Problem Very Easily Solved

There is a very easy fix for this...

Shoot one down.  Or at least shoot and miss...but shoot.

Death Throes for Venezuela

Belmont Club Guy Richard Fernandez pens "Death of a Nation" in re Venezuela.

I've been saying this for awhile...always early but never wrong, baby (OK, sometimes wrong).

Also, there was an article on Bloomberg.com the other day that Venezuela was stiffing the printing companies that are printing up planeloads of bolivar notes.  Not good, at some point those guys will need to get paid or they'll cut Maduro off.  No more printing money, in Venezuela's situation, and the economy will crater into a barter system.

Finally, there is alot of misery in Venezuela, but we should have ZERO sympathy.  In fact we should cheer it. Chavismo is just another iteration of the inherently flawed organizing principle that is socialism, and we need constant reminders that it is a failure, lest we resurrect and maintain an enthusiasm for it in other parts of the world.

Obama and the Stock Market

Is Obama trying to take credit for the stock market returns over his tenure?  Looks that way.

“One of the constants that I’ve had to deal with over the last few years is folks on Wall Street complaining, even as the stock market went from in the 6,000s to 16,000 or 17,000,” he said, referring to the rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average during his administration.

I can't update my analysis on this just now, but let me reiterate my basic thesis about Obama and the stock market: 1) what, in general, has been bad for Barack Obama has been good for the stock market; and, 2) the stock market expected 3 very bad things to come of the Obama era, and when it became apparent that only one would materialize, it rose on the reduction of fear rather than on a wave of optimism.  My key posts outlining this are here and here and here.  And here is the gist:

...despite re-election, Barack Obama's popularity has gone consistently down and his power has consistently ebbed since the day he took office.  Even at the supposed height of his influence, he had to scrape, scrounge and have Harry Reid pull a few sneaky tricks to get his signature legislation through.  Beyond that his accomplishments have been nearly nil, and, in my view, the stock market loves it.

The market had big legs up in response, or in absorbing the reality even before the fact, to major Obama defeats, the 2010 midterm elections and the 2014 loss of the Senate.  In general, however, the Obama tenure has been one of slowly eroding power and influence and the market has melted up.  It picked up on his ineffectuality long ago.  For the last year or so, it has been discounting what a post-Obama world might look like.

Having said all that, I DO believe that the Democrats' policies have resulted in the stock returns that we've experienced in recent years, but these results are completely unintentional and diametrically opposed to what Democrats say they want to achieve.  What we are seeing is either profound lack of understanding, on the part of Democrats, of how the world works or a completely phony facade of rhetoric built on top of a policy program specifically designed for the wealthy class.

Again, The Wages of Apathy Are Dear

As what any reasonably informed or analytical person could have told you from the start, Warren Wilhelm, aka Bill DeBlasio the current mayor of New York City, is a typically corrupt, Democrat-machine politician.  While maybe not as rotten to the bone as others, he exhibits all the garden-variety stains of corruption that New York City has pleasantly enjoyed respite from for 20 years.  Add to that rank stupidity and it's the Big Apple's profound shame that this putz sits in City Hall.  (If we are going to have corrupt Mayors, we want effective, productive, and visionary corrupt Mayors!)

So I will say it again, DeBlasio is a political science lesson to the citizenry...don't be apathetic.  The Wages of Apathy, as I call them, are paid in a ninkompoop like DeB.  Getting things abjectly wrong in exercising your vote is another problem to be avoided but that is not the issue here (for a case study in that type of mistake, see Obama, Barack).  Not caring, not voting, thus letting an absurdly small number of the citizenry saddle your polity with disastrous leadership is even easier to avoid than an active mistake (again, see Obama, Barack).

The wages of apathy are costly.

Minimum Wage Best Thing for Kiosk Biz In Decades

I was not the first to point this out, but if you are pointing this out now, you are WAY behind the curve...

"Bugger Off, Obama"

I agree wholeheartedly with the number of Brits (like this one) who've come out and said, in response to the Lightworker's condescending and irrational instructions on the "Brexit" vote, more or less, "Bugger off, Obama."

That being said, don't forget it was many of these Euro-schmucks that helped give us this shithead to begin with.

Ugh. Bloomberg: Those Unlucky Venezuelans

Here is another one of those examples of terrible journalism that soft-pedals the destruction wrought by socialist policies and authoritarian government.

It has been an exceptionally painful year for Venezuelans, suffering from violent crime, chronic shortages, plummeting oil prices on which they depend, declining health and fractured government. Yet this past week it seemed to reach a new low. A kind of resigned misery spread across a city that had once been the envy of Latin America.

A sudden combination of natural disasters joined man-made failures. The smog, called calima, is a meteorological phenomenon that involves ash and dust clouds fairly common for this time of year. Meanwhile a prolonged drought blamed on El Nino and related forest fires has arrived. Levels at the Guri dam in the south, which produces 40 percent of the country’s electricity, are reaching record lows.

Bad year?  Venezuela has been headed down the toilet for years and years as Chavez and now Maduro have destroyed the economy with their aggressive state-directed, oil-funded socialism. 

Natural disasters?  Aww, pobrecitos!  Bullshit, Venezuelans have cheered, voted for, and even during the worst of it, tolerated Chavista destruction.  They have nobody to blame but themselves. No one should have any sympathy for Venezuelan people, they are reaping what they have enthusiastically sown for decades.