Long Complicated Story About Archaeology in Venezuela

It all started 75 million years ago when a huge shale deposit was laid down, under the sea, presumably, which is now the oil-rich Maracaibo Basin of northwestern Venezuela, site of several hundred menes, which are fossil-rich tar pits. There are other sites in the Americas, such as La Brea in Southern California which feature this phenomenon. See La Brea Del Sur: the fossil-rich tar pits of Venezuela may rival those of Southern California. Then the story continues in March 2013 when I was in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia, failing to get any help from my former colleagues at the University of Cambridge and, having sold everything I owned, facing a very uncertain future in the Bolivian Amazon. Realising my problem was economics and people's failure to understand what it is all about, I made what I thought might be my last attempt to explain Aristotle's economics to the general public. As I wrote, I listened to this on repeat. I think I must have heard it over a hundred times in three days and my whole nervous system was resonating to this beat and the words:

The result was Economics II and on Pages 14--16 I rewrote the lyrics, starting with this:

... and including this rewrite, starting at 2:13:

So you see, prompted by the strange discontinuity in the original song, ".... and found, ..." and my knowledge of Venezuelan Archaeology, obtained from a several years-old copy of a Science magazine I had bought in La Paz at the US Embassy staff book sale a couple of years before, ... produced the obvious, to me, resolution of what it really was that was found. And to my genuine surprise, it also seemed to be saying something about voting machine technology, of which I knew nothing at the time.

At the time I wrote this I did not realise that Venezuela was electing a new president in a few weeks' time, otherwise I would not have gone there! But there was an election, and as I found out a few weeks later, whilst working as carpenter's assistant in Tumupasa, a small town on the border of the Madidi National Park, there had been demonstrations and, in the TV reports I heard, at least seven protesters had been killed during demonstrations concerning the integrity of electronic voting systems used in that election.

That's all I actually know about this, but I suspect there is more to know. Particularly concerning Richard Stallman's sudden trip to Colombia in September/October of the following year, after our "discussions" about the integrity of the FSF's GNU project development process outlined here: The Mother of All Software Vulnerabilities. I sometimes wonder if the timing of Edward Snowden's flight to Hong Kong was not at least partly something to do with what was going on in Venezuela and Bolivia. See Bill Binney on Surveillance.

Lissie - Further Away (Published on YouTube on July 21st, 2013)

The Flobots - Defend Atlantis

So, people like Elon Musk will now know the explanation why Cash Is Trash: