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On Egyptian Elections And Israeli Escalations
The full results of the Egyptian election will not be 'released' until the 21st but as Stratfor's Reva Bhalla notes, the Muslim Brotherhood is already claiming a narrow victory over the military's preferred candidate. Rather sadly, she opines, "the Presidency itself may not even matter much as the military has taken a series of moves in recent days to overtly reassert its authority over the Egyptian political system", further reinforcing Stratfor's historical position that Egypt's political future will be dictated (ironic choice of words) by the military and not by protesters in Tahrir Square. In a succinct 4 minutes, Reva explains why the possibility of a Brotherhood victory remains somewhat impotent given the implicit understandings with the military (via the constitution) but worries that the changes in the clamp-down efforts (more aggressive) of political protests will affect political affiliates in the Palestinian border-lands with Israel - where this weekend's 'suspiciously timed' renewed spate of attacks into Israel raises questions of who was responsible (and for what end?). The bottom-line is that tensions remain and the Brotherhood's links to Hamas are a political foil for the military (or even Israel's Netanyahu) to declare them unfit to rule.
Well worth 4 minutes of your time to grasp the political gaming going on and what is at stake...
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Thanks Tyler(s) for posting this important story! Europe is getting LOTS of attention (which it should), but we need to see what is happening in Egypt!
i was so tired of hitting refresh
Three militants crossed the border and clashed with troops? Pffffttt. That's not border violence.
This is border violence...
And look at these numbers of deaths, not, "clashes."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10681249
Why worry about Egypt when there is plenty of, "political gaming," going on in the Mexican elections?
+ 1 h_h
MEXICO is going to be a big problem.
Shhh. Quiet. Easy with the bold ALL CAPS. We don't want anyone to be distracted from the terrible, "clashes," on the Israeli border.
Nothing a few thousand drones can't fix.
Here is a little HISTORY LESSON on Egypt:
in 1956,
UK, France, and Israel went to war with Egypt over nationalization of Suez Canal. That critical path to import oil into Europe.
US told UK, back off or else we will crash british bonds by flooding them.
funny after 50 years china is in position to do the same against US, when US is about to go to war over Iran's oil bourse.
Problem is going to be a big mexican.
That's what we call a slow news day down here!
Thank you & brgds
700+ deaths? The Baconator has more bodies under its belt than that. Non-story...
Forget Mexico, watch out for the Chicago land shootings by the dozen while the Obamas were visiting this past weekend.
The last time I was down by the Rio doing work three were shot in broad daylight. Fortunately the local radio station was working rather quickly to get the word out before the bodies quit bleeding.
As far as the violence involving Two or three individual Terrorist... keep in mind Israel has no place to retreat to. Or any desire to.
Always attack.
Some videos show Israeli soldiers occasionally tossing the Terrorist back onto the frag that they just threw.
Yes, violence is up in Mexico, but the Middle East is the place to watch!
Wars in that region have a nasty habit of getting out of control! The Egyptian story is far from over.
The murder rate in Mexico nationally is somewhere in the vicinity of 15-25 homicides per 100,000 residents. Most of those homicides are disproportionally located in two cities, at present: Juarez (murder rate of 250 per 100,000) and Monterrey (65 per 100,000). Take those two areas out and Mexico's homicide national murder rate drops precipitously. Mexico City's murder rate is about 10 per 10,000 residents -- on par with Boston or Dallas in the US. The murder rate in Yucatan is less than 2 per 100,000 -- on par with Honolulu and safer than Wichita.
The murder rate in New Orleans is 50 per 100,000. St. Louis is 40 per 100,000. Baltimore is 35 per 100,000. Detroit is 35 per 100,000. Newark is 32 per 100,000. Oakland and DC are at 20 per 100,000
More Americans killed in Chicago this year than in Afghanistan: http://freebeacon.com/more-killed-in-chicago-this-year-than-afghanistan/
Puts things in perspective, no? Especially when you consider that many of the deaths in Mexico occurred in pitched battles between paramilitary groups that the wider populace steers clear of. Whereas many of the deaths in urban America take place during armed robberies or home invasions that just about anyone can fall victim to.
