quote:

Yup. Making a connection with a non-fused connector. MacGyver got around it by using foil gum wrappers...

Maybe they were using .22 rounds....

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
They can't even keep the lights on...

September 2, 2018
Watch Venezuela's power stations, one after another, explode through the night
By Monica Showalter

Socialism and electricity don't seem to mix in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where a humongous string of power substation explosions occurred, posted in full Technicolor by the locals on Twitter.

So in addition to people eating out of garbage bins, fleeing for their lives on foot to the next available country as real refugees, million-percent inflation and no money, zero health care, bathing from buckets because there is no water, a huge death toll from world's highest crime rate, now there's no electricity due to overloaded circuits and Cuban socialist mismanagement of resources.

Kind of shows you just how poisonous the socialism pill is through the entire the body politic. Any comment, Bernie? Any explanation, Alexandria?

https://www.americanthinker.co...rough_the_night.html

Venezuela feeling the Bern. How you like me now?

September 12, 2018
U.S. charges Venezuela's socialist elites with stealing even the food

For socialists, socialism isn't about equality: It's about getting rich.

And as Venezuelans grow hungry from the economic mismanagement of socialist policies, whether through the devaluation of their currency, or the price and currency controls that have triggered shortages, losing an average of 19 pounds in the ordeal, sure enough, Venezuela's socialists have found a new way to get rich. According to the BBC:

The US has accused Venezuela's government of stealing from a state-run food programme while its own people go hungry.

Marshall Billingslea, a US treasury official, said Venezuelan government officials were over-charging for food.

He said corruption by President Nicolás Maduro and his inner circle had "impoverished millions" of Venezuelans.

The Venezuelan government blames US sanctions for the food shortages the country is experiencing.

Mr Billingslea, who is the Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing at the US treasury department, accused President Maduro of "rapacious corruption" and of operating "a kleptocracy".

Gad. Stealing from the starving. Always gotta get some, is that it? Funny how socialism always seems to lead to stealing, while all the while, its proponents, such as Bernie Sanders, call it 'sharing.'

I have not found any information about this so-called state food program, but there were some when I visited Venezuela in late 2005. One was called Mercal, which was put in place to provide discount foods to the poor because the small local groceries were supposedly charging too much. The 25% to 50% state-store discount put those mom-and-pops out of business, leaving just the government food programs, run by Venezuela's military. With their monopoly established, the stealing opportunity was there, given that there would be no need to satisfy customers, either through price or availability of goods.

Which would match the U.S. official's description of Chavista socialist elites overcharging for food while the country starves.

Chavista socialist elites have always been famous for their stealing. The U.S. is currently investigating massive amounts of thievery around Miami from Venezuela's state oil company, according to many reports. Like any bank robbers, the greediest ones go where the money is. But downwind, the Chavista elites steal, too, because socialism is essentially about thievery; I mean, 'redistribution.' They do it with votes, too.

What we see here is a particularly horrific example of the rapacious nature of socialism. They steal even the food from the starving people. As President Trump said at the United Nations recently: Venezuela's socialism hasn't failed because it wasn't properly implemented. It failed because it was faithfully implemented.

Obviously, stealing does that. Are you listening, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.co...d.html#ixzz5QtcTXFgQ

No. Not only is she not listening, she's covering her ears and chanting to avoid exposure to the truth.

How much money have the red hidalgos stolen? And how much have those dumbasses cached in the United States? I wanna hear some more about the Trump administration grabbing those funds.

I'd also like to hear more about their creditors grabbing them by the balls and squeezing. Venezuela owed $2 billion to Conoco Phillips for oilfield leases that were seized by the Maduristas. The company seized a couple of refineries and loading docks in the Carribbean. Did they keep them? No. They cut a deal with the Maduristas to return them in return for getting paid the $2 billion over five years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2018/08...s-venezuela-oil.html

Hey, fuckstick! You had to seize the damned assets because they don't pay what they owe!

When they turn to cannibalism, that's the perfect opportunity to send ALL Socialists in America a one-way ticket to Venezuela.

