12 December 2006, a Tuesday
Well, if I understand what is happening today, my attorney is taking Tony's mother to Ciudad Quesada this morning to get the last document that we need and will be returning it to me this afternoon. In which case we are off for the embassy tomorrow morning and there won't be a post for a day, depending on how things go.
Oh, oh, have these NYTimes writers slipped in this global warming scare article?
Some academics see an analogy between a global warming policy and the pursuit of national security in the cold war. In the late 1950s, American military spending reached as high as 10 percent of the gross domestic product and averaged about 4 percent, far higher than in any previous peacetime era. A Soviet nuclear attack was a danger but hardly a certainty, just as the predicted catastrophes from global warming are threats but not certainties.
Here we have previously been told by some people that the danger is so certain that people should not even be ALLOWED to question it! Now this poor honest guy hasn't gotten the PC story-line and admits the risks are not certainties.
(The) price on carbon dioxide emissions, most economists agree, would be the most efficient way to combat global warming. And the price, they say, should start small to give industries time to adapt, then ratchet up over the years to encourage long-term investments in energy saving, carbon cleanup and new technology.
The two methods of pricing carbon are to charge a tax on each ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the air, or to place a cap on total emissions and then let polluters trade permits to emit a ton of carbon dioxide.
Economists like William D. Nordhaus of Yale and Mr. Cooper of Harvard advocate a tax as the clearest price signal to the energy marketplace, and less susceptible to political tampering and market manipulation than a cap-and-trade system. It could also be used to raise revenue to offset other taxes.
In a recent paper, Mr. Cooper suggested an initial tax around $14 a ton of carbon dioxide emitted, which he calculated would translate roughly into a 100 percent tax on coal and add 12 cents to each gallon of gasoline. Such a tax would raise as much as $80 billion a year in the United States.
Of all the stupid ideas, the cap-and-trade system is the dumbest by far. It says, essentially that if your company and my company are both allowed 100 billion glugs of carbon a year, and I'm putting out 150 but you are putting out only 50, I can buy your surplus capacity from you. Or trade you something for it that you want...let's make a deal. Have your politician or lawyer (or both) call mine, set something up. True, the total emissions will still be 200 billion glugs, there'll be no effect on global warming, but at least now it will be legal.
As for the rest, the tax policy salvation solution, what are we assuming here? A new world government? Or that only U.S. emissions are the issue in the global warming argument?
China is on track to surpass the United States as the leading emitter of carbon dioxide by 2009, according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency. “Unless China and India are brought in, it won’t matter much what the developed world does,” said Scott Barrett, a professor of environmental economics at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.
Maybe the U.N. will, with Kofi leaving, suddenly become relevant? A group that cannot get Iran to give up atomic bombs will suddenly be able to convince China and India to pay them taxes in order to reduce global warming?
Nevertheless, the beat goes on:
It is increasingly clear that there is a considerable cost to carbon dioxide emissions, especially to future generations, as climate specialists warn of declines in farm output in poor tropical countries, fiercer hurricanes and coastal floods that could make many people refugees.
So far the evidence that global warming has caused fiercer hurricanes is...well, isn't. People, especially journalists, tend to measure hurricanes by the amount of financial and physical damage they do to human habitation. Thus the hurricane that hit New Orleans was considered horrific, and much of the ensuing hot air afterwards has been blown criticizing the Bush administration for how slowly it acted in protecting the residents of several states who had elected governors to protect them. But Katrina wasn't the world's fiercest hurricane in terms of strength...global warming did not make it into a monster storm.
As for coastal floods, people who live along the coast take a calculated risk, deliberately so. The recent tsunami in Asia killed what, some 180,000 people...compare that with the loss of life from Katrina.
My geologist friend, Mero, might tell people living along the eastern seaboard that they are, taking the group as a whole, far more likely to perish from a tsunami created by an already-recognized geologic risk out in the Atlantic...and global warming isn't going to stop that from happening, when it does.
And as for the loss of farm output in poor tropical countries...please, get a grip. The reason things grow like hell here in the tropics is not because of the high heat, otherwise the Sahara Desert would be paradise, but because of the longer growing season in places of abundant rainfall. And opening up Canada and Siberia to extended farming, if global warming did that, would probably offset any such speculative losses, anyhow.
