Goodbye.

Pendejo Viejo, Pendejo Sin Fronteras

There really is no fool like an old, failed fool: Then: Britain's special relationship 'just a myth' So, after Blair was keel-hauled and Gordon Brown became the worst PM in modern times, what do we find about the Anglophile gringo with a man-crush on Neville Chamberlain? That he probably would have LOVED Caracas! Maybe there are pro-Castro, pro-Chavez grings who aren't really really clever, idiotic, asshole failure at life---we've just never seen any. At Least He Isn't a Traitor to His Class

The all-too-familiar story of W. Kendall Myers. by Sam Schulman 06/22/2009, Volume 014, Issue 38

The W. Kendall Myers treason story--the retired State Department gent and never-published scholar whose 30 years of skillful espionage on Cuba's behalf has recently come to the notice of the authorities--has already produced one great benefit. Not for some years have we seen newspaper writing like this in the Washington Post: He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. "We were all appalled by the Bush years," one said. Mary Beth Sheridan and Del Quentin Wilber in only a few Updikean brushstrokes paint the character of W. Kendall Myers (age 72) and his wife Gwendolyn (age 71). Until he retired in 2007, Myers was an official at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), a group within the State Department that scrapbooks intelligence supplied by the 18 federal and military agencies that actually do legwork and plops it on the desk of the secretary of state. Myers is also one of some 130 "professorial lecturers" at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, a title he has held since 1979. Although Myers is a Ph.D.--his 1972 Hopkins dissertation defending -Neville Chamberlain was titled "A Rationale for Appeasement"--his SAIS rank is really nonacademic, shared by a floating crew of 130-odd part-time lecturers, mostly State Department employees and other diplomatic professionals who give classes from time to time. Mrs. Myers was an executive in the computer department of Riggs Bank--a bank often said to have cooperated with the CIA. And since 1979, the government believes that the Myerses have been passing classified information to the Cuban authorities. The couple told FBI agents that they are passionate and committed supporters of Fidel Castro and the transformation he has wrought upon Cuba. It is astounding to the Washington Post team and to the neighbors and former colleagues they interviewed that a man of Myers's breeding, education, and charm could have dedicated himself to the enslavement of the Cuban people. A colleague from State was particularly astonished because Myers never spoke about Latin America at all, much less Cuba, "ever, ever." It is depressing that our striped pants brigade expects so little of what John le Carré calls "tradecraft" from our spies. Did they imagine the Myerses would wear Che T-shirts and hang souvenir Venceremos Brigade machetes on the walls of their offices? Myers's academic colleagues are also stunned. SAIS professor David P. Calleo, who often invited Myers--despite his lowly rank--to co-teach with him, thinks Myers's treachery is "out of character." He told the Post that Myers "has this amazing intellectual curiosity" and is "open to all kinds of ideas." This description is high praise, since Calleo is himself open to all kinds of ideas. One of these ideas is that disloyal American Jews have mesmerized the United States through their control of the media into supporting a friendly power that really ought not to exist at all. Despite his learning and his intellectual curiosity, Calleo is unaware that some of the greatest traitors to the Western democracies were notable for their intellectual curiosity. The KGB spy Guy Burgess, for example, was the "most brilliant, compelling, promising human being" that his Cambridge peer Noel Annan had ever met. Myers, too, has a high opinion of Burgess and the Cambridge Ring of traitors. According to Tom Murray, a SAIS student in the 1990s who looked up his lecture notes when Myers was arrested, "Myers suggested they were called by their sense of duty to 'save' Europe (rather than the British Empire), and that U.S. and U.K. policies 'turned them into' spies." Murray was also impressed by Myers's "dapper Anglophile" wardrobe and sense of style. Myers didn't charm everyone at SAIS. Another colleague remembers Myers in a different way: "droopy mustache, air of fey, bemused irony, obvious condescension about the petty follies of U.S. foreign policy, love of Europe, unexpressed but evident disdain for America"--in other words, a man with no curiosity at all who feels taking in new ideas is beneath him. One begins to see the truth in Fielding's observation that it requires an unusually "penetrating eye to discern a fool through the disguise of good breeding." To the amateur of treason, there is something wonderfully familiar about the Kendall Myers saga--and it has nothing to do with his ideas or his teaching. Rather, it is the class markers--markers that make a spy-hunter of the old school feel like it's the first day of grouse season. Myers's patrician upbringing and manners disarmed suspicion. But they also injured him in a way that could only be healed by personal attachment to the ill-mannered man who turned Cuba into a charnel house. A decade ago, Edward Luttwak declared that "snobs made better spies." In America, we have our own set of patrician disloyalists and admirers of mass murder. The Communist party, famous in the 1930s and 1940s for having the best-looking girls, commanded the enthusiasm of some very well-tailored men and chic women: Frederick Vanderbilt Field of Hotchkiss and Harvard, Corliss Lamont (Exeter and Harvard), Ralph