Blogging the democratic revolution
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames??????? is an explosive open-world action game set in a massive, highly reactive, war-torn world. A power-hungry tyrant messes with Venezuela’s oil supply, sparking an invasion that turns the country into a warzone???????” With a hat tip to Venezuela Today this new video game, showing a major street in Caracas on fire, represents a significant cultural shift. Gone are the days when Venezuela was just an insignificant Latin American country, or a more ridiculed version of Mexico. It’s now the center of attention, the focus of evil in this world today. I am not a big…
6:00 a.m. Greenwich Main Time City: London Brrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggg!!!!!!!!!!! Brrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnggggggggg!!!!!!!!! Roy: Hullo, mate. William: Goddamn it, don’t you hello mate me, you oleaginous punk. This is Caracas calling. Roy: Wot’s up? William: You know what’s up, Swedish Wonder Kid. And boy you better have an explanation. R: Hunh? W: Haven’t you seen the London Times? We have a crisis. One week before Our Fearless Leader makes his grand debut in London? Do you see what’s in it? R: No, I only read my own Web site, the font of all truth. W: Cut the clowning, blobbo. You know very well what…
Every leftist and his chihuahua has seen fit to adapt the image of Che Guevara on his cheap mass-produced t-shirt. It’s an all-purpose “revolutionary” (and very fake revolutionary) insignia. Not only was Che Guevara a thief and a psychopathic killer, he was also a mercenary who took a special pleasure in ending the lives of very young victims. He killed people for no reason whatever, and then drew a draw out of his fancy cigarette-holder, emblem of the very rich. He was a foul foul creature, one of the worst who ever lived. And yet, in this Hollywood-tinged age, he…
Oh it’s a rocky road to socialism, the road to Chavismo. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has assured that, because the doggone donkey trail out of Caracas to the airport (the bridge to Socialism already collapsed) has been done in by a rockslide. So, the road to Socialism, the Sea of Happiness ever promised by Hugo Chavez like a shimmering ribbon, is now covered with a big mound of rainslicked mud. Note that unlike those hateful, capitalist private sector places, there is only one road to Socialism and it goes through Caracas. No road? No socialism. And no entry to Caracas.…
BBC News: Russian President Vladimir Putin has used a Victory Day parade to issue a warning to neo-Nazis and other nationalist extremists. He said they were “leading the world to a dead end” and would not be tolerated in Russia. His comments follow a series of attacks on foreigners – some of them fatal. Ä…Å By using a big, set-piece occasion to raise the issue, Mr Putin is stressing the moral urgency of Russia’s racist problem, says the BBC’s Russian affairs analyst Steven Eke. “Those who are again trying to raise the defeated flags of Nazism, who sow ethnic hatred,…
Cuba has secured a spot on the new United Nations human rights council, the board that replaced a previous one, which was intended to keep countries like Zimbabwe and Burma off these boards. Cuba is the biggest human rights violator in the hemisphere. It is one of the few tyrannies in the world that refuses its citizens the right to leave, effectively turning it into an island prison. It has one of the world’s highest suicide rates. Its locals without party connections get no health care, and in fact are denied education if their parents are dissidents. Its residents are…
Today signals the beginning of the end for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. His oil-fueled pork-barrel project to buy off the Americas and secure absolute power is now showing signs of fraying badly at the seams. It has to tatter, of course, and the reason is simple: Chavez’s Cuban socialism does not work. Three powerful news items around Hugo Chavez’s personal ATM machine — I mean, Venezuela’s oil production — tell the story, and these stories are starting to arrive fast and thick: 1. All new (corrected, thank you Nick) oil production from 32 operating contracts with foreign firms HAS COMPLETELY…
Iran’s leader, Mahmood Ahmadinejad, Monday sent a letter to President Bush in some sort of effort to communicate with him, and to halt potential action over Iran’s nuclear program. It has a weird bloggerly quality to it, mulling over events, ranting and raving here, whining about always being a victim there, and it’s sort of interesting to read. But the most interesting part (to me) is Ahmadinejad’s clear reference to Venezuela’s dictator, Hugo Chavez. It’s obvious he watches the Chavista soap opera going on in the Western hemisphere, and clearly has discussed the paranoias of Chavez. They fill his thoughts.…
