Real corruption in Costa Rica

Indigenous rights, reptile rights for Green Iguanas and snakes, animal rights for dolphins,insect rights for spiders. Rap music? And then badmouthing Ayn Rand.

This thread has some legs.

Talk about indigenous peoples problems?

Spoke with a you European donating time with a tribe of about 1000 people. The government is started a hydro-electric project in their area.

They have started to dig the river bypass tunnel for the dam. That's how you start a dam.

The older people want it stopped, the younger people are not sure. I think it goes to a vote. The government could get some support with some extra compensation.

I bet the courts move slower than the tunneling.

He said they want to transmit the electricity to California. They need to cut a swath all the way up there through Mexico for the electric lines so we can run our washer, dryer and air-conditioners during the day time.

Hope Erin Brocovic and the anti nuclear power generation plant activists are happy. It might be this one
http://www.costa-rican-real-estate.com/2010/10/el-diquis-hydroelectric-dam-in-costa-rica/

What a world, what a mess

Whereas spiders are not insects, they are endowed by the Creator with only unalienable arachnid rights. Agreed, this thread has legs.

#20 I've seen enough discussion of plans to develop the hydropower potential of the Terraba to believe it's for real. Lake xArenal's a hydropower impoundment, isn't it? Transmitting to xCalifornia, though, is a paranoid fantasy. Too much energy is lost as heat over distances like that, the 630 MW mentioned in the linked article is big but nowhere near enough to justify the cost of such a line, the conductor itself would be at risk of theft (crazy, but it's happened in Tanzania), and at least for now xCalifornia, xMexico, and most of xTexas are each basically electrically disconnected from each other.

#22 That explains why I couldn't find any info to confirm the California connection but it has the makings of a world class urban myth.

I talked to a Maleku man up around Arnel. He had the facial features of a SW United States Indian.

I was on a truck ride with a Guaymi woman and her children near Puerto Jimemez and they had the facial features of a Chinese or someone from Tibet. Slight facial features.

Do some of the Indigenous look pure Asian or is it more likely a result of inter-marriage?

All indigenous people of the western hemisphere Americas have ancestors who crossed the land bridge from Asia making any similarities in look very possible with people living now on that continent. Distant relatives might also have originated in Africa at the dawn of man. But...

Miscegenation is good for the nation.

There's also some intriguing new evidence -- both genetic and pottery patterns -- of Japanese landing in Peru perhaps 1,000 years ago. I can't remember where I read about this recently, but found this link when I googled for it just now:

http://www.peruviantimes.com/08/genetic-evidence-links-peru%E2%80%99s-ancient-mochica-culture-to-japanese-siberian-and-taiwanese-peoples/1277/

As I vaguely recalll the article I read, the ocean currents they may have followed would suggest a first landfall in Central America.

at the departure lounge of guatemala city airport a woman was showing off her adopted baby. she commented on its asian features, as if she didnt have a clue. my explanation was received with a bewildered stare followed by silence. i thought everybody knew.

This family was 100% Asian. There were 20 local people in the truck and I wasn't the only one sneaking a peek at them. The mother was also very pretty.

Back to Iguanas. I was in the 8 Latitude bar in Golfino clutching my copy of Atlas Shrugged and pounding down beers with the owner. He said a few years back there were large numbers of iguanas around but they have largely disappeared.

They were very friendly and he treated them like pets, fed them at his house. He thinks an influx of birds are eating the young ones.

He misses them very much.

Living Fossils

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/221392/living-fossils/thomas-sowell

Oddly I used to stay at a hotel in NYC where the housekeeping staff was mainly Tibetan, the women were very slight in nature like an Asian, but had the skin color of more a Euro/Asian Turk/Mongolian, including freckles, but the forehead and brow line was most similar to American Indian/Eskimo. Now being in China a month, I see great variations here in Shanghai of Chinese peoples, my wife can almost always guess which areas they are from, from Uzbeks to Mongolian, Sichuan to Ughir. She also notes the Korean physical features as well as Japanese, she tends to get confounded as you get closer to old Siam, Thailand/Burma/Laos and the Khmer in Cambodia/Vietnam. Fillapinos and Malaysians/Indonesians are easy. The far western tribes in on the border with the Stans are far more Near Eastern/Greek/Turkish looking.