"Puts things in perspective, no? Especially when you consider that many of the deaths in Mexico occurred in pitched battles between paramilitary groups that the wider populace steers clear of"
The wider populace are slaughtered among the narcos, most of the killed in the high body count cases had nothing to do with narcos, like the 18 in Jalisco.
I live in a relatively safe place, yet the tortured bodies pile up and nobody is safe.
Some of my extended family have been killed, some threathed with guns, like my wife, everybody is affected.
The narcos rule much more effectivly then the different levels of government.
The local police is just a uniformed arm of the narcos.
Things in Mexico are much much worse then what you read or see in media.
Thank you & brgds
These killings in Mexico are ALL the result of Mexico's U.S. inspired Drug War. Mexican drug gangs are fighting each other and the Mexican government to determine who will control the U.S. drug trade.
All these killings would stop, same as U.S. drug gang killings would, if the U.S. legalized and regulated drugs.
These murders in Mexico are the direct result of U.S. drug policies. And if we changed our policies, they would stop.
Not going to happen, not because of legal or moral reasons, MONEY, too much money to be maid of guns, choppers, three letter agencies and so forth.
So much money to be made by banks, remember, 2% fine on drug money loundering and nobody in jail. Bankster are laughing all the way to office.
So much money invested in "legal" business.
So much money in lobby groups, they have to make living too.
So much money to be made by keeping people in jail, that's a business too.
Legalize, never ever gonna happen, but we can wish.
But criminal organisations will not go away even if we legalize drugs, remember prohibition.
Thank you & brgds
double comment deleted
Don't be afraid it's just drug dealers like DC or Florida in the 80s.
AND vix@18.28 - NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT
And I just finished the 4 minute video, YES, it is worth watching. Hmm...
Reva is cute man!
Those glasses will not slide down
If the U.S. one day merges with Mexico the political landscape will look like Sacramento.
O/T but HuffPuff has named Tyler/ZeroHedge #2 and WB7 #10 for their excellent work on exposing the racket.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-m-brown/best-financial-journalists_b_1605584.html#s=1092293
Kudos to you both!
5 Stars Bitchez
Sort by ranking.. ZH is # 1
Herb Greenberg/CNBS #6
WTF??
A sideshow, we are waiting for the main event, Israel/Iran Bitchez.......
Bank downgrades a comin' AH.
They overthrew the dictator only to not fire the government. And now the beureacrats (the military includes just about the entire government) took over. They never give up control peacefully.
By the way, the Egyptian military is one-quarter funded by the US. Second only to Israel in "aid" given a year.
Is (Not) of the Day: Cairo is (not) Berlin 1989.
Muslims need to be ruled like dogs
They understand and respect only one concept
Either I am fucking you, or you are fucking me
Would you hand over the power to someone who wants to send you into a no-winner war?
I wouldn't.
seems to be what the israelis did with the netanyahu government. of course, the plan no doubt is for Americans to do the fighting in that case.
Are the only choices military dictatorship or military dictatorship? Because the Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs, and East Germans seem to have avoided both.
The choices are actually a military dictatorship or a religious dictatorship. No military will enter a war to die for no tangible asset. Can't say the same for the religious group in question.
+ 1 Egypt will be an interesting test case to watch vis a vis Eastern Europe.
Great observation!
Democracy is a double edged sword isn't it? There's 51 muslim nations. Name one that has ever held fair and free elections? I'm no fan of the Egyptian military or Murbarak but I'm less of a fan of sharia law.
Hey MORON.. do you think our elections are fair? Bought and paid for by the highest bidder.. Controlling the masses with propaganda and food stamps.. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on..
It's all relative dickwad. I dont vote knowing a bunch of unelected army generals will be installed regardless of the vote and will dicate future direction of the government ie; Turkey, Indonesia. But I am comfortable with that knowing I don't have to worry about another regime that is hell bent on dropping aircraft or worse on our cities. As for my horse I would name it Brown Betty you figure out the rest........
How long until it's essentially American advisors fighting American advisors? Or are we there yet...
But just think of the profit potential...for the well connected.
The Brotherhood is a significant threat to Israel all the anti-Semites notwithstanding. Look to see Obama flooding oceans of cash to his 'brothers.'