See, in my college days, they'd all volunteer to go down to Nicaragua to pick coffee. Where's that good ol' American can-do spirit when you really need it?

It's the best of times(US),it's the worst of times(Venezuela).

quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
No. Not only is she not listening, she's covering her ears and chanting to avoid exposure to the truth.

Actually, she's listening and taking notes. It is every socialists dream to rule over impoverished people.

VENEZUELA: Maduro Increases Minimum Salary By 40%, Forces Stores To Close. And Yet, He Enjoys $275 Steaks

"No, I can't do it any more"

September 18, 2018

As the poor get poorer in the socialist paradise of Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro is enjoying himself with $275 steaks as he imposed a minimum salary increase of 3,500%, reports El Nuevo Herald based on findings from the National Council of Commerce and Services of Venezuela.

The salary increase has caused nearly 40% of all Venezuela stores to close. Store owners say Maduro's salary increase is just one of many cuts that have contributed to their demise. Not only are the businesses selling items below cost, but they are also paying people unaffordable wages.

"These decisions are leading many business people to say, 'No, I can't do it any more,'" said Maria Carolina Uzcategui, president of the council.

Four in ten stores have been unable to open since the salary increase. Others that have opened are liquidating their merchandise or plan to close definitively.

Furthermore, the Maduro regime has banned stores from increasing prices to cover his salary hike. The owners face prison time if they disobey.

"We have inspections, and they force us to sell at last month's prices," said Uzcategui. "That takes money away from the business because of the hyperinflation, when you can't even sell at yesterday's prices because you lose money."

"And anyone who protests against these measures runs the risk of going to jail, without the right to appeal, without the right to anything, simply because the official whose turn it was to inspect the store just felt like arresting you. He did it, and that's all," she continued.

The legislative National Assembly currently estimates that August saw an inflation increase of 200%, causing the bolivar currency to lose two-thirds of its value.

Economist Orlando Ochoa said the stores cannot survive due to the government having a monopoly on imports.

"The government sector has the monopoly on imports, the currency market is dysfunctional and there's hyperinflation," Ochoa said. "So, if salaries are increased by decree, and the commercial and industrial sectors cannot sell their products because of these problems, and on top of that because of electricity blackouts, infrastructure problems and the loss of qualified personnel, which is leaving the country, then it's easy to understand that many may prefer to close."

Meanwhile, as his people suffer from policies he put in place, Maduro is living the high life, with Eater reporting he enjoyed a $275 steak from celebrity chef Salt Bae in Istanbul over the weekend.

https://www.dailywire.com/news...crease-250-paul-bois

They are going to have to kill him

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
VENEZUELA: Maduro Increases Minimum Salary By 40%, Forces Stores To Close. And Yet, He Enjoys $275 Steaks

How many Bolivars is that?

ETA: 16,841.34 Venezuelan Bolívar

He spent the equivalent of Venezuela's GDP on one steak. What a guy.

quote:

Originally posted by 4x5:
He spent the equivalent of Venezuela's GDP on one steak. What a guy.

Doesn't seem very "social".

quote:

Meanwhile, as his people suffer from policies he put in place, Maduro is living the high life, with Eater reporting he enjoyed a $275 steak from celebrity chef Salt Bae in Istanbul over the weekend.

He might want to be mindful of what happened to the Ceausescus in Romania.

quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
They are going to have to kill him

Yup. And I hope they do it by hacking his trac-suit clad, blubbering ass to pieces in the street with machetes.

What Chavez and Maduro have done to those people is despicable.

quote:

Originally posted by egregore:

quote:

Meanwhile, as his people suffer from policies he put in place, Maduro is living the high life, with Eater reporting he enjoyed a $275 steak from celebrity chef Salt Bae in Istanbul over the weekend.

He might want to be mindful of what happened to the Ceausescus in Romania.

If he was smart, which he is not, he would seek a country which would offer him asylum in exchange for leaving Venezuela. But yeah he's going to have to be killed.

