Drugs and oldtimers

A typical Typhoon Sunday morning in Taiwan is not the best time to be inspired to save the world. Utterly dark outside, let me explain to you how the wind trying to get inside the house blows hard and makes nearly everything whistle like you are in a cheap horror movie from the Corman Factory. Already two days raining. We don't have the thrill of real typhoons here. There are mountains that prevent the storm from showing its real power. Not the real deal you may say. This is the stage I am in right now. Your state of mind contaminates from that surrounding you.
And then you almost feel compelled to watch again those old Guns'n Roses videos from the nineties while you are doing a little bit of exercising. Trying to aisle from the outer world I use my earphones and pump up the volume (always wanted to actually said that somewhere it makes sense). So, here I am, hoping to remain in shape and listening Hard Rock in an absolutely not recommended high volume penetrating my brains. Add some strong coffee to the equation.
Suddenly I feel 18 again, like been high with the sensation of invincibility. Hello World and watch out, I am going to eat you! That is how I felt then, almost everyday sensing there was something outside waiting for me to be done, discovered, achieved. I don't believe it was anything exclusive to me. Every kid in the process to became a man or woman experiences the same, at least that's how things should be, from my point of view.
Somewhere I kind of lost those feelings, became a grown up and estabilized my life and way of thinking. That is the politically correct way of describing the way we betrayed ourselves and stopped looking for the Holy Grail. Listening to the music you used to like then, may make you feel sorry for those forgotten days. But in my case also brings hope. There is still time. We have more experience, may be a bit more wisdom. It is only that pulse for life what was left behind and I see no medical or physiological reasons not to bring it back.
Can you call strong coffee with old hard rock music in the morning a real drug? To me, yes, it is. It is a question of resetting your spirit. Like a bad dream means a bad morning even though you don't remember what was in your nightmare or thinking about what you would do if you win the lottery puts a smile in your face that nobody knows where came from. That music makes me feel like nothing can stop me, forget all the impediments to reach whatever I want and seems as if everything is possible. It is just a matter of going for it. Because that was the music I use to listen when things where easier and simpler. No commitments, just the future awaiting for us to conquer it.
Please, somebody make coffee-rock pills so I can overdose in the morning and overcome the gray and rainy Sundays.
Life is a roller coaster. We think the world is a strange place. We do not understand it and we are totally stranded there. Finding those things that bring us to the time when we where kings help regain the strength to make amazing things or just live a fulfilled life with those we love. Because only when in the wooden suit you may say the game is over...and in my case they haven't even planted the pine for that kind of furniture :-)

War

I have realized one thing hard to admit: war is inevitable.
If things go as planned, I intend to live some good 80 years, may be 90 with a little bit of luck. My father lived 88 years and one war in his lifetime, the Spanish Civil War.
In my first sentence in this entry, I am not referring to something that could happen in a foreign country, far away. I speak about your own backyard. Your house, your family threatened by a real danger. One you can smell or be touched by. In Spain or Western Europe, war seems so distant. Things have changed so much. ..Have they?
And then, there is my wife. She is from Taiwan, the most distant place from my hometown you can imagine. She was lucky enough to spare herself from such thing but again her parents and grandparents generation suffered the taste of military and the rotten odor left by gunpowder. Same thing everywhere, no exceptions.
A country may have reasons to go to war, but does a man ever have them? You don’t fight against a country, you shot people, not ideals. You kill citizens, coming from a town like your own. His sons and wife not so different from yours. How can you show anger to someone you don’t know? And yet it seems far easier to kill the unknown soldier and feel no remorse. Just because they said so. Kill a nobody in the battlefield is allowed when defending your country. Self defense.
What are the odds of being in a war in your lifetime? Pretty probable. Did the Germans really hate so much the rest of European countries and people? Did Japanese actually feel hate towards the Chinese peasants or Americans? It is clear that the answer is no. You can say Americans indeed did hate Japan as a whole after Pearl Harbor. But this is only as a result of misinformation. If they only knew the truth beneath that aggression, for sure their feelings would have changed.
From these facts you can deduce that Information is the best and sometimes only weapon to fight war. From the other point of view, Information is always the first casualty prior to make a country go to war. With the world kept well informed and access to information being a non alienable right it would be difficult for any government to convince its population to joint the army to kill. But, all this said, what I really wanted to say is that good chances are you will experience a conflict in your lifetime, in your country. And that should be enough to not be able to sleep at night anymore and to start working to avoid the unavoidable.
But when the time comes, what should a human being do? Defend his country or his family? When wars are over, those who parted are seen in a different way depending on whose side the victory was. If war was won by your country you will never be able to come back. An outcast for ever. Better even change your name. If, on the other hand, defeat was the result, you won't be able to come back either, but mainly because the country will probably be closed for some time till the loser's purge is completed. And the new rulers won't like you anyway.Your once compatriots will hate you because your wife was not raped, your children not slaughtered and you did not have to kill anyone. It is the price they paid for the victory or the defeat, the reason why they hate you. The more they paid, the more they hate you. They do not seem to recognize that you were not the one who drove them to war. It will be soon forgotten. Rulers, good or bad, pass by and their mistakes forgotten. But deserters remain traitors no matter what. Not to kill is always harder.
A killer or an outcast, certain death with honors or hated by your old folks for ever, a murderer or a coward.
Rather than prepared for war, a man should be prepared to die to avoid war.
Because is a nasty business that of war.