What's really causing global warming, since all of this has happened repeatedly long before man ever showed up to start building fires? Who ever reads the front part of an Atlas, anyhow? Try this from the Reader's Digest Atlas from 1990, in case you missed it:
Secret Rhythms of Heat and Ice
The planet has throbbed hot and cold, according to a pattern. We live at the end of an interglacial--a warm spell lasting about 10,000 years. It is sandwiched between recurring ice ages, each lasting about 100,000 year. If the pattern continues, the next big freeze might begin within a few hundred years.
Rhythms of sunshine--in the form of three long-term oscillations--affect the way in which the sun's rays strike the earth. Cycles in the earth's spin, tilt, and orbit--of 22,000 years, 41,000 years, and 100,000 years, respectively--are known after Milutin Milankovich, the Yugoslavian scientist who proposed their climatic effect in the 1920s.
Together these cycles influence the way in which heat is distributed around the glob at different times of the year, disturbing the nature of our seasons. When a summer is cool and new ice fails to melt, the icecap grows. Since snow and ice are brilliant mirrors which reflect much of the sun's radiation back into space, the earth grows colder still. The next summer is likely to be even colder, as the earth plunges into a new ice age.
The first of the Milankovich cycles is government by the irregularities in the shape of the earth. It is not a perfect sphere because it bulges at the equator. The gravitational pull of the sun and moon tug on this bulge and causes the earth to wobble as it spins about its axis. Over a period of 22,000 years, the earth's axis gyrates in space so that the seasons occur at different points of the earth's elliptical orbit. When the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, causing summer, the earth is at the furthest part of its orbit. Some 11,000 years ago, however, summer in the northern hemisphere occurred when the earth was closest to the sun.
The second cycle operates over a 41,000-year period. The degree of tilt in the earth's axis varies between 21.8 degrees and 24.4 degrees. Today's tilt of 23.4 degrees is gradually decreasing, with the result that the difference between the seasons will become less marked. Summers will become cooler.
Finally, over a 100,000-year period, the earth's orbit changes from an ellipse, along which the sun is further from the earth during certain months than in others, to a near-perfect circle, when the earth is the same distance from the sun throughout the year. If the earth's orbit is very elliptical, and summer in the northern hemisphere occurs at the farthest point, the winter snow will not melt.
Man is caught between two opposing trends. There is a long-term drift toward glaciation, but the planet is also heating up, as carbon-dioxide accumulates in the air.
Cycles are interesting things. Different things will happen when the three cycles all reinforce one another, as these three pretty much would every 900,000 years or so, whereas at various other times they might be in opposition or working at odds with one another...it would be interesting to see a superimposed plot.
Now, there are other complicating factors, of course, such as the fact that it makes a difference when the polar regions are occupied by continents or open oceans and thermal conductivity is thus hugely different in those situations, and we know now that the continents and oceans actually move about on the surface of the planet, something we really learned how to verify only since we developed the capability of put into space orbit instruments capable of measuring such things.
We now know that the oceans used to be different sizes than they are today, changing the flow of currents and tides, which in turn affect the circulation of the atmosphere, the two greatest factors in the transfer of thermal energy from one part of the planet to another.
We know that the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the sea-floor is spreading apart the entire hemisphere, brings molten magma and gasses of all sorts, including carbon dioxide, to the surface even as we speak.
We know that vast regions of the earth have been subject, as plainly written for all to see in the geologic record, to extended periods of volcanic activity quite a bit more severe than the conditions we see today.
Most of all, we know that all of these things, these cycles of warming and cooling, have occurred repeatedly in the past, all without benefit of influence by man.
So, well, the question becomes simpler in one way and more complicated in another: does man really produce enough effect upon these dominant natural earthly processes to markedly affect them?
And nobody knows. Right now man is suspected of having a big influence upon the rate at which carbon dioxide is being created an added to the atmosphere. This may be so, but since the previous periods of global warming have occurred without man's help, is carbon dioxide really the greenhouse gas having the most effect? Ah, there's another thing we don't know for sure, although there are some hints that perhaps it is not.
What's my point here?
The fact that the current global warming mania, like most human excesses, is being crowd-driven rather than science-driven. Scientists are people, to begin with, and as such they are also susceptible to being influenced by the mania of crowds, at least to some degree, so you are going to get some scientists who will get carried away by politicians eager to manipulate them for their own purposes.