October 27, 2018
Murderous communists? Who knew? Take a look at what they are doing in Venezuela

When we think of Venezuela, we think of starving people fleeing their country without access to food, clothing, toilet paper, or medical care. We think of street urchins fighting over garbage scraps with machetes. We think of migrant exoduses from socialism.

But there's another reality about the place, and it's not getting the attention, say, Saudi Arabia or Russia is, over the killings of dissidents. The Maduro regime is showing an alarming willingness to violently attack opposition leaders, and it's moving in on high-profile ones who had previously seemed untouchable. They've already jailed politician Leopoldo Lopez and driven many others into exile. But the regime's people have stepped up the thuggery to higher levels since then. They tortured to death a city councilman who was then flung off a ten-story building earlier this month. And they encircled and beat up leading opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, likely signaling intent to kill.

Machado first came to the fore in 2005, when she was greeted by President George W. Bush as the leader of Sumate, a Venezuelan non-government organization that sought clean, zero-fraud elections in Venezuela. I met her when I was in Caracas in 2005 and found her a fine, straight-arrow, and extremely nice person, with an indomitable will to ensure that Venezuela keep to its claimed democratic norms, yet she was such a natural, normal person. I was delighted that she liked President Bush, refusing to engage in the usual Bush-bashing of the time. You may remember the famous picture of them meeting here:



The other day, she looked like this:



It's utterly vile and horrible – she was encircled by Chavista thugs from Venezuela's Cuban-directed secret service, known as SEBIN, and beaten up. It's not the first time they have done this – Chavista thugs assaulted her in the legislature in 2015 and broke her nose. Foreign Policy at the time called her "Venezuela's Marked Woman." But this assault seems to have been even more deliberate and planned. The tweet showing the shocking damage comes from Andrés Pastrana, a former conservative president of Colombia, who is worried about her. According to the Miami Herald:

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, attacked with clubs and rocks Wednesday by pro-government thugs, is the most recent target of an increasingly desperate Nicolas Maduro regime because of her steadfast resistance to a new round of political negotiations, former Colombian President Andres Pastrana said Thursday.

Pastrana, who had warned two days earlier that Machado's life was in danger, told el Nuevo Herald that all the actions against Machado were being directed by the secret police, known as SEBIN.

"What we're eeing is that the stumbling block on the way to the false negotiations" between the regime and the opposition "is María Corina Machado," Pastrana. said

"Information from friends from the Venezuelan opposition and friends we have in other places pointed to the possibility that they were organizing an attack" against Machado, the former Colombian president added.

Machado said the townspeople – at great risk – rushed to help her, which was a great comfort, and the Herald reported that Sen. Marco Rubio spoke out on her behalf on Twitter, blasting the outrageous act of thuggery against the woman.

But she felt the attack was different from the others:

"The young people who were accompanying me later told us that this time it was different because they somehow felt that they were beaten in order to separate them from me," she said. "It's like there was an order to attack me."

About eight of the attackers, including some women, managed to reach Machado. One of them pulled on her pony tail, wrenching her back.

While one of the attackers held her from behind, others beat her with fists and clubs. A woman hit her on the head with a club, and she was also hit on the nose.

Overall, about 20 people were injured or beaten during the attack, Machado said.

This is disturbing stuff, and I feel concern for Machado's safety. She's the only opposition leader left, and up until now, she's been relatively untouchable. That the regime thinks it can attack her and get away with it seems to signal that the communist regime feels immensely threatened by her and believes that it can do absolutely anything it wants to preserve its grip on power and get away with it, same as Russia and Saudi Arabia, except without the international condemnation. Where is that? Where are the loud voices that yelled about the Saudi dissident being murdered while this brutality is going on much closer to our shores?

The regime knows that the sticks and stones of global condemnation can never hurt it, because unlike Saudi Arabia or Russia, it no longer seeks any international respect. It sees how other regimes get away with this, most notably the Castro regime, which has gotten away with murder and torture for decades, and is rapidly following Cuba's path downhill.