A fearless Peruvian democracy revolutionary, Maria Elena Moyano, may finally see her killer brought to justice. An arrest was made of the Shining Path Marxist terrorist who most likely did it 14 unpunished years ago this afternoon in Peru. I wrote about her case about a year ago here. Source: Peru Hilfe Moyano was a Peruvian community leader in a poor slum who organized to get the poor included into the system too. Instead of out in guerrillaville. The Shining Path hated her intensely for it, threatened her, tried to kill her, and eventually killed her. There’s a big difference…
In a little-reported story last week, Mexico experienced some fearsome riots, with Sweetness & Light reporting that they were about opposition to a new Wal-Mart. In San Salvador Atenco, in central Mexico state, not far from the capital, over 200 people were arrested, protesting a new Wal-Mart about to go up. One 14-year-old was killed, and President Vicente Fox has said over the weekend that the government overreacted. Naturally, the Marxist Zapatistas showed up, led by blue-eyed, white-skinned, failed, wanna-be professor Subcommandante Marcos, who says he represents the Indigenous people. But his opportunism (and he’s all about opportunism!) doesn’t obscure…
…the knives come out. On Saturday, the small city-state, and economic hub, of Singapore went to the polls to elect a new parliament. For the first time in years the ruling People’s Action Party faced a real challenge to its 47-year grip on power – with the opposition gaining a large chunk of the vote, including in the Prime Minister’s own constituency. In spite of electoral rallies that saw tens of thousands attend for the opposition, and barely hundreds for the ruling party – the PAP secured victory. By no means was their win as a result of ballot-stuffing. The…
Amid all the smoke and dust of urbanized Jakarta – motorcycles, white Islamic veils, clove cigarettes, blue jeans, smoking satay on the street grill – in a megalopolis of something like 21 million people – there is a real Java, Indonesia, too. This one isn’t revolutionary, but eternal. By eternal, I mean it seems to resist EVERY change in favor of itself, its OWN identity. Java is the same as it always was. Not that it is always easy to live this way, of course, it’s just that it’s frequently done. You might ask why such a post belongs on…
Blogger Boli-Nica, a Bolivian national who knows a load of baloney when he sees it, whales hell out of the newest development coming out of that Chavisticating country: The army of 400 auditors from Venezuela’s flamingly corrupt, incompetent, thieving oil company rolling in to inspect the books at Bolivia’s national energy company. Boli points out that there’s something distinctly unsavory about the auditors of ONE country, coming down to audit the books of COMPETITOR! When has that ever happened except in a hostile takeover? It’s scary indeed. Aside from that, Boli points out that Venezuela’s auditors have an Augean Stable…
No poverty in ‘revolutionary’ Cuba? No people living in the streets? This is what Castro and its supporters on the extreme left keep on saying. The reality is quite the opposite. Contacto Cuba has a must-see video showing street people in Havana. The video, made in cladestinity, includes street people telling their daily life. Not surprisingly, for those who never believed in Castroite propaganda, when asked about how they think their future would look like, everyone said “my future? it’s the street” . Others even affirmed: “If I could, I would move to the United States” and another said :…
It’s finally out. We knew he was a megalomaniac. We knew he was like Hitler in Paris when he strutted through to “congratulate” his newest colony of Bolivia. The signs are everywhere, and starting to come together: Hugo Chavez’s ultimate masterplan is to rule the world. Literally. He’s got it all mapped out in various regions and on five fronts. His three-pronged strategy is “anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism and advancement of The Project.” Sound nutsy enough to you? Sound Hitlerian enough? If you don’t think so, you haven’t read this longer piece detailing Hugo Chavez’s very own goal for global domination at…
Political temperature time for the Americas and Boz has a new collection of polls for the hemisphere this week. The lowdown on Mexico, and rightwing PAN party candidate Felipe Calderon’s growing presidential election lead is one thing, as well as the fascinating political lineup going on in Peru – which makes me think the worst things that can happen probably won’t. In all, a good week, and lots of stuff I haven’t mentioned. Go see what he’s got here.