Ingersoll (Hotchkiss and Yale), Alger Hiss (Hopkins and Harvard Law), Michael Whitney Straight of Dartington Hall and Cambridge (and son of Dorothy Payne Whitney), Martha Dodd (Vassar), Donald Ogden -Stewart (Yale and the Algonquin Round Table), Molly Day Thacher of Vassar (Mrs. Elia Kazan and the daughter of a Yale president). Et in Chicagoland ego: Ernest Hemingway and Bill Ayers. To these gentlemen and ladies, Myers is about as close as Gatsby gazing over from West Egg at the Buchanans in East Egg. Although the Post's Sheridan announced on NPR that he was a "man from one of Washington's most prestigious and storied families, a prep school background, elite universities," she neglected the crucial point. Myers's accomplishments were deeply mediocre measured against what his family and he himself must have expected. On his mother's side, he was the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell. His grandmother married into the Grosvenor-Hubbard dynasty, which organized Bell Telephone and founded the National Geographic Society (and still chairs its board). Myers's mother married a soon to be successful Washington cardiologist, Walter Kendall Myers (Princeton and Johns Hopkins). Until 2009, journalists could always get a paragraph out of the Bush dynasty and their Skull & Bones memberships. Myers's great-uncle Alphonso Taft, father of Willam Howard, founded Bones. And Kendall himself? Like Henry Adams in his Autobiography, "no child, born in the year, held better cards than he. He could not refuse to play his excellent hand." But something went badly wrong. Instead of a first-rate New England or Delmarva prep school, Myers attended the third-tier Mercersburg Academy in his father's Pennsylvania hometown. He went to an Ivy League college, but it was Brown (don't scream, Gen-Xers, long before you were born or attended Brown or desperately wanted to or pretended that you had, it was, in the 1950s and 1960s, known as the "armpit of the Ivy League"). There were also emotional issues: After his father's death in 1964, Myers stopped being Walter Jr. and styled himself as W. Kendall. His Johns Hopkins doctorate earned him an assistant professorship at SAIS from 1972 to 1979, but for some reason--probably having to do with the eternally unpublished dissertation (you can find it cited in scholarly books for decades as "the yet-unpublished writings of Kendall Myers")--he did not discern tenure in his future. According to the Post's narrative, based on the accounts of his friends, "his life was rocked by tragedy and difficulties" in the mid-1970s. In 1975, "Myers was driving a car that slammed into a 16-year-old girl in Northwest Washington, near his childhood home, killing her. Myers felt terrible about the crash." In 1977 he divorced his first wife, Maureen Walsh. On the basis of her name alone, it seems likely she had not fit well in the Grosvenor world. Myers's second wife, a South Dakota divorcée called Gwendolyn Steingraber Trebilcock would have been just as unwelcome at Wildacres, the Grosvenor estate near Bethesda. Myers went to Cuba in 1978 at the invitation of the Cuban mission to the U.N., according to the Post. "[T]he son of privilege fell in love with the communist revolution." But like many chic radicals, Myers must have felt inwardly that he was not a legitimate son of privilege. His academic failure--the dissertation only in the beginning of its long career of nonpublication, the disappointing academic career, his inability to play up and play the game--made him ready for conversion. In a diary entry made during his Cuban idyll in 1978, we can see this child of privilege projecting his sense of self-disappointment onto his country. The robber barons disappoint him--but so do their victims: Cuba is so exciting! I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the evening news is a radicalizing experience. The abuses of our system, the lack of decent medical system, the oil companies and their undisguised indifference to public needs, the complacency about the poor, the utter inability of those who are oppressed to recognize their own condition. Myers's indictment of the state of the American polity under Jimmy Carter is a cliché. But his admonishment of the poor for not being able to recognize their own misery and failure is rare, though also familiar. Imagine how his parents must have admonished him when he didn't get into Groton or Princeton (or wherever he actually was supposed to go), when he brought home to his Presbyterian Colonial Dame of a mother an Irish bride, when he chose not to be a professional man but a tweedy professional advocate for Neville Chamberlain--when he failed to play the hand he was dealt. It seems that Myers chose soundly just once--when he chose no longer to allow himself any more choices. Within six months of his return to America, he was in South Dakota living with Gwendolyn, and--as Clarice Feldman shrewdly guesses in a long piece at TheAmericanThinker.com--some gunsel in the Cuban mission on Lexington Avenue drew the short straw and traveled to South Dakota to enroll the eager couple as traitors. Signing up with Fidel solved Myers's problems. From that moment, everything that the couple would do--where they lived, when they moved, where they worked--or attempted to work (the poor fellow failed the CIA entrance exam in 1981)--would no longer be their choice, but would serve the cause of the Cuban Revolution. The Cuban people unburdened Myers of his freedom to fail. And no doubt Myers is still grateful for that gift of captivity. And for us--it's nice to know that we can look forward once again to watching the life and lies of a WASP traitor unfold in the next months, even if he's only a third-tier sort of WASP traitor.

