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Welcome To Vilcabamba
"The Sacred Valley of Longevity"


This Is A Privately Circulated Blog, scribbled exclusively for Friends & Familiars, that peers into and pontificates about Expat life in the hinterlands of South America. If your eyesight is less than optimal (like mine), then just click the type size up a notch on your browser..


Here you will find a series of curmudgeonly commentaries that I've posted from atop my rickety old soapbox for the past few years. And yes, there are indeed political rantings, so place your seats in the upright position and fasten your seat belts .... it may be a bumpy ride.






8/15/15

Listen up, Congress people!

Here is an older post that I have moved up to the present. Why, you might ask?

Well, it is even more relevant today than when I first wrote it back in 2012. Take a peek and see if you don't agree.


Listen up, Congress people! You are NOT going to disintegrate our country because of your petty bickering, pandering and posturing. You who have been sent to our nation’s capitol to represent and serve us—the very men and women we elected to get us out of this mess—cannot seem to tie your own shoe laces, much less offer a solution to our economic problems. Instead, you have sold our votes cheaply to those who would profit from your political ineptness …. The banksters, lobbyists and corporatists. But NO MORE!

We The People are coming together in a coalition as diverse as the left-leaning 99% Occupiers and the conservative Tea Partiers to sweep you and your oligarchical cronies into the dustbin of history. We are slowly arising to take back our Republic, to reestablish our constitutionally guaranteed Rights and the Rule Of Law .... with Justice.

And the first order of New Business will be to revise the size and complexity of our institutions and practices of governance. Nothing should be “too big to fail” if it means that our beloved country falls as a result. You, the politicians, could have led in this renewal effort, but to your everlasting shame you have not. So we say to you, NO MORE!

Go home and be replaced by those who are no longer constrained by either ideology or political obligation, by those of our fellow citizens who will sit down in the spirit of compromise and find solutions for the good of the whole country and its citizenry. It CAN be done. It MUST be done.

8/14/15

A Thought ..........

I have been thinking about what has been going on in my former long-time home, back on the Island of Maui in Hawaii.

When I boarded a flight back to the US Mainland some seven years ago, in route to my newly established home in Ecuador, I left a place that had felt like Paradise for a quarter of my life. But it was also a place that was entering troubling times ..... a place which required a round-the-clock delivery schedule from the outside world. Hawaii, you see, is smack-dab in the middle of the North Pacific ocean, some 1,200 miles away from the US Mainland. All it would take is one prolonged strike by the Longshoremen union to cut off the flow of required Stuff and Things for the islanders.

At least that was the consensus of opinion of the tiny group of people who were my trusted advisors, helping me to make certain that I was fully conscious about what was in the process of coming, both political and economically in the immediate future.

Alas, we were all of us wrong .... at least about the time-span we had left before the SHTF struck the Islands and the US Homeland. But only about the timing, not the fall-out that would surely follow ..... like the up-swelling anger toward the self-serving politicians, Beltway opinionators and professional political hangers-on-ers.

That, my dear readers will certainly come about ..... just as soon as the current Fed chairperson realizes that she and her room-full of bright young economists don't have a clue of what they are doing.