Pisaq is a great town.  I highly recommend it.

Every restaurant you visit in Cuzco would eventually have a traveling band of musicians show up to throw down.  They will accept any form of money.  Applause is totally optional.

I love this huge red wall.  I want my dining room to look like this.

This would look good on your wall, no?

If I had a shop, I would display stuff in the window on the floor so people would have to break their backs bending down to look.

It would sell miniatures.

Every time I saw something that I thought about buying, I had to ask myself how I would get it home & where the hell i’d hang the damn thing.

That’s a serious blue sky folks…

Very blue. This is how I would expect a vampire to look.

In 1988, a story in a Beirut magazine led to information that Ronald Reagan’s administration had been secretly selling arms to Iran, the declared enemy of the United States, and using the proceeds to give military aid to counterrevolutionaries (the “contras”) in Nicaragua, thus violating an act passed by Congress.  Regan and Vice President Bush denied involvement, although the evidence pointed very strongly to their partipations.  Instead of impeaching them, however, Congress put their emissaries on the witness stand, and later several of them were indicted.  One of them (Robert McFarland) tried to commit sicide.  Another, Colonial Oliver North, stood trial for lying to Congress, was found guilty, but not sentenced to prison.  Reagan was not compelled to testify about what he had done.  He retired in peace and Bush became the next president of the United States, both beneficiaries of plausible denial.  Machiavelli would have admired the operation.

- Howard Zinn – Declarations of Independence

Wondering what has changed? Read about it here.

When the Founding Fathers of the United States wrote the Preamble of the Constitution, their first words were, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice….”  The Constitution thus looked as if it were written by all the people, representing their interests.

In fact, the Constitution was drawn up by fifty-five men, all white and mostly rich, who represented a certain elite group in the new nation.  The document itself accepted slavery as legitimate, and at that time about one of every five persons in the population was a black slave.  The conflicts between rich and poor and black and white, the dozens of riots and rebellions in the centuray before the Revolution, and a major uprising in western Massichusetts just before the covening of the Constitutional Convention (Shays’ Rebellion) were all covered over by the phrase “We the people.”

- Howard Zinn – Declarations of Independence

Wondering what has changed? Read about it here.