a Conspiracy of Illusions

I recently finished watching a series of 5 docudramas entitled Chernobyl.  It was an event from 1986 that I remember when there was an explosion in what is now Ukraine, but at the time was part of the Soviet Union.  I suppose I always just thought it was a problem and it caused a large area to be evacuated and remain evacuated today, but never realized exactly how close a majority of the population of the Soviet Union and Europe came to be wiped out.  It was a thought provoking, profound, and enlightening (albeit sobering) 5 hours. 

There is a quote from one of the main characters, who in the series helps mastermind the solution and cleanup.  I've gone back and listened to it a few times because it's rather profound.

"What is the cost of lies? 

It is not that we will mistake them for the truth. The danger is that if we hear enough lies, that we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then but to abandon the hope for the truth and content ourselves with stories?  In the stories it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame."

After I finished the series, my friend who had recommended it, suggested I also listen to the NPR Podcast on each one of the series that was an interview with the author/writer/producer.  I did listen.   In retrospect, I wish that I’d listened to the podcast at the end of each movie rather than all at the end.  

Without going into a description of all the narrative, I can say that at the end of the final podcast, the author was asked by the interviewer, what exactly was the one single point that he had learned from the entire experience which he had so carefully researched and documented.   The series covered many things, but the primary was the lies the Soviet Union told the world, themselves, and the people.   The author said that he’d come to see that each of us, whether in the Soviet Union, or today in America, live in a “conspiracy of illusions” and that he said he felt we did so because there were certain truths that men and women just could not accept/tolerate/endure or feel secure with.  And so, we let ourselves believe lies.    That expression stuck with me.

Like you reading this, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that I certainly don’t willingly live my life in lies or illusions.   But then the author gave an example of a green light.   He pointed out that each of us drive through a green light, usually at the normal rate of speed, and “believe” that we are safe because we have the green light.   In fact though, the green light is an illusion to us because it does not guarantee our safety.  It only keeps us safe, as long as the person with the red light stops, either by choice, or not stops by choice, or runs the light involuntarily.    I realized he was exactly correct.

For the past three days, I’ve been examining my own life to see how many illusions I can identify that I choose, consciously or subconsciously to believe, or illusions that I’ve had, but since discovered were not real or true.

My initial list may prompt the reader to examine their own lives.  I’ve also realized many illusions that I see in others, but don’t believe in myself.  I’ve included those as well, as a reminder to myself to not believe something similar.

Tomorrow will be like today.   Just as good, or just as bad. 

Disasters are certainly prone to happen.  But certainly only happen in other places, to other people.

I will be alive tomorrow so there is no urgency for any matter today, that I can wait and do tomorrow.   There will always be tomorrow.  

People who die in traffic accidents probably died because they were careless, drunk, distracted, or bad drivers.  I’m a good and cautious driver and I have no danger of being killed on the road in my life time.

Others should understand any tardiness of mine, because I am a busier person than they are.  

I can text and drive, because I'm really careful about being distracted.

I am safe and secure in my home because it has a locked door.

I am in control of my life and all the decisions I make.

I can rescue my children from their adversities.

Children sent to religious universities will get a better (from my point of view) education because those schools were established on a Christian foundation like Baylor, TCU, SMU.

Raise up a child in the way of the Lord and when they are old they will not depart from it.

If you're suffering hunger, you've probably failed to follow God closely enough to depend on Him for your needs.

I will be loved to the same extent that I love.

The church is a place of safe haven for all in need.

The United States is a morally upright country and only does things that need to be done for good in the world.  The USA is exceptional.

Health food makes me healthier.

I cannot make a difference in the changing the world by my self.

As long as I obey the law, government cannot make me do something I shouldn’t.

If you always do the "right" thing, you'll always come out to the good.

Although with some flaws, the United States is a good and Godly country.

People should be trusted until they show they cannot be trusted.

People with more education than me about a particular subject, are more likely to be right about a question on that subject than I am.

I can pledge my allegiance to a flag and a country.

I have some moral responsibility toward Endangered species to be protected and preserved.

Governments exist to protect me.

God blesses America more than others.

In the same vein as the last, God takes sides in wars.  And if the United States is in a war God is always on our side.

It might be ok to hate your enemies.   

Some people are not worthy of my, or other's, or society's forgiveness.

Being poor is primarily a result of making poor decisions. If you don't have a job it's because you don't want a job.

