Slashdot Mirror
Venezuelan President Survives Drone Assassination Attempt (cnn.com)
The Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, has survived an apparent assassination attempt involving drones that exploded close to him while he was speaking at an event in Caracas. State television showed Maduro abruptly cutting short his speech during a celebration of the National Guard's 81st anniversary. From a report: In a tweet, the president of Venezuela's National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, called the incident at the military parade a "terrorist attack against the president and the high military command blaming the opposition for the violence." Venezuela's international government broadcaster, TeleSUR, said on Twitter that the Venezuelan government confirmed an attempted attack on Maduro. Venezuela's vice president for communications, Jorge Rodriguez, later addressed the nation on live TV at the request of Maduro. He said people heard explosions that corresponded to drones and heard drones detonate near a parade for the occasion.
If it was an actual assassination attempt against the Venezuelan President is dubious, given there were at least two explosions and he was healthy enough to appear on live TV a couple hours later. How far away the explosions were from him was only vaguely referenced, but apparently was close enough to the parade that he thought they were fireworks. He was on a stage, which was presumably to the side of the parade's path. A few people supposedly responsible were arrested, so it's not like an anonymous attacker was controlling the drones (or they were, but a convenient patsy was arrested). That said, no evidence was given that drones were involved.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I'll wager dollars to doughnuts that this is a hoax, staged to make Maduro into a sympathetic figure. The rate of inflation is approaching a million percent a year; they've just lopped five zeroes off the value of the currency. The Venezuelan people are fleeing across the border as fast as they can.
Anybody who could afford a drone has already left, and the first world nations don't care enough about South America to bother to assassinate him. Therefore: Probable hoax. He'll use this as a pretext to consolidate power and steal all the rest of the money.
Note 7 being used as tv camera.
It's funny how people just associate socialism and communism to any government not working out.
They are a democratic presidential republic like the US.... a failed one you can say that fell into dictatorship.... but that doesn't make them commies....
Democracies are not unfailable.... look at the US at the moment... look awefully close.... but I'm sure US will elect someone saner and things will be back to normal after the next election given the deeply ingrained democratic culture and education. That said if a few more populist elections happen .... US could go the way of Argentina...
His point was that 3 "Banana Republics" had more equally distributed wealth than what is ostensibly the Greatest Nation on Earth. He was right to point that out, but like all popular politicians fighting against the American oligarchy he's got to be careful how he says things least people take quotes out of context to smear him.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Why would the CIA need to spend any resources attempting to destabilize Venezuela when they are doing a far better job themselves? The usual tripe about oil no longer plays since the U.S. has its own vast reserves that we can now exploit and the Venezuelan oil requires special refinement that other sources do not.
The simple truth is that centrally planned economies are not workable and that when you go around nationalizing businesses, no one wants to invest in setting up a company there. Add on currency restrictions (no sane person uses the official exchange rate) and the idiotic financial policies and this is exactly what you can expect.
I am sure that people will still try to line up to defend socialism by talking about the Nordic model (which is not really socialist, but that is a completely different argument) but what Venezuela has done is Soviet era stuff that we know for a fact does not work.
If anything, the U.S. benefits more from leaving Venezuela to their own devices. At least now when socialists start talking about their great utopia we can point to the literal hell that you actually get. I just hope that the amount of misery that most Venezuelans have to endure in order for us to get that point is not so great, but history leads me to believe that this will not be the case.
Anyone who "sees parallels" between the deregulation and push for expanded trade and employment in the US relative to the nationalization, currency controls, and Government-economic-stranglehold of Venezuela is simply insane. The economic policies put forth by the Trump Administration are pretty much diametrically opposed to those of Maduro.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Some of what Trump has done is good, but we should not pretend that he is some great proponent of the free market. For example, his penchant for tariffs and trade wars is outright idiotic and will only hurt the American economy in the long run. That Trump looks good on economic policy is more as a result of Maduro being batshit crazy than Trump being intelligent.
Keep in mind that Trump is not promoting tariffs and trade wars--he is simply reacting to tariffs in other countries. The media conveniently forgets to mention that Trump has said he will sign a trade agreement tomorrow with any country that agrees to sign a bilateral agreement where both sides agree to lower tariffs to zero. That's his definition of free market. I disagree with him on a lot of things, but I agree with him on that.
"It's funny how people just associate socialism and communism to any government not working out."
That's because socialist and communist governments NEVER work out. Your pattern recognition abilities aren't too good, are they?
That gives way too much credit to the CIA. When they wanted Bin Ladin dead, they sent the Seals. The CIA is a bunch of screwups.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
he is simply reacting to tariffs in other countries. ... I don't see a big difference.
The EU has tariffs on US products in the range of 6%, the US has tariffs on EU products in the range of 4%
Jumping up and putting tariffs in the range of 20% on selected EU products makes no sense IMHO.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The bombing might be fake. ...
The news is not
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The Soviet Union showed that a planned economy is workable.....it just doesn't grow as quickly.
