Burrowing Parrots

Burrowing Parrots, Las Lajas, Argentina

Very difficult puzzle, though I don't understand why. You might think that all the pieces of birds would give useful clues, but they didn't. Even when I was down to the last few dozen pieces, I could not find a place for some. I think maybe I'll go back to cars. They are much easier.

I do like parrots though. I wonder if I should get one. Kids seem to think I need a dog. We shall see.

Biologist Juan Masello studying the world’s largest parrot colony, at Balneario El Condor in Argentina. Don Priesler

Burrowing Parrot Range. Yellow is nesting area, orange is area of seasonal food migrations.

Iceberg #2

INCREDIBLE COLLAPSE TRIGGERED BY GLACIER CALVING | South America, Chile
Licet Studios

Update:

Curious how the bottom of the berg flips up. I has expecting it to topple forward, but then I wasn't expecting it to be a one thousand feet tall either. Nine tenths of an iceberg is underwater, so if the glacier cliff face is one hundred feet tall, then the ice must go down for another 900 feet below the water line.

Paraphrased from the YouTube blurb:

A large chunk of the Grey Glacier's ice-sheet breaks off and flips over in Southern Patagonia, Chile. The ice-sheet of the Grey Glacier is part of the 'Southern Patagonian Ice Field', the world's 2nd largest contiguous extrapolar ice field and the largest freshwater reservoir in South America.

The glacier wall collapses during the summer when large icebergs – often up to 100 feet in height – are breaking off the glacier and collapsing into the water of 'Lago Grey'. The waves created by such glacier calving events often splash dozens of yards through the air. The glacier itself is about 3.7 miles wide and has an average height over 100 feet above the surface of the water.

Grey Glacier in Patagonia

Grey Glacier Extent

Lusitania

RMS Lusitania departing New York - Ossie Jones

I'm reading a story about the Chinese plan to build a railway across the Andes mountains in South America. Okay, that sounds nuts, but it also sounds like something China might try.

Well, let's see if we can find a map. I found several speculative plans, but nothing definite. I'm reading about one and they mention Lusophones, which is a new term for me. Look it up and it turns out it means people who speak Portuguese and comes from the name of a Roman province which was located where Portugal is now.

Just bugged me that there were so many disparate things that all used the same name.

Four Masted Barque rounding Cape Horn 1928 - Captain Irving

Four Masted Barque rounding Cape Horn 1928 Captain Irving
iSail Yachting and KTM Kulture

Amazing. 

Via Uniberp.

Update November 2024 replaced missing video.

Cerro Rico

Potosi: The Silver Mine that Changed the World
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
The Silver Mountain was mentioned in another video I posted last week, Why Is Latin America still Poor, and it got me curious, so this morning I did a little digging. This video covers it pretty well. 

He doesn't mention the elevation of this place. The town of Potosi, Bolivia, is at 13,400 feet and the top of the mountain Cerro Rico is 15,689 feet, though it is steadily falling due to internal collapses of old mining galleries. As far as I am concerned air stops at 10,000 feet, so anyone living in this town must be a real life spaceman, a person who can survive where there isn't any air.

Why Is Latin America still Poor

Why Is Latin America still Poor
Casual Scholar

Everybody, including me, complains about Maduro, the President of Venezuela, but I can kind of understand him now. Latin America has been ruled by a tiny minority who own all the land AND who see no reason to change the way their countries are run. It's not enough to just become president, you need to ruin everyone of those mother-fookers. If any on them manage to hang onto their lands, the whole elitist oligarchy will return and things will go back to the way they were. That is fine for the 'nobility' but wretched for everyone else.

You might think that he could at least manage the country's oil business a little better, but I suspect anyone who could compently run the oil business is a member of the 'ruling elite' and so, like in China's cultural revolution, they can't be trusted. But the people who can be trusted, people who are part of the revolution, don't know anything about the oil business because they never got a decent education. You'd think they would put a priority on sorting that out, but I suspect that there is a whole lot of in-fighting going on behind, beside and all around Maduro. Everybody is trying to get their piece of the pie. If the whole pie gets destroyed that's too bad. At least none of those other mother-fookers got any of it. And if you wonder why they are like that, it's because they learned it from the best, the people who were running the country before Maduro came to power.