Sam Schulman, a writer in Virginia, was publishing director of the American and publisher of Wigwag.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/617jxvit.asp?pg=2

This Is Not America

America under the reign of Shah Barack I, or a Pendejo Sin Frontera in the making:

The Littlest Totalitarian By JONAH GOLDBERG

‘Helping Dad become a better man: priceless.” That’s the closing line of a new MasterCard commercial. You know those commercials; they’ve been out for nearly a decade. A typical one goes something like this: “Bric-a-brac: 17 dollars. White elephant: 28 dollars. Getting your wife to remove the restraining order: priceless.”

Only this one has a little boy tailing his father — a man who looks like a perpetually adolescent extra from the old sitcom Friends — through a home-improvement store pointing out ways the carbon-profligate old man can reduce his footprint. The boy replaces the usual narrator as well. “Energy-saving bulb: four dollars,” quoth the child. “Reusable bag: two dollars. Helping Dad become a better man: priceless.”

There are two kinds of folks in this world: those who find this sort of thing creepy, and pod people. Okay, maybe that’s a bit too strong. But how anyone could fail to find this commercial one of the more disturbing convergences of corporate power, advertising, and progressive groupthink is beyond me.

If you can’t see why, maybe it will help to look a few spaces ahead of where we are. In Britain, an electric utility launched a website for kids that teaches them how to become “climate cops.” Their duty is to keep a “watchful eye” and monitor the “energy crimes” of their family and neighbors, with the ultimate goal of building a “climate-crime case file.” Beware that Johnson kid with the clipboard going through your recyclables.

If you still can’t see why this kiddie Gestapo stuff is offensive, change the issue from environmentalism to eating habits (you know that’s coming, by the way), or religion, or just about any subject where you don’t think a six-year-old should be scolding you for weakness of character or informing on you to the authorities.

Now, it’s not that I think kids shouldn’t be encouraged to be civic-minded. And while I find today’s climate obsessions to be suffused with religious hysteria, I don’t see anything terrible in encouraging kids, or anyone else, to conserve resources. But that’s not the issue here. Nor is environmentalism per se. It’s the kids.

There is something evil about recruiting children to lobby their parents on political causes. Okay, it’s not always evil; sometimes it can be funny, like the time in 1965 when Soupy Sales told the children watching his TV show to sneak into their parents’ bedrooms and take the “green pieces of paper” from their wallets and send them to him.

