A new year

Wishing readers the best possible year 2021. It is going tough this time around.  And if you are in Venezuela just making it through the year will be quite the achievement. Not that it will be much easier for those of us forced to leave the country but at least most of us will have access to food and running water 24/24.

If you are not Venezuelan and read this blog, do something good this year: help an exiled Venezuelan.

Love to all.

Le panier de French plums

Ha!  Summer goodness!

Since there is no "where is Waldoniel" this year (sorry AIO) maybe we can have a prize for whomever can identify the three fruits in French and in English.  A big smooch if you manage both (PS: "plums" is not enough...)  And yes, what you see in the background is low tide, so yes, I am also into fishy stuff....

Le Bastille Day that nobody calls that here

I have not been in France for a July 14 for so many decades that I dare not count.  I think it was probably during my last college year when my siblings came over to spend summer here after I graduated.  Since then I have avoided France in Summer, the more so that my relatives happen to live in beach resort areas which become hellish in July and August.  France is best from me late spring or early fall though I do not mind it at all in winter.

Then again, after today I might have to reconsider some, or at least plan for vacations finishing on, say, July 15.

Le bowl de cheries

Life can be a bowl of cherries.

Granted, it does not happen that often but it can happen.  It does not need to be a the Ritz Carlton of Maui, it does have to happen in the splendors of Alaska's wilderness.

But a real bowl of French cherries, in season, next to a chaise on a balcony overlooking a small resort town street, with your kindle at hand, on a very mild summer afternoon....  well, it does not get better than that.

The more so if it has been 2 decades since I was last time in summer in France.

Break time

I had scheduled long a go a break for this July to attend to some family obligations.  Thus I will be out of the country through July.  I am not planning to follow closely what happens inside Venezuela, regardless the recent decrepitude of Chavez.  So, what's wrong with this picture?

Idiots in the net, putting all of us at risk: MacMaster and his fake "Gay girl in Damascus"

This week grievous damage was done against all of those who have put their life at risk by blogging against any form of oppression.  I am not talking of people like Yoani Sanchez who is now a star in her own right, or even to modest activists like yours truly who signs with a "non de plume" but who has revealed his true identity and face to many of the people that interviewed him over the years (there are many reasons to use a pen name and not necessarily to hide, simply to separate public from private life).

If Superman does it.....

Superman telling US president he does not want to be US citizen anymore....

Would political bloggers be best served by forfeiting their citizenship?  I do not know whether the answer is to become a citizen of the world, but I can tell you that sometimes my eyes look like those of Superman during a Chavez cadena....
(hat tip FW who also dryly comments that Superman was an illegal alien to begin with, when the Kents found him).

The Venezuelan electricity crisis summarized for Canada

Since it is Semana Santa in Venezuela, light writing to be expected around here.  So for your enjoyment a little summary of the electricity crisis in Venezuela for our dearest Canuck audience.

Lessening the two evils

And thus the choice of Peru is becoming the choice of a continent.  We hoped for the last minute surprise of PPK edging Keiko Fujimori but it was not to happen.  And thus in what is almost a text book case of two extremes joining, a majority of Peruvians have voted for totally unacceptable extremes and they imposed upon the more civilized stock the nasty duty to chose the less stinky option they left us at the toilet of history.  See, I am already using "us" and I am not Peruvian.

Tonight I was very briefly watching Buenas Noches in Globovision, another example of shitty choice between utter idiocy and utter evil at VTV.  I watched it because as I was surfing I got there just as they started talking of Peru's election.  Kiko, in his unreconstructed superficial leftism said he was going to go for Humala while his side kick Carla Angola refused to take an outright stand, indicating as such that she was going to Keiko.  And thus was there the trap set by the left, that you could not possibly consider Keiko over Ollanta, because, you know, she is the daughter of a dictator...  You laugh?  Even Quico fell for that one, going as far as confusing a banal campaign clip as the dark designs of Keiko Fujimori.  It is fitting that this 11 of April I learned more about how come Chavez became president than I had learned in a long time.  See, Kiko Bautista was an open supporter of Chavez in 1998 while I was already telling to whomever cared to listen to me that Chavez was hell upon us.  And Quico Toro is a well known comeflor seen as stepping on his own toes occasionally.

From Kabul to Tripoli, It is the same war

Tonight I am in Caracas and watching the news with my old Dad.  TVE of Spain translates live the Obama speech about why the US had to get into the Libya potential mess.  I am trying to explain him that Republicans are unfairly attacking Obama, and that many in the US think that two wars are enough.  My Dad easily and convincingly dismiss the whole thing with a handful of words: "They shouldn't.  It is the same war".

That Libyan double standard and other half truths

Since Amr Moussa, maybe thinking about his eventual election as next president of Egypt, went on record dissociating himself of the attacks on Qaddafi bases, you can find many articles that go as far as mentioning the double standards of the West.  Indeed, if Sarkozy is bombing Libya why is Obama not bombing Bahrain or Yemen?

Saturday Science

Let's forget for a few moments Japan, Libya and Chavez destruction of science and education and remember what makes us humans.  For me,  science and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.  I will paste below the NYT editorial of today for your enjoyment.
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Mercury, the smallest one

Mission to Mercury

Late on St. Patrick’s Day, Eastern time, a spacecraft called Messenger, weighing a little more than a thousand pounds, slipped into an elliptical orbit around the planet Mercury, becoming the only manmade object to orbit the planet closest to the Sun.

Through the coming days, scientists from NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory will check Messenger’s systems and begin turning on its instruments. On April 4, observations begin.