All this assumes Maduro has good intentions and is sufficiently paranoid. It could be that he is an idiot, but somehow I doubt it. So we have two questions: can he destroy the oiligarchy? and two, will he be able to restart the economy from ground zero once they are well and truly obliterated? Castro pretty much destroyed the local oligarchy in Cuba, but once he had done that, he didn't build anything new.

Part of the problem is that most of Latin America is very Catholic, and the Catholic church has been very complicit helping the oligarchy maintain their position. They were in the past anyway, I don't know how much support they give them now.

Victory

 

1938 Chevrolet, Vintage class winner of the 2016 Rally of the Incas

The Rally of the Incas started in Buenos Aires and finished 6,000 miles later in Lima Peru. The Endurance Rally Association stages long distance rallies all over the world.

Via daily timewaster

News from Guyana

Liza Destiny oil processing ship

They are drilling for oil in the waters off Guyana, a small country in South America. One of the oil fields and this ship are named for my niece. As if. Iaman notes:

For a country of less than a million people, the find (the Liza oil field) changes everything. Within a decade Guyana could be completely transformed by the find going from unpaved roads and sporadic power to being a developed nation.

Noble Don Tailor drillship

Naturally, they are drilling in water that is a mile deep, and then through another two miles of rock and salt before they get to the oil, all to keep the price of oil low enough that I don't need to check the price each time I fill up my car. The reptilians will see to that.

767 stuck in the mud

Meanwhile, an Eastern Airlines airliner cut the corner a little tight on a taxiway at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport near Georgetown (map) and got stuck in the mud. Note that this isn't the same Eastern Air Lines that went bust back in 1991. Via FlightAware.

Green Frontier

Green Frontier | Official Trailer | Netflix
Murder and mayhem in the Amazon jungle. Our girl has come from the big city to investigate the murder of 4 women missionaries and she encounters a whole smorgasbord of characters. The best part is the atmosphere. A little spooky, a little mystic, a little psycho, and occasionally a little bit of common sense shows up. It's pretty great. Plus we've got Amazon jungle scenery.

Leticia, Amazonas Department, Colombia

The show was filmed is Leticia Colombia, which is the southermost point in Colombia and right on the border with Peru and Brasil.

Leticia, Amazonas Department, Colombia

Leticia is also right on the Amazon river, so you could float all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Fray Bentos

The Real 'Fury' Tank - The Last Stand of 'Fray Bentos'
This video popped up on YouTube. It tells a crazy story about a WW1 tank crew, but it doesn't tell us how the tank got it's name. Fortunately we have Google, who knows everything even if it isn't willing to tell us exactly what we want to know right off the bat. Sometimes we have to dig a little.

Fray Bentos (upper left), Beunos Aires (lower left), & Montevideo (lower right)

Fray Bentos is a town in Uraguay, about 100 miles upstream of Beunos Aires, Argentina.

Fray Bentos 'Classic' Steak and Kidney

Fray Bentos is famous for the meat packing plant that produced tinned (canned) beef. In the 100-odd years they were in business they slaughtered zillions of cattle and produced bazillions of cans of tinned beef that were shipped world-wide.

Fray Bentos Abandoned Meat Packing Plant

This plant is so significant that it has become a world heritage site. The site is not all that impressive, a bunch of old, decaying industrial buildings. I suspect the reason it was made a world heritage site is  because of the impact it had on feeding Europe.

Okay, so we know where the name 'Fray Bentos' comes from, but how did it get applied to the tank?  You may have already figured this out. Because being inside the tank when things were heating up outside, the crew felt like tinned meat.

More:

• The frontispiece for the video comes from Andrea Miniatures.
• Some dude thinks the name Fray Bentos is derived from Friar Benedict.

UPM's Fray Bentos Pulp Mill (foreground) and the 
Libertador General San Martín Bridge to Argentina (background)

The bridge is like 3 miles long but only 2 lanes.

P.S. I always thought 'frontispiece' was spelled 'frontspiece'. Don't think it needs the first i, but that's spelling for you, always sticking in extra letters where they aren't needed.

