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Re: Postcards on the Edge
You would be crazy to eat one of those ducks. Do you know what they eat!?
You would be crazy to eat one of those ducks. Do you know what they eat!?
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
I believe it was the crazies who were eating them.Originally posted by aaron View PostComment
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
Symbiosis of a New Type
El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie together uncomfortably like an estranged couple, surrounded on all sides by mountains and desert. The cities are separated by the thin trickle of the Rio Grande, which flows through concrete channels, built to put an end to the river’s natural habit of changing course and muddying boundaries. One side is Texas; the other, Mexico. The border’s way of life — its business, legitimate and otherwise — has always relied upon the circumvention of this dividing line.
The cities are so close that you can sit on a park bench in El Paso and watch laundry wave behind a whitewashed house on a Juárez hillside. Thousands of commuters come across from Mexico every morning, waiting in a long line at the Paso del Norte bridge, snaking back up the seedy Avenida Juárez, past military checkpoints where hawkers wave tabloids full of tales of carnage. The recent war among various gangs and drug cartels has made Juárez one of the world’s most dangerous cities, while across the way, El Paso remains calm, even eerily prosperous. It consistently ranks as one of the safest cities in the United States.
This grotesque disparity has, in some ways, torn the cities apart. Few El Pasoans venture across the bridge anymore, if they can help it, while much of Juárez’s middle and upper class has decamped to the other side of the border, taking their money, businesses, even their private schools with them, forming an affluent community in exile.
I spent a lot of time in El Paso this winter and spring as the Mexican Army mounted a fragmentary campaign against the cartels and as American politicians of both parties exploited the spectacle for their own purposes. In Washington and Austin, the capital of Texas, in the faraway realm that borderland residents call the interior, conservatives were raising the specter of “spillover violence,” while President Obama was boasting of an unprecedented border fortification. In reality, spillover was notable for its scarcity — when stray bullets from a Juárez gunfight improbably flew across the border and struck El Paso’s City Hall last year, it made international news.
But that’s about the only physical damage the city has suffered. And the federal security buildup — symbolized by an 18-foot, rust-colored fence that runs along city streets and through backyards, part of a 650-mile, $2.8 billion border wall — was regarded around town as a threatening imposition. Some two million people are linked at this spot, by ties of blood and commerce, and its fluid social ecosystem still retains something unique and emblematic and perhaps worth saving. If scholars of globalization are right that we are moving toward a future in which all borders are profitably blurred, here is the starkest imaginable expression of that evolution, in all its heady promise and its perverse failings.
The conflict has claimed some 40,000 lives in Mexico since it began, and Juárez has seen a tenfold increase in its murder rate, reaching more than 3,000 homicides last year. El Paso, by contrast, had only five murders. Why the violence hasn’t spread remains a mystery. Tightened border security seems not to have interrupted the cartels’ operations. Drugs still come over the bridges in huge quantities, hidden in some fraction of the tens of millions of cars and trucks that annually make the legal crossing. The traffickers know that the U.S. authorities can’t search everyone without hindering legitimate trade between Juárez and El Paso, which amounted to $71 billion last year. Once the product reaches the American side, it is whisked off to stash houses and moved on to retail markets in the interior; in the other direction, shrink-wrapped packages of $50 and $100 bills make their way back to Mexico, along with weapons. (One in eight gun dealers in America is located along the border.)
Many analysts believe that the absence of violence here is due to a rational choice by the cartels, which calculate that creating chaos in the United States would disrupt this fairly free flow of goods.
“The nature and the cause of violence in Mexico is driven in part by the border itself,” says David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego. “They’re fighting for control of access to the other side. So to me, violence stops at the border because the need to control territory stops at the border. It’s about real estate, and it’s about corruption networks.”
Sometimes I wonder what El Paso lives off of,” says Tony Payan, a professor of political science at UTEP. To a large extent, the answer is that it subsists off of Juárez. There’s no real agriculture in its arid climate, and much of the city’s once-significant industrial sector has closed down or moved away. El Paso’s income and education levels have long been far below the national average. For the last few decades, the city’s prosperity has been tied to production in the maquiladoras, the outsourced manufacturing industry across the border, and to public-sector employment in border security, law enforcement and at the fast-growing Army base at Fort Bliss — institutions that are all there, to one degree or another, because of the city’s proximity to Mexico. Then, of course, there’s the hidden economy of the narcotics trade, which generates anywhere between $6 billion and $36 billion a year, depending on whose estimates you credit.
Howard Campbell, an anthropologist who studies drug trafficking, told me that the relationship between the two cities “is both symbiotic and parasitic.” When I asked him who was the parasite, he gave me an amused look — silly outsider — and said, “The U.S.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/ma...1&ref=magazine
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
Last summer I sold my 92 Nissan pickup to a Mexican fellow named Jose. Two weeks later his cousin was busted for growing copious amounts of pot (here in Virginia). A day later the feds surrounded Jose's house, helicopter overhead. “So what happened to that truck?” I asked my mechanic. “Jose had no drug connection, but his papers were no good, so he got deported. He gave me a number and some cash. I called the number. A guy came the next day and drove the truck to El Paso which is apparently the only place you can get it across. Your truck's way down south of Mexico City.”Comment
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
In a similar spirit, the altar in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican was built by Bernini using bronze taken from the ceiling of the Parthenon in Athens.
To the victor go the spoils.