Brotherhood victory will be important symbolically for the region, regardless of the level of real control (ie military dictatorship notwithstanding)...
Livermore,
You are an idiot if you still believe that Obama is somehow in bed with the "Muslims" over there.
Are you unaware of how he has vastly expanded the war on terror? Or are you just a hook line and sinker dumbass that has been imbibed by Mark Levin?
If so, please let me know.
To the Zionist crowd, anyone who isn't for exterminating Muslims off the face of the planet is an anti-Semite. So yes, even though the majority of the world sees Obama for what he is, one of the most ardently pro-Zionist leaders on the planet, in the eyes of neocons and Israeli's he might as well be a reincarnation of Hitler.
First, the "War on Terror" is a bullshit contrivance designed to get that pesky US Constitution out of the way, and to keep the military industrial complex running at full speed..
Second, by sending the CIA to topple the secular gov'ts of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, etc. O'bomb-a has handed those countries right over to the Muslim Brotherhood.
LivermoreJim said:
Yes indeed...
Actually the total deal was closer to a Billion...the 70 million was immediate...
It's a good thing that we are in such great financial condition and flush with cash to be able give to our needy friends. Isn't it also great that our seniors, per the advice of AIG's Benmosche, are willing to forego their retirement and S.S. funds they and their employers have paid in all their lives and work till they're eighty. Life in the good ol USA is fucking grand...isn't it?We should also ask ourselves why would Predator drones(General Atomics) be the Obama Aministration's "favored weapon?"
Surely it has nothing to do with the Henry Crown Group's relationship with General Dynamics of which General Atomics was a former(?) division. Henry Crown's son Lester Crown is and was a major financial backer in Obama's rise to power in Chicago and then the Presidency. Is there still a relationship with the Crowns and General Atomics? A relationship as in heavy use of Predator Drones allow a major Obama financial backer's MIC interests to profit handsomely?
I don't know that for sure, I'm just asking the question...it all seems very cozy to me.
related story:
General Dynamics, Crown Dynasty & ObamaMolotov Cocktail Vending Machines orders going hyperbolic...
lol
+1
No no no... watch the Euroland gold bar machines to be reconfigured to dispense gram powder.
http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/militants-infiltrate-israel-egypt-2-reported-dead
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/156972#.T9-GhbVI-a0
Fight Club getting huge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToceoE9DHWY
+ 1 to Serial Link Provider BD!
Next time you Jews move and you will move again someday, your little garrison might someday be overrun...please check the neighborhood first. Or maybe we just will build a big, artificial island in the middle of Pacific.
A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure...
+1 blade runner
"palestinian border lands"... that would be occupied Palestine. A "border" that Israel seems intent on changing yet again.
...yuh think? ...John. Lol. http://www.prophecyinthenews.com/tv-program-return-to-mecca-with-avi-lipkin/
made myself watch about five minutes of that insanity... not sure which group is worse... the israeli expansionists who think that the bible gives them legal claim to the entire ME, or the evengelical christians who fall for the total BS... the real irony, Israel is about to start another war, for the pretextual reason of stopping Iran from "developing nuclear capability".... claiming that Iran is led by religious fanatics... in reality, Isreal is run by fanatics that HAVE hundreds of nuclear weapons...
" in reality, Isreal is run by fanatics that HAVE hundreds of nuclear weapons..." Yeah, and these fanatics have had nuclear weapons for over 50 years and they've used them exactly how many times? I'm no fan of the what's going on, but emotionally charged statements like this are counter-productive to reasoned and coherent debate.
those isreali fanatics are goading the US into starting a war... debate all you want, but I call murder what it is.
dont forget, it's legalized murder ;)
...ain't nobody clean here friends. Lol. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYjbkRktqIE
john39 said:
my vote is for them...the 'christians' who worship Israel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIv5-2mAEpA
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/feb/05/washingtons-secret-hist...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ZER403A.html
Fuck Campdavid, Israel and Mubarak...
Not necessarily, Camp David is set in some of the very best Forest Land filled with water, deer and wood.
Oh and the Poison Ivy is a good cure for the STD's everyone seems to be bringing with them.
