. I just write this as a statement of fact.

Again, my greatest thanks to Jorge and Mora for taking so much time to work on this blog. You have made it better.