Being illiterate or uneducated is strictly a result of not taking school serious or paying attention.

Everyone in the USA have the same opportunity for education or success or greatness as anyone else.

White people, or any people, are not privileged.

I am not deceived about anything.

Democracy is the highest ideal of government and we know that everyone else would like it if they had it.   And we're going to show them how good it is, even if we have to kill them or destroy their country.   Sometimes you just have to destroy a village to save it.

Military service equals a status of warrior/protector/saint/admiration

USA Military only makes good decisions for freedom and our liberty.

Most other nations have people who are naturally inferior to Americans.

Because I am alive, I was born with certain rights.

I have a right to happiness, success, or freedom.

If I can't pay for my own healthcare or welfare, someone else should have to.

Demons are only in bad, evil, tormented people.  I have no demons.

Christians cannot have demons and if they did, they would know it.

I am the best judge of my own flaws or short comings.

The Month of March exists to show people who don’t drink what a hangover is like.  

I can trust that Fluoride in my drinking water is good for me because the government says it isn’t harmful?

I can believe that food is safe to eat because the government tells me they inspected it.

Government workers are public servants.

Being a veteran gives me some specialness or uniqueness or privilege.

The Brazilian Fisherman reaching success!

There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”

The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”

The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”

How Christianity Changed the World

The New Hebrides — which is now the nation of Vanuatu — was an area known for infanticide, cannibalism, the sacrifice of the wives after the death of their husbands, violence, murder and theft during the early 1800s when John Geddie arrived as a missionary. After 24 years of devoted service he died. Following his death, a commemorative tablet was placed in his memory: “In memory of John Geddie….When he landed in 1848 there were no Christians here, and when he left in 1872, there were no heathen.”

That’s a result of the first Christmas more than 2000 years ago.

R.R. Palmer, a major historian from Yale, wrote, “It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the coming of Christianity. It brought with it, for one thing, an altogether new sense of human life. For the Greeks had shown man his mind; but the Christians showed him his soul. They taught that in the sight of God, all souls were equal, that every human life was sacrosanct and inviolate. Where the Greeks had identified the beautiful and the good, had thought ugliness to be bad, had shrunk from disease and imperfection and from everything misshapen, horrible, and repulsive, the Christian sought out the diseased, the crippled, the mutilated, to give them help. Love, for the ancient Greek, was never quite distinguished from Venus. For the Christians held that God was love, it took on deep overtones of sacrifice and compassion.”

Christmas is obviously more about changing lives (and society) than toys, trees, and tinsel.

Following Constantine’s “conversion” in A.D. 325, the churches especially in the West, built and maintained hospitals, hospices for travelers and houses for orphans, widows and the indigent. The churches were the only group that the poor could look to as the Empire was crumbling. In fact, the Church in Rome supported 1,500 widows and virgins, as well as those ill in inns, prisoners and many of the poor. A number of hospitals were founded by rich Christians in various cities.

At the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325, the bishops were told to establish hospices (a place for travelers to rest) in every city that had a cathedral — which was the major town in a parish where the bishop lived and ruled! The first hospital was built by St. Basil in Caesarea in A.D. 369. Christian hospitals (the only kind) covered all of Europe and even beyond by the Middle Ages. In fact, it is said that Christian hospitals were the world’s first voluntary charitable institutions.

Note that the atheists and agnostics did not build hospitals and other charitable organizations.

Historians note that charitable organizations are almost unknown in the ancient world until after the time of Christ.

Monasteries in the early days of Christianity generated the copying of Scripture and other literature, especially from Greece, and their libraries provided the inspiration for the first universities in the twelfth and thirteenth century.

Kenneth Latourette declared in his classic seven-volume “A History of the Expansion of Christianity”: “After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Church, impelled by its Christian purpose, had become the schoolmaster of Western Europe and the tutor of the barbarian of the North. Under its auspices most of the universities of the Middle Ages had arisen.”

The notion of public education first came from the Protestant Reformers who taught male and female of all classes. In America, the first law to require education of the masses was passed by the Puritans. The law was called The Old Deluder Satan Act. Furthermore, the rise of the modern university is largely the result of Christian educational endeavors. And in 1910, America had 403 educational institutions of college grade under Protestant or Baptist sponsorship. All but one of the first 123 colleges in colonial America were Christian institutions. America’s university system emerged from the American seminaries: Princeton headed by John Witherspoon and Yale headed by Timothy Dwight.

