thanks once again to be Huffington Post for giving us so much welcome love.
Tag: Mexico
Hundreds of millions of humans will soon gather in bars, barns, parks, taverns, caverns, caravans, caves and bunkers, some crossing vast deserts just to find a radio so they can listen to a sporting extravaganza that’ll be bigger than the Super Bowl, Stanley Cup, NBA Finals and will at the Ohio 200 of them “World” Series all rolled into one. It’s humanity’s biggest pilgrimage: the World Cup. The pot’s been simmering for four years, and it’s finally coming to a boil. 204 teams played 848 matches and scored 2,337 goals, battling hammer and tong, tooth and nail for the right to become one of the chosen 32 nations who gets a chance to bring home both the bacon and the gory. June 11, 2010, strap it on and strap him yourself in, as the mother of all sporting events crashlands for the first time in history on the mother of all continents. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for, live from a Jo’berg, it’s, World Cup 2010 South Africaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
The World Cup is a month long marathon disguised as a series of furious sprints. Lemme break it down fa ya. Group Stage: 8 groups of 4 teams. Everybody plays 3 games. Top 2 go teams through. Elimination Stage: win and live to fight another day; lose & it’s instant extermination.
GROUP A: YES: France & South Africa NO: Mexico & Uruguay
Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I’m picking South Africa make it through to the round of 16. Bafana Bafana, Zulu for “the Boys”, has a world-class forward in double-somersaulting Stephen Pienaar, and a hulking, humongous, yet surpisingly skillful shaved-bald defender in Matthew Booth, who looks shockingly like a huge Q-tip. Plus they will have the maniacal sound of 1 billion vuvuzelas, their ear-bleedingly loud local noisemakers, trumpeting their every triumph. Plus this is a nation that overcame hatred and pain in part through the beautiful game. Call me a bitter cynic, but I’m also picking France to advance. After the galling display of Gallic dishonor in the infamous Hand of Henry cheating scandal, they’ve come to represent the way the world is now. Turns out cheating is, after all, the best way to win. If you don’t believe me, go ask Goldman Sachs. Mexico? Having watched the fiery Mexicans go cold in the hot spotlight so many times over the decades, I believe our neighbors to the south are a taco short of a Combo Platter. Uruguay? Too much bad karma. Their legacy of World Cup brutality is well documented, most famously in the person of José Batista, ejected 53 seconds into a 1986 game for chopping a Scotsman in half.
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes’ yearly report of the wealthiest men alive, and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, “I couldn’t have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you.”
According to sources in the Mexican government, President Calderone is begging American officials to, in the words of reggae great Peter Tosh, legalize it. “Oh yeah,” said an official close to the Mexican president, “Felipe is going crazy. He’s screaming at everybody who comes in, ‘Why don’t they make this sh*t legal already! You’re killing me here!’ Look, everyone knows, when you have Prohibition, you create gangsters. And the more you prohibit, the more gangsters you make. El Chapo is hero now to all those slumdogs who want to be millionaires. Kids in the street, when they play games, they all want to be El Chapo, the baddest man in the whole damn town.”
Meanwhile, many speculate that rich and prominent Mexican families are in cahoots with American businessmen in the alcohol industry, wealthy industrialists who launder the unprecedented profits from the drug business with their legitimate enterprises, and lawmakers who get gigantic kickbacks and payoffs to make sure that these drugs remain illegal, so they can remain rich, fat and happy. According to sources on both sides of the border, tens of millions of dollars in payoffs and kickbacks are stashed in Swiss banks every year, blood money from the brutal business made possible by a corrupt system supported by laws that don’t, and have never, worked.
Rather than putting El Chapo and his kind out of business by modernizing outdated laws and in the process making billions of dollars from taxing drugs (as is done with cigarettes and alcohol), United States government has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing its tail, and offered a $5 million reward for the capture of El Chapo. Many have said that the offer is unofficially: Dead or Alive.
Meanwhile, as an epidemic of murderous violence rages on the Mexican-US border, and the American government wastes boatloads of badly needed money on the illegal drug business which results from the Prohibition laws, El Chapo is laughing all the way to the bank. “Whoever came up with this whole War on Drugs,” one of his lieutenants reports he said, “I would like to kiss him on the lips and shake his hand and buy him dinner with caviar and champagne. The War on Drugs is the greatest thing that ever happened to me, and the day they decide to end that war, will be a sad one for me and all of my closest friends. And if you don’t believe me, ask those guys whose heads showed up in the ice chests.”
To the original Huffington Post article by David Henry Sterry