I haven’t had anything to say about the recent mass naturalizations of immigrants, apparently mostly Guatemalans, in time for voter registration and participation in this year’s elections. By now I think that we, the people of Belize, realize that there are powerful forces around us who have their own vision for Belize, and we sense that politicians here cannot achieve power without receiving “security clearance,” so to speak, from these powerful forces.

There are some men who, because of the very same qualities which made them great men in their prime, such as extraordinary focus and determination, begin to make fools of themselves as they age. We see this phenomenon perhaps most often in prize fighting, when famous champions continue boxing long after they should retire. Watching the deterioration can be quite sad, even pathetic.

I did some talking about matters sexual in my Tuesday column, and I would like to elaborate. I am not really a mainstream person where my views are concerned, but I do believe that the “one man, one wife” thing is ideal for business success, if you can handle it. It’s a tough proposition in Belize, because temptation is all around you. But, the Christian ideal is ideal. And remember now, I am not a practicing Christian.

“Some years ago we used to have large bodies of natives sent from Africa either on military service or in some travelling show, and it was a revelation of horror and disgust to behold the manner in which English women would flock to see these men, whilst to watch them fawning upon these black creatures and fondling and embracing them, as I have seen dozens of times, was a scandal and a disgrace to English womanhood …

In my editorial for our mid-week issue, I sought to convince, pressure even, a few people involved with the National Perspective process, which lasted from late 2009 to late 2011, to step back and examine their situation. You have to do this from time to time in life. If you don’t, you may end up somewhere you didn’t intend to go and looking quite the fool, or, at least, not as intelligent as you thought you were.

“The world’s longest river has two main branches: the White Nile, which flows 4,230 miles from its remotest Central African sources to the Mediterranean, and the Blue Nile, which rises high up on the Ethiopian plateau and flows for 1,450 miles before it joins the White Nile at Khartoum. By then the White Nile has already flowed for nearly 2,500 miles.”

As we went to press, reports here are that Eugene Thompson, 26, arraigned on June 2 for the Sunday night, May 16, 1982 Mafia-style slaying of Salvador Castellanos, 30, was quietly released a few weeks ago. No official reason was disclosed, but our reports are the police may feel they lack enough circumstantial evidence to present a prima facie case.

In the old days Christmas was a time of excesses in the old capital, one of the reasons, the main one, being that the bulk of the working class had accumulated wealth during their long, tough months in the mahogany camps in the Cayo and Orange Walk forests. A second reason for the excesses was that the workers knew that if they ran broke, they could get an advance on the next mahogany season’s pay from whichever mahogany contractor was their boss.

I had to check myself last week in conversation with Dr. Dennis Young. He has lived in the United States since 1961, but he stays in touch with Belize. He was bringing up names, and after a while I realized that all I was doing was criticizing people. For sure they were people who deserved criticism, but I thought I was sounding like the classic “grumpy old man.”

In our previous discussion of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, the former Guatemalan military general who was president of the republic from 1958 to 1963, we had focused on the fact that Fuentes allowed Cuban exiles to be trained in Guatemala for the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. This had allowed Ydígoras to leverage U.S. support for his Belize ambitions.

On the occasion of the death last week in Los Angeles of Ernest “Simona” Simon, earlier this week we published a photograph of the beginning of the UBAD march of September 10 morning in 1969.

I’m halfway through a book Dr. Dennis Young brought for me on Sunday. The work is entitled MISUNDERSTOOD CAUDILLO: Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes and the Failure of Democracy in Guatemala. The author is Roland H. Ebel, a retired professor from the Political Science Department of Tulane University in New Orleans.

I am grateful to Mr. Godfrey Smith for sending me a copy of his “authorized biography” of the Rt. Hon. George C. Price. Mr. Smith’s driver personally delivered the book last Wednesday afternoon.

You can see that Barack Obama has aged during the three years (almost) of his presidency of the United States. I believe that he quickly realized, once he assumed the presidency, that he could get killed quite easily by powerful U.S. military/industrial/business forces. And so, Barack went along with the program, which is to say, he did the things which the “big boys” wanted him to do. The immediate and most dramatic of these “things” was printing money to bail out the same voracious Wall Street elements which had gotten the American financial system into the crises of 2007/2008.