Christianity changed the rules of behavior and produced a middle class not known to mankind. It had always been the rich and poor, the elite and the serfs. But with Christ who was a carpenter and Paul who was a tent maker, physical labor was now respectable and no longer limited to slaves and serfs. There was honor in all work and workers were to be treated fairly. All ethnic groups would be respected since all people were created by God. Laziness and idleness were seen as sinful. “If a man will not work, he shall not eat” was an admonition by the Apostle Paul. Thus, work was seen as an honorable and God-given calling. That helped produce a vibrant middle class.

The free world owes much to nonconformist Christianity with its emphasis on freedom of thought and liberty for everyone. It taught people to question the established church and legal systems. One of the first mass leaders of men was John Ball, a free preacher without a parish or pulpit but with plenty of pull. He was the first leader of a mass revolt in 1381 and had great influence preaching the doctrines of Bible translator John Wycliffe.

John Wesley (died 1790) was not only a great Methodist preacher but fought against bribery, smuggling, the plundering of wrecked vessels and general corruption of politics. He worked hard to relieve poverty and started missions to prisoners. He was a pioneer in prison reform. Before 1500, very few had attempted any prison reform. He was called “the best loved man in England.”

James Oglethorpe, John Howard, Robert Raikes, John Oberlin, William Wilberforce and scores of other Christian leaders made an astounding impact on Europe and the world.

Without a doubt, this carpenter from a hick town in Galilee changed the world as no other person who ever lived.

He also changed me.

Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives and writes columns for USA Today and authored 17 books.

Group Psychology: Manipulating the Masses

The question each man or woman should consider, but seldom will, is "are they part of the herd or an individual.  Most think they go thru life as independent creatures making their own decision, when in fact they are just part of various groups and allowing others to shape and influence almost every thing they do.

From the 1929 Book Propaganda, by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.  Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of socieity constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.  We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of . .  .in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . .who understand the mental processess and social patterns of the masses.  It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world."

For a more detailed look at this manipulation, in a wonderfully edited 11 minute and 50 second video, I'd recommend the Academy of Ideas on Group Psychology.  The Academy is neither right nor left, Dem or GOP, conservative or liberal.  It is a group of "free" thinkers that present the very most balanced perspectives on hundreds of different topics.

My advice to all:   Be the Stallion and not part of the herd.  If you're not the lead dog in the pack, your scenery in life never changes.

Pas de deux. The artistry of canned feces?

to my daughter,

We both have much trouble understanding how/why anyone can still be supporting DT?

I found this article interesting in its insights about the ability of people to be deceived. And more than be deceived, appear to think its the norm.   Sort of like "the Emperor has no clothes".

There are two great life lessons here.   1.  We are deceived because we want to be deceived.  and 2.   We don't know we are deceived (otherwise we wouldn't be).

The article below reminded me of seeing the Oscars several years ago and Bob Dylan was on the stage singing some song that he'd written for a movie that was nominated.   He came on stage in a hat and clothes that looked like he'd 1. dug out of dumpster 2. had slept in for the past week, and 3. were a hodgepodge of style.

Plus . . . he was totally and completely stoned or inebriated or whatever, beyond understanding.   He appeared on stage and began singing/slurring/mumbling words that were almost completely beyond understanding.   He was absolutely pathetic.   If he was an animal you would have wanted to shoot him and put him out of his misery.

Stevie Wonder could have done a better job at being an air traffic controller. 

  

But as he sang, rather than focusing the cameras on his incoherent babbling, I guess the producers/director decided it would be better to break away and shoot photos of the audience's attention to the performance.  I would have expected smirks or frowns or downcast heads of embarrassment at what was happening on stage.   But alas . .  .what I saw in everyone of the Hollywood artist-elite-cognoscenti faces was awe and amazement and apparent adoration.   Go figure? 

And the two that were most in "awe" were Michael Douglas and his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones.   In fact they were in such awe in their front row seats, that the camera went back and forth to them.   Dylan's voice became almost background sound and the director's efforts worked.  The viewer's attention was focused away from the dribble of this poetic-drooling-idiot-"artist" on stage and instead was directed to the famous-people who apparently showed that they could appreciate such avant-garde artistic endeavor and the artist himself. 
"heaven's no Catherine. He's not drooling saliva.   Why dear, can't you see that is sweat from putting such heart and soul into his singing!"

