The nationwide Venezuela power outage
Link here. The article gives a good overview of the now days-long blackout that will go on for days more. Key quote:
How did the country reach this point, in terms of its power network?
Years of disrepair, lack of maintenance and investment. From a human capital point of view, repressive management, terrible wages, and unsafe working conditions. For instance, the technicians are forbidden to talk about this. In February 2018, union leader Elio Palacios was detained because he said that a national blackout was imminent.
The one detail that would have accurately described those years of neglect would have been “socialist rule.” The people who have been in charge of Venezuela since the 1990s have all been heroes of today’s modern American socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well as most of the leaders in the Democratic Party.
Be prepared for the same here. We already see signs of this collapse in urban cities that have been solid Democratic Party strongholds for decades, such as San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. These fascist political leaders like political and economic collapse, because they can use it as a lever to garner more power and wealth to themselves.
Note also this quote from the second link above:
“What can you do without electricity?” said Leonel Gutierrez, a 47-year-old systems technician, as he carried his six-month-old daughter while he walked to find groceries. “The food we have has gone bad.”
Yet this is exactly the future envisioned by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) in her New Green Deal, where all future electricity will come only from renewable resources, a concept that is simply impossible. The result will be no electricity at all.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Link here. The article gives a good overview of the now days-long blackout that will go on for days more. Key quote:
How did the country reach this point, in terms of its power network?
Years of disrepair, lack of maintenance and investment. From a human capital point of view, repressive management, terrible wages, and unsafe working conditions. For instance, the technicians are forbidden to talk about this. In February 2018, union leader Elio Palacios was detained because he said that a national blackout was imminent.
The one detail that would have accurately described those years of neglect would have been “socialist rule.” The people who have been in charge of Venezuela since the 1990s have all been heroes of today’s modern American socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well as most of the leaders in the Democratic Party.
Be prepared for the same here. We already see signs of this collapse in urban cities that have been solid Democratic Party strongholds for decades, such as San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. These fascist political leaders like political and economic collapse, because they can use it as a lever to garner more power and wealth to themselves.
Note also this quote from the second link above:
“What can you do without electricity?” said Leonel Gutierrez, a 47-year-old systems technician, as he carried his six-month-old daughter while he walked to find groceries. “The food we have has gone bad.”
Yet this is exactly the future envisioned by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) in her New Green Deal, where all future electricity will come only from renewable resources, a concept that is simply impossible. The result will be no electricity at all.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
It’s like something out of Atlas Shrugged.
“These fascist political leaders like political and economic collapse”
When you administer the poison, make sure you have plenty of antidote that can be available for the right price…
Never let a crisis go to waste.
To build a new society, you must first tear down the old one. Rising from the ashes.
You got a break some eggs to make an omelette. Don’t jump ship in midstream, stay the course.
We must all hang together or we will surely hang separately. I was only following orders.
“You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish.”
John Galt’s Speech
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2019/02/15/donald-trump-venezuela-socialism-bernie-sanders-ilhan-omar-column/2861461002/
Robert wrote: “The one detail that would have accurately described those years of neglect would have been ‘socialist rule.’”
I tend to phrase this even more generally: when you let government run things, all you get is what government wants; when we run things, we get what we want. In Venezuela, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and other places, much of what the people have is the result of what government wanted. People have been or are beginning to flee all these places, because the price of that free stuff is too high. It is not just financial, it is also the standard of living and lifestyle that the people had wanted. Among other things, San Franciscans were promised electricity from renewable sources, but one of the the prices they pay for it is that they have (literally) tons of human feces on the sidewalks; not such a good deal for being green.
So how does a government take control from the people? They don’t. The people hand over the control. In all the places I noted above, control was given to government through elections. Government promised good things for little or no cost — at least no cost for most of the voters — and the people chose to take free stuff from the government. Notice that the article that Blair Ivey linked said that in 2007 Venezuela promised free electricity. The people forgot that someone has to make all that free stuff, and as we are seeing in Venezuela, no one is making enough free stuff. We saw it also in Detroit, and now we are seeing it in New York City.
As seen in Venezuela and the story “Atlas Shrugged,” the delivery of the goods that are produced slows or stops as the socialist transportation system degrades. Resources go to waste, efficiency is lost
It can happen here in America, and it has. Not only has it happened in several of our modern cities (Detroit was declared to be the model city for the Democrats, just after they took control through the ballot box, and see where it is today, with half the 1960 population and poverty up the wazoo), but it happened in Plymouth Colony.
I was talking to a young man, this weekend, and he know nothing of Plymouth Colony. All the oldsters in the conversation remembered their lessons from high school, demonstrating that the tragedy of that colony’s brush with socialism is tremendously memorable. But it is telling that today’s schools do not teach that socialism in America cost half the Pilgrims their lives in the only year that socialism was tried. The Pilgrims next tried free market capitalism, and in one growing season had enough left over to invite their Indian neighbors for a three-day feast, which Americans now celebrate as Thanksgiving.
Sometimes socialists say that socialism can only work when it is created from a capitalist nation. Venezuela is a classic example of this. It took a while for the Venezuela socialists to run out of other people’s money (as Margaret Thatcher noted), but tragedy is befalling them, just as it did in Plymouth Colony.
Sometimes socialists say that it has failed in the past because the wrong people were in control of their socialist system. That only means that it is not the system that works, but it is the people who work the system.
Free market capitalism has worked every time it is used. Even when the wrong people use it, it works. Communist China and socialist India have both moved toward free market capitalism, and between these two countries, a billion people have come out of poverty since they began their move. That shows how easily and how well free market capitalism works.
Now, the most productive people are fleeing New York, just as in the story “Atlas Shrugged.” This leaves the less productive ones to pay for all the free stuff that their government promised them. “Atlas Shrugged” described a society in which government overregulated business so that government got what it wanted, but at the expense of the people.
In a free market capitalist country, We the People choose what is produced by way of what we are willing to buy for the price we have to pay, and that drives the societal mechanism that produces what we want.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, electricity for the people is not a high priority for government, again at the expense of the people. In the United States, the Democrats are moving far, far further to the left in order to keep ahead of the Republicans, who are moving left, too.
Q:
What is the historic reliability of the Venezuelan power-grid, to begin with?
“Good news, Choco Ration is going up”
https://youtu.be/ciD6G_bT1Ps
0:08
“Look out man, ’cause there are rules & if you break them then God help you.”
Jordan Peterson
https://youtu.be/qtVzdBDXm3E
8:16
“These hierarchies that I have been talking about, those things are older than trees”
Jordan Peterson
https://youtu.be/aS1Pg8XqOz0
12:55
I have come to the conclusion that when a people want to elect a leader, a president, they need a way to vet the candidates.
In our capitalist republic we use a sometimes evil system. The guy who can gather the most cash and thus the most followers wins. He who can convince the most rich people to give him cash stands a good chance. Its also a good way to weed out the nut cases, normally.
Political parties help you organize and gather support.
But in a socialist society with no really rich people to get your first funds from what do you do?
Does the government just hand you money to campaign? What if there are a thousand candidates, does everyone get the same amount of cash?
Without the really rich capitalists who runs the networks and news outlets? The government?
I guess that after a few election cycles its the government that chooses who you get to vote for.
Socialism without capitalism is just communism, which is nothing more than a benevolent dictatorship. If it stays that way.