by Colin Hyde

… Last week Channel 7 had a rather extensive interview with Hugo Patt, the man who holds the vote that decides who leads the UDP in the House of Representatives. In that interview Hugo explained why he was staying with Shyne Barrow, the leader elected at last year’s UDP convention. Previous to Patt appearing on 7, his name came up in a discussion on 7 between the television station’s proprietor and Pehreh, the chairman of the UDP faction that Patt is presently aligned with. We know the fraternity reasons why Brother Pehreh goes down with the ship Shyne, so no need to go there. The incredible story we got from Pehreh when he sat down with 7 is that Patt’s support for Shyne is set in cement. If I got it correctly, he said the only way Patt would switch to Tracy was over his (Patt’s), get this, dead body.

Damas y caballeros, one of my best friends in my adopted home village, an older man, told me that there are three things a man should never change: his church, his wife, his party. My friend, who is deceased now, would later take a new wife, only after his wife predeceased him. Clearly the new wife didn’t constitute a breach of my friend’s position on those three pillars in his life. Well wala, surprise, surprise, my friend lived to change his party, from red to blue. Dee Brown, in the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, quoted an Indian sage who said: Everything changes, only the earth remains. Hmm, it looks like our shift is always from red to blue. Oh, wait, there’s always an exception. You’ve met, Tracy!

I think it’s a song out there that a day in politics is a lifetime. What the hell does Pehreh have/know that would make him say that a living, breathing Patt absolutely would not cross over to Tracy?

Mr. Patt spoke eloquently of a principled stand, but from a point of practicality, he is responsible for his party hemorrhaging. Belizeans should be pardoned if they think that he is beholden, a man who feels indebted to the gills to Dean Barrow, the father of the leader he supports. We know Dean Barrow, as counsel, has won gobs of money (from us) in the court for Mr. Patt, and when he appeared before the Senate committee to answer questions about some land near Northern Lagoon, the former Minister of Natural Resources went mum on the advice of the aforementioned counsel.

I don’t know that money can buy the kind of loyalty Pehreh says Patt has to the counsel’s son. Money doesn’t have that kind of sway on Patrick Faber. I remember that in a time when the PUP had all our money and were reportedly buying votes owta briefcase stuffed with blue notes, han oava fis, Pehreh’s estranged brother, Patrick, strung a banner across CA Boulevard with the unforgettable words, ‘tek dehn money an vote dem out’.

…I’m with the principals who insist on a hair policy in primary and secondary schools that confines girls’ hairdos to little plaits, and bandu, clips, and pins. I sympathize with Rastafarians and their religious hair thing for their boys, but I don’t see how schools can accommodate that. We had to accept the thin edge of the wedge when we toppled Section 53 to end a segment’s suffering and their fear of incarceration. But we can’t go that far for, hair.

I heard the UEF chairperson, who has gone to the fore for a revamped hair policy in primary and secondary schools, charge that present rules came straight from Europe. Well, Miss, a whole lot a people in Belize like those rules. Don’t throw out baby with the bath water. If you didn’t notice, some good things do come out of Europe.

… Ms. Marisol’s paper, “Belize’s Fisheries Waters: New Frontiers Under Threat?” is loaded with valuable information, much of it new stuff for us to chew on. My only criticism of the paper is that she drifted off course, off the dinner table with her, ehm, mention of better-tasting fish from the deep. Fair enough, taste buds aren’t all the same. I’ve eaten deep sea red snapper twice, and in neither experience did it come close to inner reef red snapper. Dehn fatter, but dehn noh nicer.

About the reference in Marisol’s discussion to Taiwan and their voracious fishing, I say forewarned, forearmed, but if anybody foreign fu get fishing rights, it must be Taiwan. If all of the world abandons Taiwan, if Taiwan goes broke and can’t help us out here and there anymore, we have to stand with their right to self-determination. China played a rotten hand when she said, if you are with us you can’t be with Taiwan. Braa Big China, you chose to not be our friend.

… Marisol told us another report is coming up on our marine status, this one by Brother Marco Lopez. Marco is great, no doubt about that, but because I read all his articles I am aware of some of the company he keeps. I find no fault with the substance of the Federation and with George Myvett; they deserve our support for keeping fire under the tail of that Minister Perez, but I take exception to some of their attacks on the Blue Bond.

I say that to forget where we were at when we went Blue Bond, that’s stuff we find in red and blue politics. We are an independent country, so we take responsibility for ourselves. If our leaders “corrupted” or “incompetenced” or “bad lokid” our resources away; if we “lazy” away what we had or “unwisely” supported initiatives that had a bad end, they are our responsibility; da we allow it fu happen. I bet we could have done better; we can always do better; but we cannot ignore the fact that we were on the ropes, our belly was pressed on a barrel, and our pantalon was down. And the Blue Bond came along and saved our blank.

Trump called Harris a communist. The US called Einstein one too

The following is excerpted from the first few paragraphs of a May 1, 2024 story, “Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?’ and ‘Monthly Review’: A Historical Introduction”, by John Bellamy Foster:

“A Spring 1949 memorandum in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s ‘Albert Einstein File,’ part of the FBI’s Vault of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, states:

‘Advised [by an agent in the field that] in April 1949, a circular was distributed in the Nashua, New Hampshire area, announcing a new magazine entitled ‘Monthly Review,’ ‘an independent Socialist magazine.’ The first issue was dated to come out as the May 1949 edition. The first issue would contain articles by Albert Einstein—’Why Socialism[?]’…

“Albert Einstein, the world’s most famous theoretical physicist and its most celebrated scientist, had fled Germany upon Adolf Hitler’s rise, immigrating to the United States in 1933, where he became a citizen in 1940. Yet, for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Einstein remained a dangerous and Un-American figure, threatening the internal security of the United States by his very presence in the country.

“The FBI had opened its file on Einstein in 1932, when he was seeking to immigrate to the United States, with a long report by the Woman Patriot Corporation (WPC), which in its extreme anti-Communism, claimed that Einstein was inadmissible to the country. ‘Not even Stalin himself,’ the WPC charged, ‘is affiliated with so many anarcho-communist international groups to promote…world revolution and ultimate anarchy, as ALBERT EINSTEIN.’

“Although Einstein famously sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, on the possibility of developing an atomic bomb—a letter that has often been seen as directly leading to the Manhattan Project—the U.S. military declared him a security risk, and he was excluded from the development, and even knowledge, of the making of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, including the decision by President Harry S. Truman to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

I say bully for Mr. Einstein that he had no part in the terrible sin of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You know we are forced to be wily when dealing with Americans who think anything on the left is communism. Those kinds of Americans don’t mind if we starve. Ah, every action has a reaction. When we starve, we end up at the Rio Grande in caravans, and that absolutely terrifies them. This story could go on and on until it runs off the page, so I have to cap it. The US would be “less” rich if we were “allowed” to be less capitalist. They have their end game.