Venezuelan Bolivar exchange rate black market

Venezuela’s Nemesis Is a Hardware Salesman at a Home Depot in Alabama

The Wall Street Journal has the story.

HOOVER, Ala.—Public Enemy No. 1 of Venezuela’s revolutionary government is Gustavo Díaz, a Home Depot Inc. employee in central Alabama.

Gustavo got to be so popular by starting a website, dolartoday, that publishes the current black market exchange rate for the Venezuelan Bolivar.

Quito Approach

Quito Approach - Lufthansa MD-11F [English Subtitles]
There is no air at 10,000 feet, but Ecuador has a whole city up there. Denver, the mile high city, has an elevation of only 5,000 feet, half that of Quito's. What's it like trying to breath at high altitude? Ask the guys from Top Gear. They can tell you.

The aircraft is a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, not to be confused with the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 or the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. Via Posthip Scott.

Colonia

Colonia Dignidad Entrance

Hermione Granger breaks out of the Harry Potter frame. Actually, she broke out five years ago, but I'm still in love with Hermione. But that's just celebrity fluff.

The movie The Colony (aka Colonia) is a fictional thriller set in a real, horrifc, place. It's 1973 and the USA backed, right wing Augusto Pinochet stages a coup that overthrows the Soviet backed left wing Salvador Allende. Our characters get caught up in events and end up in Colonia Dignidad, a place no one ever leaves. Thousands were tortured there and hundreds were killed.

What's interesting is the way this closed society continued to operate. Cut off from the outside world, the inmates had no idea what 'normal' life might be like. The guy who ran it, Paul Schafer, was a real psychopath.

Alberto Santos-Dumont

Vôo do Centenário do 14-Bis Replica of Alberto's airplane flown on the 100th anniversary of his historic flight.
Watching the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games in Rio this evening and I learn that the Wright Brothers weren't the first ones to build and fly an airplane, it was in point of fact a Brazilian, one Alberto Santos-Dumont, who accomplished this feat in Paris in 1906. There are a bunch technical nits that can be picked if you want to argue the case, and some people do. Seems that I recall that one of the big contributions made by the Wright Brothers was a comprehensive set of flight controls. Flying in a straight line is verifiably wonderful, given that it hadn't been done before, but being able to control your craft became sort of important once you left the ground.
    The Olympics, like our Presidential election, is a giant spectacle. It's a little weird the number of people who dedicate years of their lives in their chase for gold. My having a flaky heartbeat might have contributed to my attitude. I mean, I learned early on, that while I might compete, I was never going to be a contender. I will say that watching the Olympics is still a heck of lot better than watching politicians yammer.
    The opening ceremony goes on for hours, hundreds of countries, thousands of athletes. We were able to hang on through Estonia but by then we were kind of burned out.

FARC

Black Rifle O' Death
Notice the fingernails

A story about women in FARC, the guerrilla army in Colombia, showed up in my Medium newsletter this morning.

Click here to read the story. 

The above photo is of a woman in FARC in the Colombian jungle, not some metrosexual in a Florida nightclub.

If we were really worried about people being killed with guns, we would pay more attention to American foreign policy. American foreign policy is what gets us involved in wars all over the planet. We usually claim provocation. In the good old days it was usually by the Communists, but the ragheads have been moving up. But paying attention to foreign policy that requires thinking and abstract thought and that is hard work. I think I kind of have a handle on it, but I'm not sure. And it's not that interesting, not like hot girls, high tech toys, fast cars and cool guns.

And does thinking about foreign policy do any good? I mean other than to reinforce my beliefs that many of the people in charge are certifiable shitheads? Okay, I write this blog and maybe my opinions exert some small influence on the general population.

In any case, it's not the unbridled greed of the American Capitalists and their running dogs that causes all the trouble. It's the callous disregard for the peasant population that provides an opportunity for the Communists to get a toehold, which is the first step on the road to a Communist revolution, which is what we have going on in Colombia.