Laughable. The Soviet Union ended up dirt poor after decades of lying to each other about what was actually being accomplished. Lost the cold war simply by running out of money. Classic quote from the era: "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." What definition of "workable" is that?
Never mind the police state.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The drone in this case was most likely a propaganda-level device carrying a sympathy bomb.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
50% higher tariffs aren't a big difference?
Maybe you should go back to school.
I'll just share this fine catalogue of CIA competence:
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyl...
attempting to destabilize Venezuela
Obviously, that isn't necessary. But there comes a time when the country is destabilized enough, and enemies (including the CIA) start planning for what comes after the destabilization. "He's unpopular enough that we can kill him now" - not a smart thing to think, probably, but in issues like these CIA has a track record of being monumentally stupid, so it's not impossible.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I think it was actually worse than that. The Soviet Union managed to miss educating its people for the current world's economy. That's why it is still centered on exploitation of mineral wealth. They still produce world class academics, but have no real way to get them into the economic life of the country. The West and Orient have figured out how via startup companies...well, China is rather using a sledgehammer here with their state owned companies, but they are not very efficient nor resourceful.
However, the worst thing the Soviet Union did to their people was make them reliant on the State. Putin needs to keep this charade up or he leads nothing. Too many of their people are susceptible to Kremlin propaganda. With no initiative of their own, they are also prey to the few oligarchs who have transitioned from state ownership to "private" ownership.
The example of Venezuela doesn't show the failure of central planning. A trained hamster could do a better job with central planning than Maduro does.
This is the with the right leader it would work! argument and it is complete bullshit.
"His name was James Damore."
"We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" is funny hyperbole.
It was not hyperbole in the slightest. Saw it with my own eyes.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
...and the first world nations don't care enough about South America to bother to assassinate him
Translation: "I don't know enough about geopolitics - who does? - to really have any fucking clue who would or wouldn't want Maduro dead... but damn it sure is easy to send bold declarations like the above ripping forth from my asshole...
No, it is the "Venezuela provably has the wrong leader" argument and if you can't see the difference, you are bullshit.
Better planners would only delay the inevitable coming collapse and prolong the Venezuelan people's suffering.
The problem with collectivist systems is base human nature. Collectivist systems must overcome base human nature to succeed, capitalist systems leverage & harness that same base human nature towards constructive ends.
All collectivist forms of government like socialism and communism are authoritarian by their very nature. The State tells people where they'll live, where they'll work, what work they'll do, how much money they will earn/receive, what sort and how much education they receive, what level medical care they will get, etc etc etc.
Anytime you put people in authority over others without unavoidable and direct consequences for abusing that authority, those people placed in authority will generally become increasingly authoritarian, capricious, corrupt, and cruel the longer the situation exists as was shown by Milgram's experiment.
Socialism and communism provide people with food, shelter, medical care, and work. We have an institution here in the US that provides the same things, but very few are willing to participate voluntarily.
We call it the prison system.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Let's see.... USSR, Vietnam, N Korea, Laos, Cambodia, the whole Eastern Bloc, Zimbabwe, pre WW2 Germany China before they turned semi capitalistic. and now Venereal. He's right! They all worked out great and didn't kill, starve, and torture tens of millions of their own.
Technically correct, factually irrelevant - due to the tiny difference between 4% and 6%.
What might be relevant is the amount of subsidies each 'nation' pays to their producers.
Got any stats on that?
Sounds that may be explosions were heard during his speech. That much cannot be disputed.
Maduro says right wing plot, Colombia president, yadda yadda ...
However, fire fighters on the scene said it is a gas tank explosion inside an apartment near where the speech was.
Neither side gave more details, and in this climate and culture of conspiracies, it is hard to get to the real facts.
Long version of the above on the BBC.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Ok, so which planner made Hong Kong into an ultra rich city? Singapore?
I don't know about Hong Kong, but in Singapore it was Lee Kuan Yew.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Even if not a deliberate fraud, accidental explosions can be turned into causes for war.
"Remember" the Maine" was a political response to an apparently accidental explosion on the USS Maine that helped trigger the Spanish Amercican War. The Reichstag fire in 1933 was used by the Nazi party to blame the Communist party in Germany, a vital part of their rise to power. The history of the modern Middle East is filled with the political results of bombings and _accusations_ of bombings and murders, some of them entirely fake.
The quaint age of this expression is betrayed by the inflation charts...
And to allow him to properly crack down on what's left of the opposition...
This implies, there is some money left to be stolen. Unfortunately, Socialism is so bad, even the most equal comrades are still fairly poor compared to those suffering under KKKapitalism.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Maduro says it was an assassination attempt by drones, BUT firefighters say a gas tank in an apartment exploded.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/04/venezuelan-president-nicolasmaduro-cuts-short-speech-panic-amid/
Not, but it might cheer up some Venezuelans. Worth the shot.
