8 May 2010, a Saturday

Also inauguration day for our new lady president. I guess San Jose will be a traffic jam today, glad I won’t be there to see it. I’m glad to see Arias go, not sure he should have been reelected on the basis of his Nobel Peace Prize, which has become increasingly cheapened, sadly enough.

I always thought he was overrated on the subject, anyhow, because there’s one simple reason that Costa Rica can afford not to have an army with communist/socialist/warlike Nicaragua on its border. (We have lots of Nicas living here who literally fled for their lives and lost family members who did not. One young woman I know lost her mother as they tried to swim across the river to escape Nicaragua...her mother drowned in the attempt.) That one reason is the United States military pledge to protect them.

On his way out, the Arias government has been doing some extremely strange things with the US dollar and the manipulation is obvious even if the who and why are not. Someone seems to have made a lot of money in the last few months, and I know that we lost some of it. I hope she (the new president) turns some of that around.

But we’re back to hope-and-change, aren’t we.

I see the US says it’s looking into market manipulation, too. It’s very easy to make a lot of money if you know for a fact which way the market is going to go for even a few days, and if you control the movement then it’s not even a gamble.

I missed the rest of the day...soccer practice started eating on it and then...