Sales apologized for cracking a joke that a few kids took seriously. But no apologies are forthcoming from MasterCard for broadcasting something in earnest that in a healthy society would be seen as a joke. The idea of enlisting children to the Cause is as fashionable today as it was under Robespierre.

To crack the bunker walls of the family and seduce the children has always been a top priority of totalitarians, hard and soft. Progressives love to elevate the sagacity of children — Hillary Clinton says some of the best theologians she’s ever met have been five-year-olds — because doing so gives children all the more authority when they parrot the talking points of the latest progressive fad.

James Lileks asks about the MasterCard ad: “If the kid didn’t learn these steps to righteousness at home, where did he get them?” Precisely. It’s not as if normal, uncoached six-year-olds talk about making their fathers “better men.”

If the man in the ad were a better father, he would have scolded his kid for the disrespect and demanded to know who was teaching him such crap.

Goldberg at NRO (Currently on NRO : Latin American's Progress )

On the subject of the state as Big Brother:

"THE death of Benno Ohnesorg stirred a whole movement of left-wing protest and violence. On June 2nd 1967 the newly wed student of literature joined a protest in West Berlin against the visiting shah of Iran. As he watched a commotion in the courtyard of a house into which police had chased some demonstrators, he was shot in the back of the head by a policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras, who claimed he had been threatened by knife-wielding protesters.

This was a turning-point. In the eyes of many young Germans the state had unmasked itself as evil. Many joined what would become the 1968 student movement; some took up arms. “This fascist state wants to kill us all,” said Gudrun Ensslin, who went on to become a leader of the Red Army Faction terrorist group and died in prison in 1977.

Had she lived, she would be stunned to learn that Mr Kurras, now 81, had been a long-time agent of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. Historians trawling through the Stasi’s archives stumbled across 17 volumes chronicling Mr Kurras’s secret career. It began with an unsolicited visit to the Communist Party’s central committee in East Berlin in 1955 and prospered when he joined the state-security section of the West Berlin police. Under the codename “Otto Bohl” he rendered such services as tipping off the Stasi to espionage investigations and locating tunnels used by defectors from the east. Germans, who heard of Mr Kurras’s double identity this month, are wondering just how much of their history will have to be re-examined.

There is no evidence that the Stasi ordered him to kill Ohnesorg, though it was not displeased by the tumult that ensued. Would the students who embraced the martyr have blamed the West alone had they known that the bullet was fired by an agent of the East? Would fellow policemen have rallied around Mr Kurras, who was twice acquitted of manslaughter, had they known him to be a communist spy?

Despair over his exoneration helped drive Ensslin and others to violence. Till Meyer, once part of the violent June 2nd Movement and himself a former Stasi agent, told Der Spiegel, a magazine, that history need “not be rewritten a bit”. But if people like him had known who Mr Kurras really was, their extremism might have been tempered by uncertainty.

The revelation comes in the midst of an arcane but passionate argument about whether East Germany should be called a Unrechtsstaat, “a lawless state”. Politicians from the ex-communist Left Party reject the label, angering conservatives. Gesine Schwan, a candidate for the German presidency who lost to the incumbent, Horst Köhler, on May 23rd, heightened the row by saying she found the label too “vague”. To win, she would have needed support from the Left Party.

The unmasking of Mr Kurras does not entitle Germans to pin the blame for Ohnesorg’s killing on East Germany. But it does remind them that the Stasi was at the heart of the regime’s nastiness"

The gunshot that hoaxed a generation, May 28th 2009, From The Economist print edition A Stasi agent sets off the chaos of 1968; twenty-one years later the Berlin Wall fell. Now, we have a culture which celebrates six-year olds helping parents become "better" by joining the groupthink. At least poor Chavistas are honest: they're in it for the jack. The added layer of smug piousness that permeates the Mastercard ad, and much of the culture as a whole in 2009, is creepier.