700.000 million dollars

Where will they go?
I can write things like 'they should give it to the ones who can not pay the mortgage' or 'give it to the starving people'. But everybody would say it is just another guy that does not understand the way things go it today's world.
That remembers me of the Springsteen's song Born in the USA. There is a line that says: Went down to see my V.A. man, he said 'Son, don't you understand'...
They make us think they know what they are doing, too complex to be understood without the proper Ivy-league-University background. All those financial-engineered products are necessary for the well being of the system. The truth is they know what they are doing, getting richer, but what they do not know is what is at the end of the road. In my humble opinion, the financial code is 'just keep on doing it, fill your pockets and pray so the system crumbles after you are long gone', because they know for sure the building has such weak foundations.
I don't think anybody knew a system based on giving money to people cannot afford to pay it was going to endure for ever. Just for a while, so someone has become rich out of been a wise ass. And probably he is out of business now and laughing.
I recall talking with my friends in Spain on how the real estate market could never go down. Buying a house was always going to be a good, secure investment. I used to say: Why? is not a house like any other kind of goods? Now I know the answer and so they do.
May be a few things are hard to explain to normal people. Einstein theories, Maxwell laws could be among them. But in general, the rest is not understood because we do not want to spend the time to find an accurate and independent source. Not meaning with that some conspiracy-theory lover geek with a blog like mine. This is 2008, Internet provides us with free reliable knowledge. Universities, Wikipedia, non-sensationalist newspapers, respectable people writing in their blogs for us to read and understand.
Everybody is amazed now to read about Michael Milken or the Dot.com bubble and how nobody preview what was going to happen. In five years we all will be so smart to understand the stupidity of selling bonds based on subprime mortgages. Why can't we understand it now? Why nobody could one year ago?

HANS-GERT POETTERING President of the European Parliament: 'You cannot give 700.000 million dollars to the banks and forget about hunger' (September, 28th 2008)

We hate whoever you say we should, dear President

The so called crisis in South America between Colombia and Ecuador foster by Venezuela and Nicaragua has prompted their respective presidents to show how machos they are.
But beware, we should not use indistinctly the words Venezuela and President of Venezuela. And the same stands for the other participants in this affair (and I am running out of words to call this just to avoid naming it school fight).
One person does not represent the feelings of a whole country but amazing as it may appear, can put a country on the verge of war and then change his face to a friendly one to shake hands with the not so far ago (maybe minutes) enemy. I recall now Videla´s Argentina and that crazy war coming from nowhere to distract the people from the real worries of the economic situation of a disastrous government with an absolute lack of management skills.
But here we are, don´t have to look so far in time to find populists who made thousands of men go to war only because of their narcisism and vanity, always fit in a brilliant disguise of national pride. No doubt that because in the end there has not been a blood bath, everybody may say I am exaggerating. But actually it has been one man decision, as so many times in history, not to draw first blood. This should make all of us ponder the way things are and realize something has to be made in order the world may avoid such dangerous situations now more and more governments (not coutries, not people in them, just rulers and their cohorts) try to get nuclear dissuasion armament.
Also as citizens have the responsibility in our hands not to follow as sheeps every fool that gets the microphone. And maybe that is just enough. With the medicine of schooling for everybody we will get ride of the populist infection that takes the lives of the youth in the pursuit of the pride of the macho-presidents. In the meantime let´s pray none of them gets the nuke-button.

Dear inmigrant, don´t bother. It is hell for you here.

A new strategy is being developed here in Europe to make African people think twice before starting the dangerous odyssey of illegally trying to enter the formerly-kown-as-paradise part of the world.
Yes, they are still building walls, patrolling the sea, monitoring the African coasts in costant search for small boats full of desperate people, possing a threat to the stability of western civilization.
But, in a new turn of the screw, now the approach is to convince them at home that hell rather than heaven awaits on the other side.
Even with help of some Non-governmental Organizations that provide the material to show in remote villages of Africa, intended to be a counterbalance for the TV influence. Showing the rough part of the story. People being treated as second class citizens. The coast guard rescuing undermined bodies from the sea or simply recovering the dead ones from the shore. Testimonies of unsuccessful experiencies with a sentimental touch here an there to make them more impressive.
To me this is like telling the father that is watching his son drowning in the sea, not to enter the water because it is cold. It is not knowing the reasons why an inmigrant is an inmigrant. As strange as it could seem to us, people usually wants to live where they were born. If you give them a chance, they will stay. You can call it a kind of mother love for your land. Because once you grow up there it inpregnates your soul in a way even the best detergent is not capable of removing it.
The reason they come here is what they left there. A incomprehensible wish to come back and share with the ones they love the fruit of their hard work wherever hard work is available to be done. And I say incomprehensible, because that is what we think of it. If we ask a western person where he would like to live, it would be amazing for us how many of them would choose places like The French Riviera, Monaco, the exclusive Chelsea of London, Monaco, Geneva... A lot of them resigning from their own homeland, trading people for glamour.
I don´t think the same stands for poor people of other continents. They would decide to stay at home but improving services and live conditions in general, but not even to the standard level assume as reasonable here but to that minimum to live without the constant threatening of starving or diseases.
Let not missunderstand this. I am not saying that a man living in a shanty town wants to remain there for the rest of his lifetime. I say they want to build their own land, not "steal" ours.
Meanwhile we keep on spending so much money to stop the unstoppable tide, not realizing that the solution is somewhere else and perhaps cheaper than we think.