Wasn't the election of the world citizen,the new messiah Barack, supposed to bring us world peace?
Yes! This is why we gave him the Nobel peace price in advance. He's working on it, I'm sure.
He can't do what he needs to do with all of the limitations placed on him. He needs freedom to really operate, so let's get rid of that damned constitution, those idiots in congress, and all of those unnecessary laws that hold him back. It's like all of you gun loving, Bible thumping Americans are trying to stop Jesus from walking on water. Get out of His way!
No. He really inherited a mess. And, then, there are those Europeans who won't solve their own problems. And, of course........
Wall Street is basically laughing at the "turmoil" in the Middle East.
Gasoline prices continue to get lower and lower, providing the "GUMS" with even more spending money.
Heh, any wonder why Target and Home Depot are doing so well?
Target is the trap that ensares the unwary and the Home Depot is a necessary inconvenience when upgrading or making repairs to the home rather than buy a new one.
Reva Bhalla probably was workin hard to get all these informations.
Good work Reva
Does the state have responsibility for non-state actors operating within its borders?
Good let all those stupid assholes carry some flags and storm the border of Israel.
Have the egyptian army on one side behind them and the Israeli army on the other side in front of them.
And then finally the millions of wanna be martyrs can get their wish. Storm the Israeli border. Then have both the egyptian army on one side and the Israelis on the other open fire on the idiots. Give them all a one way ticket to allah by the hundreds of millions. The sooner the better. They do nothing for humanity. They hold up humanity and progress.
Half of them would have never been born if it wasn't for their 100% subsadized socialist existence via petro dollar.
The Mother Teresa shit has to end. There is to many of them and they're primative idiots who can't and don't want to jack shit. Except pork their north african muslim babby mommas and spit out millions more dependent jihadis.
What side are you on?
Zulu - Final Attackhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1csr0dxalpI&feature=related
You sir are cannon fodder.
Then again everyone who wishes to fight the USA wants to use Human Wave so that when the GI runs out of ammo, they would be buried.
You're nonsensical.
You refer to the "100% subsidized socialist existence via petro dollar." So you think extracting a vital natural resource and selling it on the global market is a de facto form of "socialism." Yet, Israel relies on explicit subsidies from the U.S., both in the form of direct cash payments and greatly discounted military hardware, in return for absolutely nothing (other than campaign finance dollars for U.S. politicians) and that is what? ... Free markets at work?
Then there is the fact that a very significant percentage of Israel's founders were *overtly* self-declared socialists and communists, some of whom were even participants and leaders in the Bolshevik revolution, who immigrated to Israel from Russia/Poland/Ukraine.
You either know absolutely nothing about the history of Israel or you're just an angry buffoon.
So did they have the usual celebratory gang-rapes and infidel beheading?
i've had the story here from tripoliPost: Muslim Brotherhood Claims Victory for Mursi in Egypt polls
the courts ruled last week that shafiq (who lost) could run and the parliament was ordered dissolved
so, the military has stepped up
waaay up. but it is not impossible that this is to actually to protect the elcted muslimBro win and winner? there isn't a constitution and the miltary just took veto power over any constitution and said that the parliament couln't be re-elected till the consitution got passed
so you see, there were no washinton flip-flops on the ground, whatsoever...
but no surprises, either; the newBoss will govern exactly the same in the near future as the oldBoss
and we'll see... i think the brothers want to show what they can do with their own military, no constitution, and no parliament
follow orders, for example...
There will always be some other election, these things don't matter. Bernake's finger on that print button is all. Stock up on some popcorn and find a comfy chair, Wednesday should be exciting whichever way he goes...
Just get it over with and take over the middle east and Mexico . What the fuck are we waiting on?
Mexico has it's own issues in a grip of a Cartel war and most everyone here in the USA is safely insulated from the Border Hell that forces our Schools to duck and cover as the stray rounds screech through.
Be patient, on a long enough timeline you will have your BLEVE event in the ME anyhow. Just need some of those stupid sandheads to strike a rock containing metal to spark the shit.
Is this the same Stratfor that's been saying Fukushima Daichi was no big deal? They are nothing but NWO tools.
Same outfit that got hacked to pieces and had their pants pulled down around their ankles a while back, correct?