Skint - pelao

The gas-injection will come from Hugo

From The Economist print edition, May 14th 2009, a recap of Chavez seizure of, as the article succinctly states, accounts payable:

UNTIL a few weeks ago, the Venezuelan government was encouraging private investment in oil services. But in a sudden about-turn, President Hugo Chávez changed the law to make the whole industry a preserve of the state. On May 8th the National Guard began to occupy dozens of drilling rigs, docks and boats operated by private contractors, both local and foreign, hired by PDVSA, the state oil company.

Mr Chávez invoked national security. PDVSA complains that the oil-services firms did not cut their prices when the oil price plummeted last year. But the real reason seems to be that PDVSA has run out of cash. At the end of last year it owed contractors $14 billion, according to a report to the National Assembly.

Mr Chávez says that PDVSA will save $700m a year by ending the outsourcing of activities ranging from docks to maintenance and to the pressurised gas and water injection that many Venezuelan oil wells require. But there will be a cost, and not just in lost technology.

The constitution sets prior judicial review and “fair compensation” as conditions for expropriation. But the oil-service firms will get only the book value of their assets, paid in government bonds and with deductions for any labour or environmental liabilities the government adduces. Many of the service contracts allow for international arbitration, so PDVSA is likely to face expensive lawsuits. And other service contractors not yet taken over may scale back their investment in Venezuela.

Despite years of record oil revenues, PDVSA accumulated liabilities of almost $70 billion by last September, up from less than $30 billion in 2006, according to the company’s financial reports. The company is itself owed more than $24 billion, mostly by Cuba and other neighbours to whom Mr Chávez supplies oil on easy terms.

PDVSA’s decline stems in part from the fact that Mr Chávez has turned what was an efficient oil company into an all-purpose vehicle for implementing “21st-century socialism”. PDVSA, whose workforce has more than doubled since 2003, now builds houses, imports food, runs farms and pays for adult-education projects.

The government insists that Venezuela continues to produce over 3m barrels per day (b/d) of oil. Independent sources put the figure at around 2.2m b/d. The government’s main hope of boosting output lies in the Orinoco heavy-oil belt. It has been seeking foreign partners for the big long-term investment required. Already the adjudication of seven new blocks has twice been postponed. “PDVSA is demanding bidders renounce arbitration rights,” says Pedro Palma, an economist. “Given what has happened, that could be suicidal.”

The cash crunch in the oil industry has a wider impact. “We don’t supply PDVSA directly,” says the owner of a small office-supplies company in the eastern city of Maturín. “But most of our clients do. We’re owed 120,000 bolívares [about $56,000 at the official exchange rate] in overdue payments, and we’re down to 12,000 bolívares in the bank.” So goes Venezuela.

Venezuela's oil industry:Skint

Not Emma Lazarus, Nor Ellis Island

"A friend of mine report to me that Z&P, Costa Bolivar and Terminales Maracaibo, all of them piers in la Costa Oriental del Lago, are under Guardia Nacional custody right now. Chavez will come tomorrow to finish the work done today by Asamblea Nacional." Caracas Chronicles, Apocalypse Now comments

The news is that Chavez has seized about 39 or 60 oilfield service companies in the Lake Maracaibo region of Venezuela.

What the comment on Quico's site tells me is, Chavez is going after the Italians.

Z&P is Zaramella and Pavan, and if you ever lived on the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo, if your family was with Exxon/Creole or Shell, if Las Morochas or Tamare or Tia Juana or Lagunillas or Ciudad Ojeda mean anything to you, you've heard of them.

What they are is Venezuela's own miniature of the American dream. These were companies that in their majority were founded by immigrants. Not the Spaniards and Portuguese, but by Italians who'd come in the post-war era, to shabby, dirty, hot, muggy little hamlets surrounded by petroleum.

They didn't work at Shell, or Creole, or CVP, but for them, as contractors, contratistas. And they stayed on after Shell and Creole were asked to leave, in 1976.

How to explain the Italians in Venezuela? They're not Paulie Walnuts, or Mulberry street stereotypes. They adore Venezuela, many married Venezuelan criollas and are proud that their children are Venezuelans (even if they prudently also carry Italian passports).

They're proud of their success stories, men with little formal education or credentials who nevertheless saw the unbridled potential in Venezuela, and made something.

