Voting nowhere fast

I guess I need to write about the electoral campaign. Years ago this blog was flooded with entries on candidates, polls, statistics and predictions more accurate than wrong. But now the voting system is utterly rigged and for all that we know the percentile difference between Maduro and Falcon is already a given. Maduro will win by AT LEAST 15%. The only question is whether he will dare to have a higher percentile than Chavez top in 2006. My guess is that he will not resist the temptation.

Speaking of entries on candidates.  It is a sad spectacle to see how burned Falcon is. Oh!, not a surprise at all, but really, the guy has been found out and yet he persists in pretending that he is fooling us, that his defeat will be because of the opposition abstention, etc, etc, but never any self awareness that actually people cannot vote for him. Period.

Terror in Caracas

What we have experienced today in Caracas is terror. Even yours truly got gassed, not much but truly. But I am not the one who suffered the most, by far. So I will start this entry with pictures that show clearly the terror the regime deliberately forced upon us, at an enormous risk of lives lost. Four pictures to say it all.

This picture truly represents terror. On the right what are goons of the worst kind. On the left kids, teenagers 20 something, girls, hiding for dear life away from these goons, trying not to fall in the river. Look at the picture, look at the details!!!

Unfortunately some of them had to go down and wade through one of the most contaminated streams of the world, the rive Guaire that crosses Caracas, an open air sewer. I let you imagine the consequences...

How did that happen? The repression deliberately set a trap that could have caused hundreds of death.

The main highway through Caracas was taken by the march. That highway, Autopista Francisco Fajardo, AFF, splits at the level of Chacaito in an upper road West-East and a lower road East-West. Since the march was so huge (in a post later) the two decks were densely packed. Then the regime decided to strike. In the first picture you will see the upper deck and how packed it was. Had the wind gone East West, or had there being no breeze, the suffocation would have created a stampede and people would have been trampled upon, or maybe even jumped! I suppose the regime bet on the wind so that the smell would not be so bad to avoid a stampede. But the risk was enormous, ENORMOUS!

The next picture is the view West East where you can appreciate more what I just wrote. You can also see the amount of tear/pepper gas used and that the breeze was not that strong. You can also see that the lower deck battle was strong and that the crush forced people to jump into the sewer. The crossing shown above is further down river and not seen in this picture in particular, or at least it had not started yet as people may not have been aware yet of what was happening.

Now you understand better the terror in the first picture above.

All of these are worthy of Crime Against Humanity pursuits...

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For the record, while I prepare the next post with my own personal experience of the day.

About ten minutes before the gassing started I was where the cell phone add was (white, black sash), at the end of the curve. That is where we decided to go back as it was becoming impossible to go further and people were already going back. Within minutes the police was bombing the area and and a few minutes after we had to take refuge in the street on the right in an eatery that shall remain nameless because they have already been in trouble.

Becoming a failed state (3): reversible?

We seem to agree that Venezuela is either already a failed state, or about to become one. It has a rather wretched populace. It has loss of institutions. It is unable to agree on anything. It is pretty much bankrupt, bankrupt as in getting out of the hole will take a generation or more.

The question is thus the way out of a failed state. From the reasons discussed before it seems unlikely that there is an easy way out of the dire straits we are in. And the prospect for things to get worse is not a prospect, it is a reality. Why?

Becoming a failed state (1): the parameters

There is actually the concern that Venezuela may become a failed state, if it has not become one already. After all, there is no way to get real numbers and thus for all that we know we may be already bankrupt with no way out as long until there is a sudden rise in oil price. Like to 90USD per barrel.

Being failed

So, are we becoming a failed state? Is there a way to avoid it? Do we have the people for that? Before going into the last point, a highly un-PC examination of the populace, let’s set the parameters that would qualify us as a failed state to be.

Let’s start with Wikipedia, as reliable a source as any other on this one since it is a relatively subjective notion.

Genocidal class warfare in Venezuela

Last week I took the S.O. to his monthly chemotherapy. We were late by almost two weeks while he was dealing with side effects of the preceding cycle. Thus it had been nearly two months. The place is an ample room with about 15 comfy chaises for patients and an extra chair for accompanying people. Usually it is full and often we had to wait up to an hour for our turn.

What was my surprise to see that only two other chairs were taken and that the S.O. went straight to a chair of his choice!