Now I understand that trying to get a business going that is based on extracting some kind of wealth (i.e. some kind of produce you can sell to the rest of the world) from the jungles of South America can be an all consuming project. Small matters like stepping on peoples toes could easily be ignored, especially when they don't speak English, their manners are diffident, and besides, they smell bad.

That's just the way of the world. The loud and pushy get things going and it's up to the mild and accommodating to smooth things over. But it takes a while for the mild to catch up with the bold, who are constantly trampling new paths through the jungle.

The River of Death

The River of Death 1934
After the Captain and Aloha Wanderwell finished their round the world tour, they set out to find Colonel Percy Fawcett who had gone missing in the Amazon jungle. This film chronicles their journey.

General Rondon (left), Aloha and Captain Wanderwell

Just past the two and a half minute mark, General Rondon makes an appearance. This is the same Rondon who accompanied Teddy Roosevelt on his expedition to explore The River of Doubt.

Junkers W33

I suspect the airplane they used is a Junkers W33.  (From aproximately 5:00 to 7:00 in the video above.)

The Junkers W33, the Russian ANT-25, and Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis were all single engine airplanes, and they all flew long distances over inhospitable terrain where engine failure would almost certainly lead to the death of all aboard. Kind of like today's rockets that carry people into orbit.

NARCOS

Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar (left) and Juan Pablo Raba as his cousin and right-hand man, Gustavo Gaviria 

We've been watching Narcos on Netflix. It's a heck of a story. Everyone knows the story about how exporting cocaine from Colombia became a multi-billion dollar industry, or at least they ought to, but the show fleshes it out, makes it more real, even though it's all 'fiction'.
     People do lots of things they shouldn't do, and there are two different views on whether people should be prevented from doing certain things, even though they don't affect anyone else but the doer. You could probably start a big argument about that, but it's funny, I don't ever recall hearing any cogent discussion of the topic. All I've heard are the two sides, and they seem to be equally entrenched in their own self-righteousness. Here I am talking about taking drugs for recreational purposes, i.e. getting 'high'.

Netflix Organization Chart for the Medellin Cartel 

    Then there are actions that do affect other people, like torture and killing. I'm not sure which is worse. Since torture is often a prelude to execution, I am going to say torture is worse. If you want to kill someone, just kill them, that's the Christian way to get rid of your enemies.
    I mention these two items because they are both essential parts of this story. If recreational cocaine wasn't illegal in the USA, we wouldn't even have a story. Okay, you could still have a story, but it would more like Office Space.
    I don't know why Colombia is fighting the drug war. Do the powers-that-be down there have a moral objection to producing cocaine? Or are they fighting this war because the USA is giving them money to fight it? Or is it because they don't like the idea that these upstarts from the wrong side of the tracks suddenly have more money than they do?

Boyd Holbrook as DEA agent Steve Murphy.
His deadpan narration is perfect.

    The show is a little one-sided in that it shows the cartel thugs being brutal, callous and even vicious, but the cops and soldiers are generally pretty well behaved. Problem is that things the cartel thugs are shown doing, South American governments have been pulling the same kind of shit for decades, if not centuries.
    There was one scene that was a little telling. Normally, the cartels thugs are acting on orders, killing policemen, soldiers and government officials. On the episode we watched last night we have three thugs delivering a payoff to some dude. They are driving down a country road with little traffic, though occasionally there are small groups of peasants walking along the side of the road. Two of the guys are talking about who has killed more people and the driver slightly veers toward a group of peasants and hits and kills one. "Shit", one of them complains, "now we'll have to get the car washed". Like I said, callous. I suppose executing dozens of people could have that effect on a person.

P.S. 1. Good story about growing up in Colombia back in the day, by Bernardo Aparicio García.
P.S. 2. Wikipedia article about airliner blown up by Pablo.

Clinton's Blacklist

Envigado F.C.

Looking for pictures to go with my last post, I stumble over this article about how a Colombian football club (soccer to US'uns) has managed to get themselves on Clinton's backlist because they are suspected of laundering drug money for the evil drug cartels.
   The Clinton List? That would be Bill Clinton, who set up this list back when he was President. It is apparently still hanging around despite a couple of Federal courts declaring it unconstitutional. (At least I think it's Bill, or Will, not Hill. I couldn't find the origin, The best I could find was a list of revisions going back to 1994, which, along with rumor and innuendo, kind of points to Willy.) Is the ACLU working on this? If not, why not?