In Italy, being an attorney or an MBA has less cachet, luster than being an ingegnere, an engineer, a builder --- going back to the days of the Roman aqueducts. And that's the niche that Z&P, and all those others, filled in Venezuela's oil business.

They came, they saw, they worked hard. They built businesses, they built farms, they created. In a nation that for four hundred years had produced strongmen, cacao, coffee, and arrogant, elitist, pretentious, work-shy Caracas intellectuals, this was a novelty.

If Venezuela ever had its Ellis Island immigrants, its Emma Lazarus newcomers, it's them.

Being Italians, they knew how a mordida culture, of patronage, shrugged shoulders, and you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours worked. They were there under Perez Jimenez. They thrived under democracy, and they had the field to themselves after the gringos and Brits and Dutch were shown the door.

Were they seen as examples? Of how people with scant book-learning, but a fierce work ethic, could bloom and prosper in Venezuela?

Riiiight. The stereotypes were what you'd imagine, and also the resentment. The idea that, rather than being examples to be emulated, these were foreigners who were "exploiting" their new land. Building and creating what so many native born Venezuelans, from the barrio to La High, couldn't be bothered to do.

They made their accomodations with Chavez, guessing ( I suppose) that this was just another nuisance to be paid off in order to get on with business. They couldn't have imagined that, with the obscene oil profits of the last years, that Chavez could bleed the national oil holding company dry. That they'd be owed $ 13 Billion by the Venezuelan state. That what they'd built would be taken by a thief.

That's Venezuela under Chavez. "We should have gone to Canada, or Brazil, or Australia. We might as well have stayed in Italy, because look at it now"--I'd imagine that's what many of the older men are thinking. "I'm going to Italy", is what I'd imagine many of their Italo-Venezuelan offspring are contemplating.

For me, it's just another piece of the Venezuela of my nostalgia, the Venezuela where my Mom would bring butter to the Costa Oriental beach in order get the tar off our feet, demolished.

For the old guard at Z&P, I can only imagine what it is to see a lifetime's work seized by goons, led by a goon-in-chief who creates nothing, but blindly demolishes, filling his pockets.

Chavez has come after the Italianos.

Who's left to sack, loot and plunder?

http://mybloop.com/go/jD97Mw

From Venezuela, BC ( Before Chavez)

Updated: "Alma Llanera", to bring a tear to Jungle Mom's eye!

(Square icon stops autoplay)

Venezuelan country music, from the Llanos, Venezuela's great plains, home to the llanero, Venezuela's answer to the gaucho or the cowboy.

It's simple, but gorgeous nevertheless, and it tells you more about Venezuela than I ever could. It reminds me of my childhood there, and it's one of the songs that I still love in spite of the best efforts of the self-appointed Venezuelan Folk-Cultural Commissars to tell people (especially foreigners, extranjeros)- what they should appreciate about Venezuela. Too bad these precursors to Chavez are now running the henhouse. Zamura cuidando carne.

PASILLANEANDO

(José La Riva)

La luna en el sendero

me iluminaba,

y en el fondo del caño

se reflejaba,

recordando tus ojos

que me miraban, que me miraban

y aquellas notas tristes

de tu canción.

Titilar de cocuyos

que van dejando,

impresión de mechuzos

agonizando

chubasco que en la noche

va despertando, va despertando,

de su sueño al lucero

madrugador.

Llanero que amaneces

pasillaneando, pasillaneando,

en lomos del caballo

caracoleando, caracoleando,

rebaños de ganado

que van dejando, que van dejando,

como paso los horas junto al recuerdo

con la ilusión.

Pasillaneando: http://mybloop.com/go/w5GJmc

Alma Llanera: http://mybloop.com/go/bnvD53

Hmm...

Conrad Veidt, as The Man Who Laughs

Spring Break In Trinidad & Toe-Bay-Go That's all. (note: any similarities between these rictus grins is purely coincidental)

UPDATED: For Manuel Rosales, in exile, seeking asylum from Chavez' persecution:
Maracaibo y el Zulia Libre te esperan. http://mybloop.com/go/vg4R8m

RELAMPAGEA.