Bloomberg goes to the core of US sanctions to Venezuelan Officials

I was planning on translating the earlier post in Spanish over Obama's sanctions and the regime's reply. But the core of that entry was the message that the US sent to the rest of LatAm and Bloomberg makes a superb article on that. I certainly could not do better and it shows you that outside of the spineless opposition and brain dead but vicious chavismo there are people that clearly can see the bigger issues. Please read : Obama's wake up call to Venezuela's neighbors.ailities

There is only one thing I need to add, for the sake of avoiding extra posts.

Another day, another US sanction against Venezuelan apparatchicks

There was a small surprise of sorts today: an executive order from the White House removing visa to a few Venezuelan officials, with possible sanctions to follow of a strictly material nature. That is right, 7 Venezuelans folks who are accused justifiedly of human rights violations have had their travel visas to the US revoked. And they are under investigation for possible assets in the US that will be frozen. That is all, nothing much really, considering that today few chavistas should have significant assets in the US after the Carvajal affair.

Still, that was enough to make chavismo hyperventilate, reaching paroxysms such at Telesur which has totally forgotten what international media is supposed to be all about. I translate for you the tile of an article there: Threatening Venezuela, Obama declares war on the continent.

Just like that.

Do not think it that far from chavista land to the Islamic State

Find the 7 differences:

You could not? You won! There are no differences!

They share the same mental construct, those that rewrite or destroy history because they do not like it, because it is not convenient, or because they are idiots. Be they the chavistas who tumbled down the statue of Columbus in Caracas on October 2004, or ISIS fighters trashing the archeological museum at Mosul, they are the same crap. Nor do they care whether the pieces are original: what matters is the iconoclastic gesture. And if truly worthy pieces like in Bamiyan must be blown up, so be it.

What separates for now chavista jack asses from ISIS murderers is just  a matter of crime intensity and the specifics. In the end they are both the product of fundamentalist alienation.

De Colón al estado Islamico

Encontrar las 7 diferencias:

¿No pudo? ¡Ganó! No hay diferencias.

Es el mismo constructo mental, los que destruyen la historia porque no les gusta, no les conviene, o porque son brutos. Sean los chavistas idiotizados tumbando la estatua de Colón en Caracas o sean los Islamistas destruyendo el museo arqueológico de Mosul, es la misma mierda. Lo único que cambia es la magnitud y peculiaridad de los crímenes. El fondo es la misma alienación fundamentalista.

An impossible to avert PR mess for Maduro

Today two ex-presidents of Latin America, Piñera of Chile and Pastrana of Colombia (supported by Calderon of Mexico who had to bail out at the last minute)  are going to Ramo Verde jail near Caracas to visit Leopoldo Lopez.

La República, y el chaverío

Place de la République, hacia las 2 PM

Lo que paso en Francia esta semana fue realmente asombroso. Pasamos casi sin pestañear, por el impacto, de la barbarie a la defensa extraordinaria de los valores que representan una verdadera República. Todos los que entienden de verdad como opera el mundo entendieron claramente que los atentados de esta semana en París eran una agresión, una guerra a muerte contra la democracia y el estado de derecho, de cuales la libertad de expresión es su mayor valor. No importó que hubiese 1, 10, 100 o 1000 muertos, el peso del símbolo buscado por los fundamentalistas islámicos era acobardar la libertad de expresión.

Eso no pasó. Incluso regímenes donde ya no existe la libertad de expresión tuvieron que redactar de mala gana escuetos comunicados de apoyo a Francia como hizo Venezuela; o para las dictaduras mas sofisticadas como Rusia, mandar a algun ministro.

A Churchillian moment for France

As the horror kept unfolding through Paris with a terrorist taking hostage a Jewish supermarket I am too taken in angst to write my own words. But BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY has words for us, taken in full from the WSJ for those like me who cannot afford the subscription price.

A France United Against Radical Islam
It’s time to break, finally, from Leninist reasoning about the sociology of poverty and frustration behind terrorism.

At the Place des Terreaux in Lyon, France, after the Jan. 7 terror attack in Paris.

#JeSuisCharlie

Words have failed me through the day.

It is not enough that in one of my countries my freedoms have been reduced to their finite expression, just enough that I am not forced to leave right now. Though the clock is running faster.

But my other country has been struck in what it is dearest in our hearts: freedom of expression, freedom to dissent, freedom to be civilized, freedom to make fun of.