That's really what you see happening today. Every politician worth his salt... No, pardon me, that's an archaic and improper expression to use here. Every politician capable of making his influence felt and who has decided that global warming is a problem, not a benefit, has a plan in mind to fix it.
And every one of them includes a massive wealth-transfer, typically by taxation (or fines, which are really only taxation, as von Clausewitz might say, by other means).
And every time there is a massive wealth-transfer caused by politicians, a certain percentage of it sticks to their fingers. The bigger the transfer, the more that sticks.
Someone recently claimed that the United Nations' "Oil for Food" program was the biggest scam ever perpetuated. It might be that the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Poverty" are even larger, who knows.
But the "War on Global Warming" has the potential to set a new record.
Ah, well, back to farce...Kofi takes a dig at Bush on his way out for not sticking by American principles. I thought he must have been mistaken and said we'd been keeping too much American principal away from him and the U.N., but no, he was even funnier!
"Today the actions of one state
can often have a decisive effect on the lives of people in other states,"
Mr. Annan said. "So does it not owe some account to those other states and
their citizens, as well as to its own? I believe it does."
He added: "As things stand, accountability between states is highly
skewed. Poor and weak states are easily held to account, because they need
foreign assistance. But large and powerful states, whose actions have the
greatest impact on others, can be constrained only by their own people,
working through their domestic institutions."
President Truman, the diplomat said, "showed what can be achieved when
the U.S. assumes that responsibility. And still today, none of our global
institutions can accomplish much when the U.S. remains aloof. But when it
is fully engaged, the sky's the limit."
I had to laugh. When Truman showed what could be achieved by being the only world leader to use atomic weapons in wartime and against a civilian population, the United Nations wasn't even founded yet.
Also, unless we are to presume that Kofi means Iraq under Saddam was not a large and powerful state whose actions had impact on others, despite having the second largest oil reserves in the world and one of the biggest standing armies, he fails to explain how Iraq's own people was going to work to constrain him through their own domestic institutions.
But, hey, it all sounds good if that's what you like to hear.
Speaking of things I'll be interested in hearing more about, Byron York in NRO says there will be a report coming out soon on the wire-tapping of Princess Diana:
If the Clinton administration did engage in
surveillance of Princess Diana and Theodore Forstmann, without a warrant,
it would appear to run contrary to statements made by former
administration officials during the Bush warrantless-wiretap controversy.
After the existence of the Bush program was made public last December,
some high-ranking veterans of the Clinton administration said they had not
engaged in similar efforts to by-pass FISA. “Both before and after the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was amended in 1995, the
Clinton-Gore administration complied fully and completely with the terms
of the law,” former Vice President Al Gore said.
The amendment to which Gore referred was an action by Congress that
included physical break-ins under the FISA law, requiring the executive
branch to seek a warrant before carrying out a break-in. Wiretaps were
already covered by the law.
When Congress was considering the break-in measure, top Clinton
administration officials argued that the president had the “inherent
authority” to order such break-ins — including break-ins at the homes of
U.S. citizens — on his own, without a warrant. Even after the
administration agreed with Congress’s decision to place the authority to
pre-approve such searches in the FISA court, President Clinton still
maintained that he had sufficient authority to order such searches on his
own.
“The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the
president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches
for foreign intelligence purposes,” Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick
testified before the House Intelligence Committee on July 14, 1994. Later,
after Congress took action, Gorelick told
Legal Times that,
“Our seeking legislation in no way should suggest that we do not believe
we have inherent authority.”
Nevertheless, the law required that the administration seek a warrant if
it intended to wiretap a U.S. person’s — in this case Forstmann’s —
communications. The Clinton administration could have argued, as the Bush
administration would later, that the president had the authority to do it
on his own under certain circumstances, like the presence of a foreign
enemy. But it’s hard to see how Diana and Forstmann would have fit that
description, and in any event that is something Al Gore and other Clinton
veterans say they never did.
Algore, you may be recall, when caught misbehaving one time claimed he couldn't be punished because there was "no controlling legal authority" to do it.
And I'll always enjoy seeing the Jamie Gorelick statements reprinted, over and over again.