That's them.
Wahhabi Terrorism 101. The Brotherhood is just an arm of the Wahhabi/Saudi Terror Network, who have been and will continue to be coming to key political hotspots around the world. They focus on places where by carrying out murderous attacks on any religious, business, or political place, person, or thing, will garner a counter response from any of the collaterally damaged people or organizations near the point of attack. Their purpose is to elicit a violent response that they can then further escalate. Remember Iraq? That's the model. Where have you people been? I'll be reporting more on this, and hopefully Tyler might print it, but then again, he might not. See www.nar2012.com, and hopefully next week, www.electanewcongress.com for Super Pac Elect A New Congress.
Here's to the Revolution. Our non-violent alternative Revolution starts next week. Maybe we can "front-run" the Revolution here at home in America.
the army runs Egypt. And the army will give the power to the people who will give it back to the army again. Thats the power shuffle behind the curtain. As the new laws voted allow the army to control the legislature, the assembly that makes the laws; whatever happens in the presidential elections. The arab spring just got rid of Mubbarak but not the army; which is very pro status quo. We are in situation like Pakistan was vis a vis Pax Americana.In this tinder box. Not good, as it means it will simmer in silence underneath. Politics in Egypt are now irreversible towards more popular revolt.
I read Netanyahu and see P.W. Botha.
BREAKING NEWS: http://www.debka.com/article/22094/Russia-China-Iran-plan-to-stage-in-Syria-%E2%80%9Cbiggest-Mid-East-maneuver%E2%80%9D
Russia, China, Iran plan to stage in Syria “biggest Mid East maneuver”
PutinMiddle East military tensions around Syria shot up again Monday, June 18, with the news reported by the semi-official Iranian news agency Fars that a joint Russian-Chinese-Iranian exercise is to take place in Syria.
It was described as “the biggest of its kind ever staged in the Middle East” with 90,000 personnel, 400 air planes and 900 tanks taking part.
As part of its preparations, Beijing is reported to have asked Egyptian authorities to permit the passage through the Suez Canal in late June of 12 naval ships heading for the Syrian port of Tartus, where Moscow maintains a naval and marine base. DEBKAfile reported earlier this week that Russian naval vessels with marines on board were heading for Tartus. The Iranian media did not itemize their contribution to the joint exercise.
DEBKAfile stresses that this would be the first time that substantial Russian and Chinese military strength has ever been deployed in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East. It means that the two powers are prepared to parade their unabashed partnership with the Iranian and Syrian armies for the shared purpose of obstructing US-European-Arab military intervention in Syria. A large-scale Russian and Chinese military presence in the embattled country would expect to deter the United States from leading a military operation against Bashar Assad and his regime.
No date was attached to the report but the exercise may possibly take place before the end of the month
The large-scale maneuver was announced in Tehran on the first day of the nuclear crisis talks in Moscow between Iran and the six world powers, their third attempt to resolve the crisis by diplomacy. However, Russian and Iranian sources close to the talks were pessimistic about progress. An Iranian delegation member complained the atmosphere was harsh and unconstructive. A Russian source saw no way of bridging US-led Western differences with Tehran when the parties reconvene Monday.
DEBKAfile also notes that the big joint Russian-Chinese-Iranian exercise “at sea, air and land on Syrian soil,” ws released for publication shortly before US President Barack Obama was due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Mexico.
THE EMPIRE is willing to risk WWIII to get control of ALL the oil and natural gas in the region. At least the Russians and the Chinese aren't as goofy and naive as the vast majority of the American sheep, oh oh, I mean people. ( Another BIG joke!)
WWIII? The U.S. military won't comply... MASS ARRESTS and the virtual dissolution of the federal gov't instead... http://tinyurl.com/cd5cyjo/
Uh oh,
Hey Obama...want some? Come get some.
Hoo-rah.
I think Putin just stepped on Obama's dick. Should've kept it in his pants.