The night the regime dropped the fig leaf: TWO, 2, Mayors in jail

Amazing, I cannot leave my computer, too much to write. And before exhaustion gets the better of me as I am suffering for a bad cold these past two days I need to tell you that the regime has dropped the fig leaf it had in front to pretend that it was a democracy, not a dictatorship.

Two hours ago I wrote that Ceballos, mayor of San Cristobal was arrested this evening. Details are coming. The SEBIN went to get him at a hotel meeting with his lawyers to analyze the latest TSJ decree against opposition mayors. And they arrested him without showing an arrest warrant, roughing up the assistance. They just took him and that was that, the mayor of one of the largest ten cities of Venezuela, elected with 2/3 of the vote.  We even have already the surveillance video that the shocked hotel employee released.

The video on the mother of the raped boy....

One of the horrendous events of past days was the rape at gun barrel of one of the arrested protesters. Her mother declared and the video has been translated by Alex Beech.  Here it is. No comments needed.

Sliding to Venezuelan hell, with a video from hellish Nazional Guard, and one from a reader

The mind reels.

Syrians travelling to Munich

We cannot call it quite a disaster yet, but it is getting dangerously close.

"El Patrio", a.k.a. Freddy Bernal, chavista congressman in Venezuela

One does not not whether the US is really that clumsy to blacklist 4 very high ranking chavista for arm and/or drug trafficking.  After all, just a few hours before the local political class is about to learn of a rather momentous IACHR decision the US gives to Chavez yet more fodder to kick the table.  Certainly the two decisions are absolutely unrelated and the question as to whether Bernal was an arm dealer had been answered long ago: we just got official notice yesterday.  But chavismo is going to use the "intervention" exhausted old argument, among equally worn out arguments, to politically ban Leopoldo Lopez et al. under the excuse, say, that the US bans chavista "leaders".

I am not going to speculate on why the US treasury suddenly decides to blacklist 4 guys whose names should have been blacklisted at least a couple of years ago.  They have their reasons even if they go with a dreadful sense of timing.  Rather, let's have fun at the expense of the one who has been a noted criminal since at least April 2002.

Reminder: Chavez is STILL backing up Gaddafi and Assad

Least you forgot this factoid while you wonder about way more important things such as the US and European economic crisis, Chavez is still vociferous in his backing of the butchers of Tripoli and Damascus.  He dared to receive an emissary from Gaddafi asking him to help in selling Libyan oil one way or the other (thus we can infer that Gaddafi mercenary army is running out of cash),  and said that he would never recognize the rebel movement of Benghazi (as if Moammar had ever been democratically elected) [sigh!....].  To add insult to injury he dispatched his foreign minister to the TV to support Assad and state as if nothing that the West was operating a war of aggression on Assad already benefiting form the Libyan training, accusing the West of sabotaging the democratic initiatives of Assad to open participation in Syria.  For good measure he reminded us that Syria is at the front of the Arab Reunification, whatever that may mean.  Too bad there was no real journalist in front to ask him how Assad progressed on said reunification....

Yes, I know, I know, all of these are really destined to internal consumption of the chavista lumpen, but still...  Are Chavez in his henchmen that out of touch with the world?  Don't they realize that Lybia and Syria are after all minor locales when the health of the Euro and Dollar is at stake?  Is Tripoli really more important than Athens today?  Is Chavez not aware that the sooner peace comes back to Libya with a dethroned Gaddafi the sooner the West recovery will/could restart and  the price of oil go durably up for Venezuela?  Someone should let Chavez know that if Madrid defaults tomorrow, if Gaddafi does not clear out of Tripoli soon, a new economic crisis will come and he will be swept away when oil prices go down to 80, or less....  He can scream all what he wants in favor of Gaddafi and Assad, he is useless and absolutely irrelevant because of his cowardliness in actually doing something real to help these criminals....

From Oklahoma to Oslo

The type of terrorism which devastated Norway yesterday must be searched in Oklahoma almost two decades ago.  The constant negative ranting of some media (Murdoch?) and some politicians (Chavez?) eventually give rise to crazies like those who did these attacks in the name of race or pseudo Christian principles or who knows what... Terrorism is terrorism and having as a first reflex to look for the Islamist connection is not the best move (Aznar?).

No country deserves a terrorist attack whatsoever.  But when we look at what happened in Norway which is almost an ideal democratic working welfare society one has to pause and wonder....  From Baghdad to Oslo are we suffering from a mere statistical increase in terrorism or are we truly creating it?

My heart goes to Norway which for some reason is the country where one of the three top per capita readers  come to this blog.