I stumbled across an old column by Larry Miller which I had previously missed, and I'm sure glad I found it:
...as a service to all Americans who still don't get it, I now offer you the story of the Middle East in just a few paragraphs, which is all you really need. Don't thank me. I'm a giver. Here we go:
The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no "Palestinians" then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians" then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation." So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths until someone points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they are: "Other Arabs From The Same General Area Who Are In Deep Denial About Never Being Able To Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death." I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: "Adjacent Jew-Haters."
Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living. That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel. They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course--that's where the real fun is--but mostly they want Israel. Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel--or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it--for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God's Earth, and if you've ever been around God's Earth, you know that's really saying something. It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mideast. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.
We don't read or see so much about them any more, it seems to me, those Palestinian refugee camps and the horrible conditions those people who are forced to live there have to endure. Perhaps this is because we have always been sort of led to the notion that the horrible Israelis rounded all of those Palestinians up and built barbed-wire fences around them, surrounded by Israeli patrols to keep them inside.
See, if they kept showing these camps on tv all the time, pretty soon someone might ask what part of Israel they're located in. Only, why is it they keep arguing about a right to return if they didn't leave? But if they aren't inside Israel then they must be in, if there were such a place, Palestine...but in that case, who's keeping them fenced in?
Then somebody might even discover that these, ah, Palestinians who left Israel did so because they were afraid otherwise they'd be killed...by the surrounding Arab armies who were going to kill everyone inside Israel. Deciding in that case, rationally, that the Jews had no chance to win that contest, they fled. Several times, in fact; each time the Arabs got up enough moxie to try again.
Since Israel still has some 'Palestinians' left inside, they may even unofficially wish the Arabs had tried still one more time.
Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five million Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that if Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals. Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.
My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not. Or marshalling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab state into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible.
And, you know, he's right. If you think you disagree with him, imagine yourself waiting in line at the airport the next time you travel when suddenly you learn you have been assigned to one of two gates to board your plane. The airlines, in the spirit of freedom of religious accommodation, are allowing passengers to board whichever flight they choose.
At one gate are 6 imams shouting prayers, which coincidentally are the same two final words transmitted from the cockpit of Flight 93 before it crashed into a Pennsylvania field. At the other gate are 6 Orthodox Jews praying.
Now tell me that situation would not affect your choice of plane.
And here's another good point:
...in any big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing moral weight. We've already lost some. After September 11 our president told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them. Beautiful. Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of an Oklahoma City every week (and then every day) start to do the same thing we did, and we tell them to show restraint. If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we would all very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan.
We got all excited after 9/11...but it has only happened to the U.S. one time. What really would by your attitude if the equivalent was happening even once a year? Larry's right, I'm quite sure.
Actually I have to go back to the beginning of this story, I realize, in order to tie it to the ending, although when I began to post this all I thought of importance was the middle:
I WAS WATCHING Greta Van Facelift on Fox the other night, and she and her guests made me talk back to the TV. Shout back, actually. Nothing witty or trenchant, you understand, just something like, "Oh, come on!" Now, to be honest, it was late, and I was downstairs alone, and I was a little, what's the word . . . loaded, yes, that's the word. I was a little shined up. A little spiffed and a little miffed, and I shouted something and angrily turned off the remote. I don't know exactly how angrily a remote can be turned off, but as angrily as you can push a pfennig-sized piece of round plastic, that's how angrily I did it. Then I walked back to the bar, made myself one-for-the-stairs (as opposed to one-for-the-road) and read some P.G. Wodehouse to restore my cheery nature. But back to the freshly-tightened Greta.
Her guests were (INSERT INDISTINGUISHABLE ARAB NAME), from Hamas, and their attorney, Stanley Cohen. No, that's not a joke. Would that it were. Stanley Cohen, the attorney for Hamas.
... ...
So, now, back to Greta. You know what made me mad enough to shout? You might not even think it was that big a thing.
After the show she said to these guys, "Thank you, gentlemen, for being my guests." "Gentlemen." "Guests." "My guests." That's what it's come to with these non-judgmental hosts and hostesses. Nice, huh? "Thank you, Mr. Stalin, sir, for being so gracious in giving us your valuable time." "My eternal gratitude, Chairman Mao, for taking precious moments away from your splendid Five-Year Plan and visiting with us in this most convivial way."