Unless the regime is thrown out, it's going to go on. The left may yell against a future Pinochet to hose the place out, but the Venezuelan military, unlike the Chilean one, has been corrupted by Chavismo for years. It's hard to think such a thing will happen. The case grows for intervention by the region's neighbors. What we are looking at is not just a failed regime that can't feed its people; we are looking at a communist thug regime that beats and kills dissidents. The two go hand in hand in any communist regime, every single time.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.co...a.html#ixzz5V9qiiB8y

Concerned about the environment?
Don't vote for the progressively socialist Democrats! This is how socialism ends up:

Venezuela Is Leaking Oil Everywhere
[Bloomberg]
Bloomberg• November 24, 2018

(Bloomberg) -- From a distance, the scene is beautiful, a dark pool shimmering under the midday sun, reflecting billowing clouds. But when you close in on the dirt-packed trail leading toward a trio of storage tanks, a pungent odor makes it clear. It’s not pretty; it’s an oil spill.

In this one spot in the Orinoco Belt, a region in Venezuela named for the river that flows above the world’s largest deposits of crude, so many barrels have escaped from underground pipes that a 2,150-square-foot pit around the tanks is filled to the brim. The country is pockmarked with these messes, as Petroleos de Venezuela’s infrastructure rots after years of neglect, scant investment and corruption scandals under the regimes of the late Hugo Chavez and his successor as president, Nicolas Maduro.

Venezuela, an OPEC member dependent on oil sales for almost half the national budget, is pumping at the lowest levels since the 1940s.



The spills are conspicuous signs of what has gone so horribly wrong at once-mighty PDVSA. The state-owned company doesn’t publish statistics, but environmentalists, analysts and workers keep seemingly endless lists of examples of wayward crude—unleashed by busted valves, ripped gaskets, cracked pipes and on and on—that they say has polluted waterways and farmland and probably has seeped into aquifers.

PDVSA’s cleanup policy is, on paper, strict, because “if spills aren’t quickly attended to, they become environmental liabilities,” said Carmen Infante, a Caracas-based industry consultant. But resources are spread so thin that responses are rarely swift or comprehensive; trunks of nance trees near the three tanks in Anzoategui state are buried in crude more than 10 months after the leak was discovered.

According to workers in the field, many of the services contractors that specialize in sponging up spills, with trucks equipped with giant vacuums, have gone out of business because they’ve had such trouble getting paid by PDVSA.

Rigs and pump jacks are part of the landscape in the rural Orinoco Belt. So are black puddles, in ditches, under bushes, along roadsides, around tanks. While not all are the remnants of spills—oil on the ground is a byproduct of the business—industry analysts and consultants who have studied the matter say there are far more than would be considered normal.

Urban areas have been hit, too. Early this year, the contents of a ruptured transport line blackened the Guarapiche River in Monagas state. A water-purification plant on the river was compromised, and the authorities shut it down for more than a month. Local schools canceled classes, and government offices reduced office hours because water was so scarce.

PDVSA stopped making spill data public in 2016. That year, the number of annual incidents had increased more than fourfold since 1999.

With little detailed information to work with, it’s difficult for experts to calculate the cost of remediation. There are some hints: Infante says just the 12,367 unattended, potentially contaminated oil-waste pits that PDVSA acknowledged existed 10 years ago—the last time the company released information on these overflow graves—would require around $2.2 billion to bring up to internationally recognized standards.

“There is a lot of concern with the state of the infrastructure when the time comes to reactivate the industry,” said Juan Carlos Sanchez, an environmental consultant in Caracas who used to work for the company. “PDVSA has been collapsing since 2016.”

To get it back on its operating feet in this one area may well require more money than Venezuela earned selling crude on the foreign market last year: $22 billion.

I have a PDV refinery as a customer in the US. They will only spend money on things that keep the money coming in, nothing more. All the cash they make goes right back to Venezuela. It has been a really frustrating few years for these guys. They worry about safety at times because they push a lot of capital improvements out much farther than planned. Haven't had any accidents as a result. I'm sure they still have inspectors and such since safety is a much higher priority in the US.