Messenger spent nearly seven years in transit and traveled about five billion miles. It will spend one Earth-year studying the mineralogy of Mercury, mapping its surface and magnetic and gravitational fields, and trying to identify the substance covering the planet’s north pole. All the while, a ceramic-fabric sunshade will be protecting Messenger from the ferocious heat of the nearby Sun and the solar reflection from Mercury. The craft will eventually plummet into the planet.

It really doesn’t matter how many space missions you’ve followed or how many Hubble photographs you’ve marveled over. There is still a sense of raw excitement about reaching a critical stage in an expedition like this, an excitement that will only grow as data begins to stream toward Earth.

Part of the thrill is knowing that this is the pure pursuit of knowledge, the scientific impulse — a human impulse — carried to a remarkable conclusion. It’s hard to know just what we will learn about Mercury. Like all scientific missions and experiments, this is a journey to a more refined sense of what we don’t yet know.

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I do not know about you but I still can feel the excitement and emotion of the previous of Voyager missions and how I was counting the minutes for the first pictures to reach us....

A new world order

With apologies for the cliche title but with the events that have been taking place in the last 2 months I have the suspicion that we are entering into a new world system.  It all started with the fall of Tunisia dictatorship, moved on to the Nuclear reactor explosion in Japan and made a no return point with the abandoning yesterday of Libya's rebels to the murdering hordes of Qaddafi by the G8.

The consequences of all of these events, related or not as you may wish them to be, will be a protracted reevaluation of the West values and way of life, a political event that will be at the very least in the league of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the way it will affect our future lives.  In fact, my parallel might be 1848.  You may recall that the bright revolutions of that year were crushed one by one, either through a military coup like in France in 1851, or a brutal invasion in Hungary.  We roughly had to wait for 1918 to accept that democracy was to become the norm in Europe, and thus the final victory of 1848 even as the totalitarian era had already started in 1917.

Tsunami in Japan

I have had a close relationship with Japan as fate had me study and research for many years with many people from Japan.  And I much prefer Japanese manners, cuisine or art to the mainland offerings, acknowledging my great admiration for a culture that produced people like Kurozawa or the fabulous displays at the Boston museum.  So, in respect to the friends and acquaintances that I used to have many, many years ago, I will dedicate this post as my mark of sympathy as I watch in horror the coverage which will make it the most extensively reported Tsunami ever. After all, it happened during working hours and after the quake they had they knew they had to rush to airports and to their cameras as they all knew the Tsunami had to be coming.

From what I have seen, it is amazing to see so much devastation in a country that is so ready for such catastrophes.  I cannot imagine what would happen in Venezuela after such an earthquake and a Tsunami half as big......

The rewards of blogging

A must read book,
 if you have not done so yet

Exhausted, on a slow unseasonal rainy Sunday, after a chokefull week of news from Libya and the OAS seat in Caracas, I got a revitalizing moment with one of those rare rewards in blogging.  A reader wrote a comment on a post written in December 2006!  Not that I never get comments for posts older than a couple of weeks (which is normal) but those I get usually come from some latecomer chavista sandalista who is suddenly discovering damaging blogs to its cause.  Besides cursing me there is nothing left for them to write home about.

But today it was different.

The good Devil moves out of Venezuela

Today the Venezuelan blogosphere news is that Miguel has moved out of the country.  Not totally, as he tells us he will keep coming for a few days regularly for work reasons, but the fact of the matter is that from this week on, most of his time will be spent under other skies.  As I wrote a few days ago, we can count him as a chavista casualty, from death or exile, among those people that we will not see around us anymore because of the abject failure of chavismo.  Either way a loss for Venezuela though at least the exiles are a gain for other countries.

Aedes aegypti

I do not know about you guys but even though I am delighted at a democratic reflex appearing in some Middle East countries I cannot but help to be worried sick at the same time.  I am not going to write a treatise on the recent events because for one I am not a specialist and for second I am somewhat biased as being anti fundamentalist and pro Israel, though anti Israeli religious right, of course.

A Jungian moment: Rafael Lopez Pedraza leaves us

Those of you that have read me for a long time might be aware of my interest for Jungian psychoanalysis and the sort.  And my dislike for Freudian stuff.  Well, it turns out that one noted Jungian was a Venezuelan, even though he was born in Cuba.

Rafael Lopez Pedraza died yesterday at 90.  He moved to Venezuela in 1949, way before Castro destroyed the island.  He soon became a Venezuelan citizen, in an era where intellectual elites had no problem moving around and were not carrying the silly nationalistic baggage.  If I had been able to pursue my Jungian interests I probably would have ended up meeting him at some point, as the most famous Jungian in Venezuela, author of several essential books on archetypes and more.

Who knows, maybe he would have signed my copy of one of his most famous books.

8 years and more than 3000 posts ago

Even though the first posts were written in December 2002, the blog came on line on January 6 2003.  More than 3000 posts, including about two hundred from other hands who brought great stuff and should thus be acknowledged.  And as always, if people did not read it, the blog would have stopped long ago.  It is thus a celebration of long time readers, even those who hate it.

The 2011 New Year post

It would be hypocrite for me to just wish plainly a Happy New Year when we all know that this would not be the case for those of us living in Venezuela.  Even if the new year wish of a majority of Venezuelans, that Chavez leaves office, were to take place in the next few days, the damage he has brought to the country is so profound that the year ahead would be very tough, no matter how elated the we could be at the  prospect of a recovery.

Thus, in all honesty, I can only wish a Happy New Year for those of you who live outside of Venezuela where mundane issues are still a balm.  For those of us inside Venezuela I can only wish, in all sincerity, that the coming year does not bring you any new degradation, any personal tragedy; because short of hitting the jackpot, it is as much as you can hope for the next year.

And not to sound as dark as I started, at least for us inside, next year we will be motivated because indeed we need to put an end to this regime before this regime puts an end on us.  The real wish for us is that we may have the strength to deal with what is in store.