And I winced, and grunted, and shouted. Oh, yeah, and made that drink.
The reason I had to go back and get this portion was because Larry wrote this in 2002. At that time he mercifully was unaware of the shamefully obsequious "interview" Mike Wallace would grovel in front of Ahmadinejad in an unthinkable future.
I winced, grunted, shouted things I won’t print here and made drinks for the group of me, myself and I.
Great funny (sort of) observation made by Mickey Kaus:
I am so not excited about Windows Vista! ... And I was excited about Windows XP, because I thought its sturdier code would stop it from crashing. I was wrong, at least for the early version of XP that I bought. Now I can't see a thing Vista's going to do for me that seems worth braving the inevitable Microsoft early teething problems. [It says you can "spend more time surfing the web"!--ed No I can't.]
(I apologize for removing some of his distracting (in my opinion) formatting but I wanted to emphasize his punch line more than he did.)
A take on the ISG Report by Fred Barnes that is worth noting:
In a sense, the ISG report was payback. The group embraced the conventional wisdom in Washington that Bush has so often rebelled against. The emphasis of his foreign and national security policy on spreading democracy clashed with the establishment's yearning for stability. Thus it's not surprising the ISG report never cites "democracy" as a goal. But "stability" or a "stable" Iraq as an objective is cited more than 30 times.
Interesting that the people who most often complain that Bush is in it only for the oil also are fans of "stability" even if that means replacing democracy with a strongman. Bush, however, emphasizes democracy and freedom even at the expense of stability, when if he really cared only about oil he'd clearly choose the latter. That is, the way the Middle East has always been run in the past.
Polls are as frustrating as they are interesting, because we so often get a collection of interpreted results and seldom the actual question or the manner in which it was asked. Any married man who has ever heard his wife say "I didn't like your tone" knows that sometimes the words matter less than the way they are perceived as being uttered. Anyhow, this RealClearPolitics note interested me:
Interestingly from that same question in the Gallup poll 18% have a "great deal" of trust in the President to do the right thing as compared to only 14% for Democratic leaders. However, when you combine the "great deal of trust" and "fair amount of trust" responses President Bush is the only option out of the military, the ISG, John McCain, Democratic leaders and the state department who doesn't poll over 50%. The military and defense department clearly has the most confidence among the public as 81% trust them to recommend the right thing.
Bush beats the Democrat leaders, the military and defense department lead the pack, and Bush has said, over and over and over yet again, that he will listen to his generals and do what they recommend.
So with those two things in mind, figure out this conclusion:
Seven out of 10 Americans in the ABC/WP poll disapprove of the President's handling of Iraq and 48% in the USA Today/Gallup poll have not much confidence or none at all that President Bush will "recommend the right thing for the U.S."
I'd like to hear the answer to a poll question something like this: "If you trust the military and defense department to recommend the right thing, and if Bush says he will do whatever it is that they recommend, will Bush be doing the right thing?"
That answer should teach you something. If a majority says no then that means they don't like Bush, personally, not his policies. Just consider (absent my question being asked) this RCP conclusion:
The fact that Senator McCain (who has been pushing for more troops) outpolls Democratic leaders in Congress by 5 points coupled with the overwhelmingly strong support for the military and defense department is moderately encouraging results for Republicans and tends to confirm the thesis that the election results were more of a repudiation of Bush's Iraq policy rather than a broad embrace of Democratic leadership.
But McCain wants more troops and the two top generals STILL say they do not! Bush's Iraq policy has been to listen to his generals, so how the hell is this a repudiation of Bush's POLICY?
Answer: it hasn't been. It's his attitude they don't like. And McCain's attitude that they do, even if the poll says 81% trust the generals!
That "tone" thing, again.
I suspect if Bush switches over to McCain's position, such that both of them are now in opposition to the 81% trusted generals, Bush will still get knocked and McCain praised.
Costa Rica and family stuff
Believe it or not, I finally got my last document from the hospital administrator today.
We began our efforts towards getting Tony a US passport quite some time back, now. Costa Rica has an official registry department for the entire country, much like in the United States the various counties have recording departments for all of the official acts that take place in each county. This can be a minor pain in the butt in the real estate business when you are trying to sell property located in a different county than your office (and, of course, your real estate license is good only for the single state) so it's very convenient to have everything at a central location, especially since much of the data can be filed and also accessed from the several county-seat equivalents, like Ciudad Quesada, which is about an hour away versus three for San Jose.
