So warm, so wrong

Things are heating up these days.
The wife commented on our warm spell of these past few days, "so warm, so wrong" and it's wrong all over it seems.

Many warnings lately of a big financial adjustment that's about to take place. Devaluing of the US dollar, Quantative Easing or something like that. Sounds too big to happen, but these days you never know.

A contributor to ZeroHedge wrote ominously;
  

"Being a participant in a hopelessly compromised, rigged market makes us marks because we're ultimately providing liquidity and capital for the players to skim. When the officially sanctioned intervention finally fails and the market leaks 40% of its current value, the muppets will finally understand the "outsized returns" were just a con used to entice them into playing digital 3-card monte. The game is rigged, but the greed of the player overrides his skepticism and caution. The same can be said for pension funds and all the other institutional players. Desperate for yield, they've foolishly ponied up hundreds of billions of dollars to play 3-card monte with crooked dealers and a crooked house."

I love that!

I'd welcome some pain if it meant a majority of people would finally start to get it. Instead of the odd cynical blog post, real people taking real action.  The current system isn't working for me.
How about you?

Up in Smoke

Free Maria

There's been a great deal of speculation and excitement (undeserved) regarding the possibility of Uruguay 'legalizing' Marijuana. As is usually the case, most people had what was even being proposed bass-ackwards. Some claiming the demon weed would be legal, others being dimly aware of the gov's proposed cockimamy scheme to alot 40 joints a month to every registered pot head. I was, to put it mildly, skeptical of this plan, complete with the fool proof idea to have roaches turned in as 'proof'.

No need to worry, it was DOA and never made it out of Parliment.
Our president or his cronys appear to view smoke as a potential revenue stream (it could be), a measure to curb the use of 'free base' cocaine (it won't) and worse, something they can manage (I doubt seriously they could).
The best that can be gleaned is that this uniformed and clumsy attempt to deal with a fact many people in this world already know; Marijuana is not dangerous and needs to be decriminalized immediately, is that it could be a step, albeit a baby step, toward a more enlightened era.
Vamos arriba.

Meanwhile people do what they do and for the most part are left alone here.

Thanks for keeping up.

Title:forgot the title. (repost)

Our friend Gabriel demonstrates how to offer someone a Mate.

Consider yourself lucky if someone does. 

Mate is still king in Uruguay. 

Coffee may be the drink on the way up, but the cultural gatekeeper is this messy, inconvenient and bitter 'tea' like drink that most people still enjoy with alarming regularity.

It has a bit of stigma as of-the-previous-generation or a bit too country for the swank set, but I feel it's the benchmark for being Uruguayan. 

Still, the wife is a dyed in the wool Uruguaya and never aquired a taste for it and seems some of the younger generation will not fall in with this tradition. Sadly time marches on.

For the present, we take it, as we take life here in the ROU, easy.  And hope against hope that things can remain as they are for a bit longer.

Toma, dale.

 

Cops, chillin' just let the kids hop on. No problem.

 Things go easy around here. At first you find yourself resisting, then giving way to not-fighting-about-everything.

It's nice, you'll see.                                                

The 'ferias' or street markets are a big part of life here. This is Tristan Nervaja in city center and happens each Sunday, but smaller neighborhood ferias are in every neighborhood each week are where the smart buy as much as they can. Supermarkets are convenient and enticing, but too expensive for what most earn. Staying away as much as possible is the only way to fight back.

Remarkably, plenty of wealth on display in this modest city experiencing the same financial adjustments as the rest of the world.

No problem with that at all, but is everybody ready to pony up?

Let's see.






I still love the Ami 8 from Citroen. It's a flimsy antique powered by a squirrel, but I smile every time I see one.

That's worth something.

Equilibrium

Hacktivists are evening the score some.

Anyomous and his ilk are disrupting the web for some of the world's most egregious offenders.
I noticed they are bothering Monsanto . Good, let them know that we know.

Actually effecting change will be the real test of this latest approach to fighting evil.
I don't hold out much hope. Average people, people who don't give this stuff a thought, people who work in this (or another similarly secretive and harmful industry) need to join in the fight.
It's not "a personal choice" or "necessary to feed my family" or "none of your business".
They need to understand it's everybody's business.

You may not be ready to admit that you work for a skunk. Fortunately, there are people out there who will admit it for you.








"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Abraham Lincoln.

Schizophrenia.com

Peter Green is crazy! Me too, I'm crazy about maybe the best blues guitarist I know of.
The Fleetwood Mac story is super fascinating to me and it's what lead me to want to know more about the guy. His story is a tough one.
Here's an article on everybody's must read list; Schizophrenia!
Schizophrenia.com

Check 'em out if you can.