US Embassy in Lima, Peru

Short refresher on South America:

• Brazil is the big country with Rio de Janeiro and the big fuss about the World Cup.
• Venezuela elected chubby Chavez, a populist who made friends with Cuba and pissed off everyone who had any money. He's dead but his policies live on.
• Peru, a poor mountainous country famous for being the home of Peruvian Marching Powder. The US Embassy is the biggest building in the capital, funded almost entirely by the DEA.
• Argentina and Chile are back to back across the Andes mountains. They are the southernmost countries, have temperate climates as opposed to tropical, and might almost be considered first world countries. They both also have a history of mass-murder carried out by right wing death squads. That seems to have gone away, but it's still a feature on most of the rest of the continent.
• Columbia is trying hard to be a first world country, mostly by emulating the USA by fighting the commies (FARC) and the druggies, which may be the same thing. They pursue this course because we give them a lot of money to do so.
• Bolivia, which is also famous for Peruvian Marching Powder, probably because both here and Peru are mostly high elevation mountains, and coca leaves are what people use to in order to function at 15,000 feet without oxygen.
• Uraguay and Paraguay are smaller countries on the border between Argentina and Brazil. Uraguay is on the Atlantic Ocean, Paraguay is land-locked.
• Ecuador is a small country on the Pacific Ocean.
• The Guinea states, three small countries on the northeast coast. France has a space launch port there.

So once again the War On Drugs is distorting world affairs like nothing since the U.S.S.R. collapsed, or the Saudi Oil Embargo, which got me to wondering why, if the War On Drugs is so manifestly evil, do we continue to pursue it? Which brings me to money, movies and conspiracy theories.

    There are people in the USA who are making billions of dollars off of the illicit drug trade. I'm not talking about the gang bangers shooting each other on downtown street corners, or flashy blacks with their gold chains and their pimped out Escalades. I'm talking about the guy in the big house. He wears a gray suit, drives a Mercedes, might have an office somewhere, but he doesn't conduct any real business in it. He is totally invisible. Might even have friends on Capital Hill. I mean what better way to influence legislation?

    This-guy / these-people really like having all that money coming in and if anyone even thinks about changing the law I'll bet they get a visit, a very discreet visit from a nobody who manages to convey the message that they should drop any attempt to change the law or . . .  Whatever-it-is is left unsaid, but you can bet that the message is crystal clear, something along the lines of "nice kids you got there, shame if sumthin' were to happen to 'em". Now they might get all self-righteous and call the cops. That might protect his family, for the moment, but all it really means is that a little more political arm twisting will need to be done to see that no reform bill ever makes it to the floor.

Update November 2016 added caption to top picture so that we have a reference to the name of the club. Wikipedia has an article about the Envigado F.C. (Football Club), but it does not mention being blacklisted.

South America

The Altitude Land. BOLIVIA by Alexander Koval

Countries in South America seem to suffer once crisis after another. If it isn't an economic collapse, it's a revolution, so it was encouraging to read this story by Hernan Luis Torres Nunez comparing Venezuela and Bolivia.

Ride 'em Cowboy!

Criolla Week 2015: Gauchos attempt to stay on bucking broncos at a rodeo in Montevideo, Uruguay. (Andres Stapff/Reuters)

When I was younger, much younger, knee high to a bucking bronco, I was enthralled with all things cowboy. I still have an affection for the whole cowboy thing: six guns, horses, blue jeans, beaucoup de leather, especially cowboy boots. Frederic Remington's paintings and sculptures are simply glorious.
     I was severely disappointed when I discovered that the bucking broncos in modern rodeos were encumbered with a strap around their waist to encourage them to buck. I understand, real wild horses are hard to handle, and the last thing you want at a rodeo at your local county fair is a thousand pound wild animal running out of control.
    Down in South America it looks like they still have some real wild horses and some real cowboys trying to ride them. Restores my faith in the cowboy dream, it does.