Anyhow, I spent some time getting Tony's birth certificate legally amended in the Registro and various court documents all legally filed, and I did some on-line research about our own US State Department, so then I went to my embassy, which is located in San Jose.
It's the American Embassy, it says, but I swear I feel more like I'm entering a foreign country than I do while living here in Costa Rica. Looking around at all of the people trying to get in through the guarded portcullis, it would appear that the main business of the embassy seems to be issuing or denying visas for Costa Ricans wanting to visit the United States.
American citizens, like me, are given a slip with a number on it and directed into another holding-pen area, a temporary set-up with unfinished wooden plank floors and a waiting area with a grossly inadequate number of hard folding chairs. There is one clerk behind a heavy glass window and absolutely no indication of what you are to do with your numbered slip. On our first trip I noted some similarly-confused people turned away from the window with the woman clerk announcing that you couldn't come to the window until your number was called...with no indication what number was currently up, you just had to listen to her over her microphone.
This was further confused because her job was accepting the paperwork and putting it into various stacks for others to process. Her primary purpose was to make sure all of the paperwork was included and properly filled out, which of course it seldom was since most of us didn't know what paperwork we needed, even, until after we got there. Some papers were racked on the wall outside her window and I could see a bunch of forms I obviously was going to need, read the instructions and saw that I couldn't possibly do what I needed that day, so I gathered them up and gave up for that trip. I wasn't unhappy, since I considered it a fact-finding trip anyhow, in order to find out what I was going to need. It got me started.
So on the next visit I got as far as her window and shoved my completed forms beneath the bullet-proof glass. She rummaged through them, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and then produced from a file drawer a form that had never been seen or mentioned before, with a new requirement never mentioned before. It definitely was not listed among the printed requirements on the passport application form.
Seems that although I have Tony's properly recorded birth certificate, showing me as his father, and the document all adorned with lick-on stamps hand-canceled with other rubber stamps and initialed by the proper officials in two separate locations, and the Registro document similarly signed, sealed and notarized, the US embassy wanted yet another one. They wanted a signed statement from the physician who attended the birth. But since Tony had been born in a social security hospital, with rotating physicians, what I needed was a signed statement from the Hospital Director, instead. No form was offered for me to give, no format was even suggested, no language specified, just go to the Hospital Director in Ciudad Quesada and get it.
(Oh, yes...there had been an official form signed by the hospital when Tony was born, and it has a signature on it, but MY embassy says "The 'Declaration (sic) de Nacimiento' on yellow carbon paper showing the registration of the birth at the hospital is not sufficient.")
Oh, yes...and when I had all of the papers ready, she says, both Tony and his mother had to appear with me. Well, Tony's birth mother has no custody rights, I have sole custody not associated with Carol's name, and a court order to prove it, which I showed to the lady, at which point she said when all of my papers were okayed by her and given to a consular officer, I would have to discuss that with him.
Getting the hospital director's signature has taken what, two more months now? And $70 but what the hell. And the director, to make matters worse, said he would deliver his signed paper ONLY to the birth mother, which meant yet another hitch to overcome. It is a good thing she is still around locally and is cooperative.
Anyhow, that got finished today and I have the document in hand. It isn't recorded in the Registro and I have no idea if MY embassy is going to require that, since no mention is ever made anywhere about that being required, which could take quite a lot longer because the Registro is backed up several weeks, I understand, plus the last couple of weeks of December are worthless because of the holidays, so Thursday we are planning a family trip to San Jose to deliver everything we have to the embassy.
Now, at least, I know the drill. Arrive early, take your number, go mill around until you hear it called over the loudspeaker. If the lady shuffles through them and finds them in order, she will put them in a pile to be collected by others. In due course I will be called by name to yet another solid-glass window where presumably I will be quizzed by a human being with an official purpose.
Hopefully all of my answers and documents will be correct, the official will ask for more money, and in another ten days or so (probably longer, since it will be December 14th when we turn them in) we will have Tony's passport.
Hmmm...I wonder if we tell them we want to take him to the US with us for Christmas if that will help speed things up?
After that we can start on the NEXT part of the process.