Ezekiel 23:20
This troll was masterfully executed. I give you points for the following: - blaming the US for Chavez' brutal mismanagement - repeated grammatical errors - simultaneously embracing Islamophobia and Islamic terrorism - your "woke" denunciation of the mass media Next time, add some Unicode to annoy everyone, and refer to your detractors as "sheeple." But otherwise, this was a terrific effort.
Starving, referring to the Ukrainian famine of the 1930 and China's Great Leap Foward of the 70's
Even if Maduro died tomorrow, the Army is controlled by the Chavistas, and those generals have a vested interest in making sure the regime stays afloat (they're as corrupt as hell and a new government would almost certainly lock them up). Killing Maduro would probably makes things worse since the Chavistas would both be able to blame the US and simultaneously lock up opposition leaders. The best that can happen is a revolution coupled with a colonels revolt or coup. At that point the Chavistas would probably flee the country with suitcases filled with gold and US currency.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Germany and Japan were both really destroyed by WWII (they lost, were occupied, and Japan had been nuked) and they recovered within a couple of decades to become world class, dominant economic powers; by 1990 Japan had surpassed the Soviet Union despite much less population and far fewer natural resources. Well, make that, West Germany recovered; East Germany under a Soviet style government/economy didn't do so well. After what Japan went through in that war and their subsequent recovery, no one else can complain about starting over from a devastated country.
Funny how fans of socialism always proclaim "that wasn't socialism" every time it fails.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I tried saying "widely-known enemy if the working people, influence peddler, bribe solicitor, anti-freedom extremist, and paid agent of the Chinese intelligence services Hillary"... But it just didn't have the same ring to it.
Wow, what is the bigger part of that story: Venezuela still has fire departments... Or The apartments still have gas...
now, you can't have _excessive_ wealth for all. Excessive wealth is when it ceases to be material wealth and becomes _power_. It's when you can control access to food, shelter, medicine, education and transportation such that you begin to decide who lives and who dies. We have that in America today. 45,000 people die of completely preventable diseases every year.
The fear that comes from knowing that could be you is a big part of how our ruling class keeps the working class divided among themselves. You fight against single payer healthcare because you're afraid if the other guy has healthcare you won't get it. Only fear can make that work because it's been demonstrated multiple times that single payer healthcare works (Canada, Germany, France, all of Scandinavia, I could go on...).
Money is not necessarily power. It only becomes power when you can force someone to do something they otherwise would never consider doing. That's not fixing your plumbing. That's going to Afghanistan to fight for an oil pipeline we didn't need.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
>It was not hyperbole in the slightest. Saw it with my own eyes.
Exactly. Screw the dumbass Western socialist idiots who have never experienced the idiocy of equalizing pay yet propose it with the foam in their mouths.
There are no formerly Soviet socialists. None left. The ones that left are either professionals or senile.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
On the other hand are the subsidies that America has. How much government money is given to farmers?
US farmers received about $172 billion in 2010. The EU is considering cutting its subsidies down, by 2027, to $438 billion. Right now, it's about 3 times the US farm subsidies - and may "only" be 2.5 times that amount, in another 9 years.
With America it's like the playing field is never tilted enough in their favour.
Because it usually isn't. Your own request about farm subsidies shows as much.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The US has been nickel and dimed by it's trading partners since WW2. Why is it fair for the EU to impose 6% while the US is only imposing 4%?
Dude they own your president. That is as workable as anything gets....
Dude, read my post again and notice I that that it is about the Soviets. Russia 2 is about the mob and the corrupt kleptocracy. It's a do-over of the old Soviet police state apparatus, with mafia instead of communists this time. It does work somewhat better economically but is still terribly inefficient.
To distract the long suffering Russian citiizenry from their miserable economic state, Putin sets out on his foreign adventures. Yes, they did manage to put their man into the office of the presidency of the United States. That's a remarkable achievement. technically, much like a string of serial murders might be an impressive achievement, but is not to be admired except perhaps by another serial murderer. This was just one of a string of horrific achievements by Russia 2, which must not go unpunished.
Compare the Chinese economic miracle to Russia's stagnation. China is also a police state, but it is not run by the mob, it is run by the police. This has proved to work pretty well, growing faster than America or Europe or any other major industrialized power for many years. Because the Chinese government recognized that the capitalist system inherently outperforms a planned economy and they simply legalized it, that's all they had do do, along with mechanisms to regulate foreign exchange, capital flow, things like that. They had the bright idea that maybe capitalism is not incompatible with a centralized police state too. So far they are right.
Russia does not have a capitalist system, they just have a massive state sponsored racketeering operation. I will step out here and say, this is not as unworkable as the old dead Soviet system, but is still unworkable. We shall see.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
What's even funnier is when systems like those of Norway, Scandinavia and much of western Europe that people actually use as an example of a socialist system done right are brought up, people like you claim they're somehow not socialist enough and thus don't count.
As hard as it may be to understand, socialism is fundamentally a pretty vague concept and can be be implemented in a lot of different ways without the state control of the economy that has messed things up so badly in Venezuela.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."