LMAO. Two words... underwater missiles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shkval
"If the military gives up power voluntarily, it will be the first time in recorded History". Noam Chomsky (on DemocracyNow about ten days into the 'Revolution')
THE EMPIRE will not allow the increasingly 'irrelevent' exercise of elections(?) to create any significant risk of the most influential part of the ARAB sector upsetting the developing NEW WORLD ORDER. Look for an increase in Heroin addiction among the naive and disillusioned. This will also increase the needed cash flow for THE EMPIRE'S bankers who have so many hidden losss to cover from the CASINO, oh oh, I mean the MARKET. (what a joke!)
I laughed as the MSM were gushing about Arab Spring, Democracy, yada yada.
Military says "You want Murabek to go? Ok. Want MB in Govt.? Ok. too
Just don't forget who is really running the show."
Same game , different faces.
Great Latvian Success Story!”
You too can be an IMF success story if you grind your population into penury by wearing the austerian hairshirt. And this little video (hat tip Nathan) has to skip over capture some of the extreme measures operating in Latvia, such as bankers taking souls as collateral for loans. (www.nakedcapitalism.com
They’ve painted themselves into an ideological corner.
This economic ‘torture chamber’ of mass unemployment can, operationally, persist indefinitely, even as, politically, it’s showing signs of coming apart.
The founders of the euro believed a single currency would work to prevent a third great war.
So they did what it took politically to get the consensus needed to create the euro. Ironically not realizing what they created to promote unity has turned out to be the instrument of social disintegration.
Sounds like a war is coming. Strange because I think the USA could win now but would lose in 10 years.
And more intrigue..
It's all so fucked up!!
FR
06/13/2012
You know, I could almost get tired of what happens to vets. I could almost get real tired of it. I guess I have a bad attitude.
I met Tom the Robot seven or eight years ago at the Camaleón, a booze chute in Ajijic. He was of average stature, lean, not shave-headed but close, and his eyes said that you didn’t want trouble with him. He didn’t know the crowd at the Camaleón and seemed to be a loner. We talked a little. He made oblique reference to having done some military things that people don’t really do. Most people, anyway.
I took him for a bullshitter. You get a lot of that in Mexico. You know: “I used to be a fighter pilot after I was president of IBM, before I was a SEAL team leader in IV Corps, and an assassin for the CIA. But I can’t talk about it.” Yeah, sure.
Later I got to know the guy. He wasn’t a bullshiter. Bullshitters didn't really know the military lingo, seven-eighty-twice gear, ma deuce, brain-housing group, bloop tube, HALO. We got along. We had both grown up in the rural South, Tom in Florida, I in Virginia. We were citizens of the same world—guns, fishing, hotrods, boats, fast bikes, scuba, etc. He knew that a valve train wasn’t a way of transporting valves, and what Swamp Rat II was. He had wrecked his quota of cars and hunted ‘gators with a flashlight and a twelve-gauge. In short he was a crazy mother in the best tradition of crazy mothers.
And there was Nam. There are two kinds of men, those who were there and those who weren’t. It wasn’t that being there made you better or worse, just that there are two kinds of men. We didn’t talk about it much. Most don’t. Still, there was a bond, a commonality.
Vi liked the guy. She doesn’t like most people, but there was nothing false about Tom. We called him the Robot because when he walked, nothing moved from the waist up.
Tom was a bad-ass. You could deal with it or you couldn’t. He didn’t look for trouble, but he could provide it. He had been in ugly shit in Asia, the kind when the daily grind is what Pentagon weenies call isolated incidents. It leaves men on a hair trigger, with nightmares forty years later and a really bad attitude toward war, government, and military. When you send a kid to war, you don’t always get the same kid back.
Maybe you know the kind of vet who gets teary-eyed at the Legion post and sings America the Beautiful. Tom wasn’t one of them.
One day at Tom’s Bar in Chapala—the Toms here can get confusing—a big gringo porker was bellowing about something or other and just wouldn’t stop. Tom finally popped and said, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up?” The guy said “Make me,” which was not a life-optimizing decision and flew out the door with his face lots flatter than it started and his head broke a tail light on a VW bug parked outside. Tom was very polite with the cops. He explained that the guy really needed to have his lights punched out. The cops understood. They took him to the station in cuffs and let him go.