This week, Evo Morales nationalized Bolivia’s natural gas industry. He didn’t do it as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez did, by a hundred kisses of law, order, and win-win “people’s” baloney, but in the old 1960S style: with guns and goons. Like a pirate, he confiscated the assets of others and called them his own. Then he demanded that the rest of the world like it. This thug creates no value, produces no product. All he does is take from others. Brazil, Argentina, Spain and indirectly, Chile, were most affected. In that, he struck out at his best potential allies in order…
As I have written before, dinner table talk in Venezuela is ‘who got shot, who got kidnapped, who got murdered, when do we emigrate.’ That’s normal everyday conversation, every single day at every single dinner table in Venezuela. It’s that bad. You can imagine what the barbershop talk is like! One Venezuelan barber in the Petare slum of Caracas, having heard enough stories from his customers, decided to write them down, act them out, and film them. He didn’t have any actors, all he had was ketchup for blood, flour for cocaine and his buddies for actors. His big Hollywood…
Happy May to everyone – it’s been flurrying all day in Ulaanbaatar! My family lives about 12km NNW of the city in the hills at the very edge of the city (great hiking!). We live in a one-room house, but most of our neighbors live in gers. The front window looks out over UB, which is always cloaked in smog, and I rejoice each time I recall that I am no longer living in that cloud. Last month we did a homestay with herders in the Kharkhorin valley. I got a lot of experience combing goats for cashmere, as the…
This is the question many would ask themselves after reading the news of a new terror attack against Italian troops. This time the fact occurred in Afghanistan. Just a few weeks after the attack on the Carabinieri in Iraq, that killed 3 of them, now it’s the turn of the Italian soldiers in Afghanistan. The new Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi announced that its weak government would withdraw the troops out of Iraq as soon as possible. Terrorists may have thought that by hitting Italy in Afghanistan as well, Prodi might be easily convinced to withdraw the troops from there…
That’s the question that Lee Harris asks in a column over at TCS Daily. He focuses on the unfolding situation in Latin America, where Axis of Subversion trio Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Evo Morales are undoing the democratic fiber of the entire continent. To explain the resurgence of state socialism in this wellspring, he looks to important thinkers of both Marxism and capitalism alike. The root? Populism. This much is already known, and its potential effects on the region dangerous. What is not delved into is the exact nature of this populism and how it is morphing into state…
Outside of following the politics of developing countries, I also like to follow the markets. Especially the markets in countries that are up-and-coming or not even on the radar. Markets where a lot of people don’t even know markets exist. Others they would. Places like Mexico have been booming. But so have many places in the Middle East; for example, Saudi Arabia, which introduced the Tadawul stock index in 2001, began at 8000 points and topped 20,000 in mid-February this year. Kuwait and Egypt have also been riding uphill at lightning speed, a lot of this due to rising oil…
In Cuba, people have two faces: the one they’re forced to show when they have to march and listen to the long Castro’s speeches, and the one they prefer to show when they are almost sure that the police don’t see them. Here is a young Cuban who derides Cuba’s daily life and so the regime. It’s a courtesy of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) , that didn’t publish the name of the guy in order to protect him from the ire of the State Security and its paramilitary mobs. “Havana is the city of the long lines. Just imagine…
Eduardo Avila at Global Voices has an extremely good Bolivian blog roundup covering all the angles on Bolivia’s energy nationalization, an event that has rocked at least three continents this week. It’s an excellent glimpse on what the different Bolivian blogs – of all ideologies – are saying on this week’s biggest event. Read it here.
Who could have a fortune like that but an absolute ruler, a totalitarian dictator like Fidel Castro himself? The bearded beast is today worth $900 million, thanks to high commodity prices and some help from his little Venezuelan friend. Cubans go hungry, making less than a dollar a day, and freeze ice for lunch so that the meal tastes more like “food.” The obesity epidemic is nonexistent in Cuba and it’s not because of any accomplishment of Castrodom, let alone too many rabbit salads. It’s due to starvation living conditions. Castro, meanwhile, traipses around billionaire-style, isolated, alone, Gatsby-like, in a…