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
And Ciudad Juárez ends up with El Paso
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
Getting to be a popular voyeur topic as the world goes to hell...Originally posted by GRG55 View Post
Shared Jet Sales Soar as Wealthy Fliers Avoid Airline Hassles
For Phillip Swan, forgoing the headaches of flying commercial was worth $146,000 for 25 hours of flight time on a private jet.
“We were just sick and tired of dealing with long lines and problems with privacy going through regular security at airports,” said Swan, chief executive officer of a Bellevue, Washington-based company that makes disposable charcoal EZ Grills...Comment
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
I remember reading about Warren Buffett and NetJets about a decade ago.Originally posted by GRG55 View Post
I guess being an airline manager of business jets makes more sense than being an airline owner of cattle car jets.
Fractional ownership of jets seems to work a good bit better than fractional ownership of holiday condos.
On a related note......there seems to be a lot of cheap/entry level jets for sale......such as old G-II's and Czech L39s owned by the artificial wealthy rotting on the market like Vegas/Florida condo apartments.
Alas, I never made it onto the G-IVSP......I only made it as far as picking my old boss up a few times on the receiving end at the airport.Comment
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
But, in the end, the experience gave you the drive to become independent; yes?Originally posted by lakedaemonian View PostComment
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
Absolutely!Originally posted by Chris Coles View Post
And I wouldn't give it up for the world.
I left the dot com world before it imploded and have been running my own biz since and haven't looked back.
Getting that close to "the Gulfstream" in both the literal and figurative sense is a great memory that is quickly extinguished by my new reality of paragliding and paracuting.
Balancing compulsive competitiveness with being happy with my existing bounty of family, health, time, afforded by relative affluence is something I often try not to take for granted.
"My Gulfstream" is now my iTulip assisted family lifeboat. Sailor instead of pilot!
Last edited by lakedaemonian; August 09, 2011, 04:33 AM.Comment
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
Fancy that, my sport is gliding and in large part I was taught, way back in the 1970's, by one Tony Folk (son of a NZ Sheep farmer), when he and his wife Barbara were at Lasham in here in England. www.lasham.org.uk If you ever come across them, say hello for me.Originally posted by lakedaemonian View PostAbsolutely!
And I wouldn't give it up for the world.
I left the dot com world before it imploded and have been running my own biz since and haven't looked back.
Getting that close to "the Gulfstream" in both the literal and figurative sense is a great memory that is quickly extinguished by my new reality of paragliding and paracuting.
Balancing compulsive competitiveness with being happy with my existing bounty of family, health, time, afforded by relative affluence is something I often try not to take for granted.
"My Gulfstream" is now my iTulip assisted family lifeboat. Sailor instead of pilot!Comment
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
On the Waterfront, a Pedicab Skirmish Erupts
Drivers await passengers on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.
By ZUSHA ELINSON
On Tuesday afternoon, bicycle taxis lined up near the Ferry Building, waiting to take tourists for an open-air ride along the San Francisco waterfront.
As a ferry neared the dock, a fit young man pedaled over on a rickety yellow pedicab and parked nearby. The driver at the front of the line, Daniel Crew, bristled and edged forward. He maneuvered so as not to lose a ride to the newcomer, an operator from West Coast Pedicab of San Diego. Mr. Crew and other old-timers say that company’s pedicabs, which appeared this summer, do not play by the rules.
“My beef with those guys from San Diego is they sit over there and catch people before they get over here,” said Mr. Crew. “They’re jumping the line.”
Before West Coast’s arrival, three San Francisco companies offered rides in pedicabs — three-wheeled bicycles with wide back seats — to tourist destinations on the waterfront and in North Beach and Chinatown.
But the arrival of West Coast Pedicab, which the police say does not have all the proper permits, has touched off a small war.
The pedicab industry has exploded across the country in recent years. In cities like San Diego and New York, where hundreds roam the streets, accidents and overcrowding have forced strict regulation. But in San Francisco, pedicabs are just now on the rise. San Francisco Pedicabs, for which Mr. Crew drives, has been around for decades and was joined — more or less peacefully — in recent years by Golden Gate Pedicab and Cabrio Taxi. All plan to expand. Their drivers say they worry that the West Coast drivers will ruin their reputations and draw government scrutiny.
A San Francisco Pedicabs driver, Theo Fitzgerald, said that a woman had recently complained to him that a West Coast driver charged $100 for a ride from the Ferry Building to Fisherman’s Wharf, normally a $20 fare.
Word spread quickly, and drivers appealed to the police and started a Web site detailing complaints against West Coast Pedicab. At a Police Department hearing Wednesday to consider giving seven West Coast drivers permits to operate, several local drivers came to protest.
West Coast often hires foreign exchange students, many of them from Turkey, who come here for the summer to work and travel. The seven who attended the hearing giggled at how the presiding officer pronounced their names and then told him they could not understand the proceedings. The matter was put off because of the language barrier.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/us...anciscobayarea
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
Clam Digging
I asked my ex-son-in-law, who shoots on the beaches year round, if he thought the amount of clam digging was economy-driven.
I can tell you that I have seen lots of it over the years and more white folks lately than ever before. There is always an Asian contingency.
from Funston to Mussel Rock
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Re: Postcards on the Edge
You might ask him just how much Lead he has added to the sea shore environment over that time. Count the cartridges and give you a weight, add all the others with him and ask him to please, think about that.Originally posted by don View PostComment
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