Tom was an illegal alien. He had come to Mexico when you could do it on a driver’s license. He overstayed his visa. With no passport he couldn’t re-enter the States. He went to the US Consulate in Guadalajara to apply for a passport. Easy, he figured. He had no ID beyond a VA hospital card, but the usual long paper trail: social-security number and earning records, VA records, military records with fingerprints on file, records at the fire department in Florida where he ahd worked for years, and so on.
The consulate told him he needed his birth certificate. Tom, though bright, was not a computer guy. I got online in pursuit of the certificate.
I saw Tom maybe every month or so. We’d run the bars, the Gavilàn, Roy's, Lobos. These were bar bars, rough, unadorned, and inelegant, though no fights—well, not many—but you wouldn’t order a daiquiri or some fruity drink with a little umbrella. We’d laugh about other places and crazier times. He told me about a couple of motorcycle crashes, about his years in the Alaskan fishing fleets, and about when he was a dolphin. Really. He was a dolphin. In some movie he was paid to hover neutral two feet down in scuba gear with a plastic Flipper’s head on two sticks for the cameras.
It took me a year I guess to get his birth certificate because the New York bureaucracy apparently is a home for wayward morons and because of all the damn-fool security theater following on Nine Eleven. In lots of the US it is easy to get somebody else’s birth certificate, and easier yet to Photoshop one into existence, but getting one legitimately is hard.
Finally he had his birth certificate, but the consulate said it didn’t identify him and wouldn’t do anything. His military records, they said, had been burned in a fire in St. Louis. I think they just didn’t like him. The kind of people who work in consulates don’t like the kind who carry rifles in bad jungles and burn leeches off their legs and make people dead. There were indications that he didn’t like them either. Unless “pussies and dykes” is a term of endearment.
Tom lived on $1100 a month in VA comp and disability payments from the Orlando, or was it the St. Pete fire department. It paid for a small walkup on Hidalgo, tequila in amounts not obsessively moderate but not suicidal, and weed. He had suffered from lymphatic cancer, he said, resulting from Agent Orange, but it was in remission. Yet something was wrong with him—too skinny, began to have to sit on a bench to rest coming back from the pizza store.
After years of trying, he gave up on getting a US passport. They just weren’t going to help him, he said, and he was afraid that if one more candy-ass office pogue told him no again, he might bitch-slap him across Chapala and go to Leavenworth for life. In desperation he began trying to get a Mexican passport. There are ways of doing this, Mexico being less compulsive about legality than some countries. He had succeeded in getting a Mexican birth certificate when the cancer came back.
Or so we figure. He started losing weight and got weaker. Vi and I dropped by from time to time as he seemed to want conversation. We asked him to the Reestaurante Cozumel for bacon-wrapped shrimp, which normally was sure-fire Robot-bait, but he always said he had a bug, couldn’t shake it, but soon as he got well, sure. He didn’t get well.
We came back from Spain and brought him an ornate Moroccan hookah to cheer him up. He was so weak he could barely come to the door.
Somewhere in this chain of collapse he started drinking in earnest. He said he wanted to go to Texas to the VA hospital in Houston, but didn’t have a passport. Mexican hospitals are cheaper than American, but not cheap on $1100 a month. Miraculously a clinic, Medijic, opened nearby by that would accept VA health insurance for problems like his.
By that time Tom couldn’t walk more than a few feet. Vi and I got him to the clinic by asking guys off the street to carry him to the car like a sack of mangos. At the clinic he was too weak to hold his head up and did the interview with his head on a table full of magazines. Shortly afterward two doctors and a nurse from the clinic went to his place and offered to get him into the almost-free hospital civil, or have the nurse care for him at his place, but he refused. He had had enough.
Not long after he was found dead in a pool of blood on his sofa. Cirrhotic hemorrhage, we figured. We never asked to see the autopsy report. What difference would it make?
I emailed the consulate with his name, apparent date of death, social-security number, and address. There was no response
What happens with the Egyptian military when the dollar goes down the drain?
Roubles.
Guys with guns always have friends.
Glass factory! Glass factory! Glass factory now!!
Looks like the Muslims voted for the wrong man again they just don't understand democracy. Time for another US backed assasination .
I'm sure the CIA can cough up another Mannlicher-Carcano and even another patsy.
Once again we have helped make the world safe for democraships.