   

And then . . . finally the misery was over, and Dylan finished.   And with the camera focused on Michael Douglas and his wife . . .they were the first to do what I could not imagine.    The two of them were the first to stand, and then the entire auditorium stood, and clapped long and hard for this "genius".    The camera briefly returned to Dylan but then cut away quick, I would assume to keep from showing him stumble off the stage or perhaps be carried.   I was grateful that Dylan must have been so wiped out that he was not able to come back out for an encore. Or . . perhaps he did want to go back out to the adoration of his smiling fans?    (I could imagine in my mind the director running and scrambling back stage . . . . yelling "hell no, double hell no.  don't let that imbecile back out!. Break to commercial" and fearing he would try to go back out, and yelling for someone to try and restrain him with the temptation of another syringe in hand or saying "oh no, no Bob.  Here's a pipe. toke up pal and keep the edge off)

from the National Review online. 
Saturday May 13

The Campaign Is Over

 . . . . . . . . but there’s another form of the campaign mentality that is keeping people from thinking clearly now. Say what you will about Trump’s thyroidal tweeting and aphasic outbursts, it worked for him.

Trump’s approach was so unfathomably strange, so otherworldly in the realm of Earth logic, that his biggest fans had to believe it was all part of some grand strategy. This is a natural human response. When something or someone is so incomprehensibly strange and yet successful, we often assume there’s a genius at work that is just beyond our ability to grasp. Bernie Madoff bilked billions from people who just couldn’t bring themselves to argue with success.

I’ve always thought that some modern artists are also con artists. They create something so strange, so aesthetically alien, that insecure rich people assume it must be a work of a genius, so they’re willing to spend vast sums to convince other people that a) they can afford to indulge in it, and b) they’re members of the cognoscenti, too. The greatest example of this is probably Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista. In 1961, Manzoni literally crapped in a can — 90 tins to be exact. He printed out labels for the cans that read:

Artist’s Shit
Contents 30 gr net
Freshly preserved
Produced and tinned
in May 1961

In a touch that no novelist would dare attempt, Manzoni’s father, who actually owned a cannery, told his son: “Your work is sh**.”

It was a pas de deux of taking something both literally and seriously.

Last August, Manzoni’s canned feces sold at auction for 275,000 euros.

The Art of the Can

Much has been written about how Donald Trump became a billionaire by being, if not an outright con artist, then certainly a kind of performance artist. He sold an image, a lifestyle, a brand. “I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump “wrote” in The Art of the Deal. “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”

And, again, it worked for him. I don’t think Trump is as rich as he claims, but so what? He’s rich enough and he’s famous and, now, he’s president.

But what so many people can’t — or won’t — contemplate is that what worked for Trump in business, self-promotion, and even the presidential election may not transfer to the presidency itself.

This is a staggeringly obvious insight that many people are contorting themselves not to see. Sometimes skills don’t transfer. Piero Manzoni was arguably the most successful canner of feces in human history. I am happy to acknowledge that. But if I were wheeled on a gurney into an operating room, I would not take much solace from that fact if he were my heart surgeon.

Don’t worry Mr. Goldberg, I made a fortune spackling sh** into a can. You’ll be fine. Nurse, hand me that sharp thing.

Michael Jordan was a kind of artistic genius at basketball. Do I really have to belabor the point that those skills don’t necessarily translate into being a successful president?

I am shocked, daily, by the number of people who cannot let go of the idea — the article of faith, really — that Donald Trump has his opponents right where he wants them. The logical upshot of this is that he somehow meant to have historically craptacular poll numbers. I mean if he can execute his will and play ten moves ahead of the rest of us, then this must be part of his plan, right?

Bloomberg on the Virtues of China

Bloomberg argued in a September 2019 interview that China is moving coal power plants away from cities because the Communist Party “wants to stay in power in China, and they listen to the public.”

“When the public says I can’t breathe the air, Xi Jinping is not a dictator,” the billionaire businessman said. “He has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive.”

“You’re not going to have a revolution. No government survives without the will of the majority of its people,” Bloomberg insisted.

I am reminded this morning reading this, of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain going to visit Hitler after he had invaded Sundeland and returning to England to tell the King that Hitler's intentions were peaceful and he was not a bad man or a threat?

Wall Street's motto in December 2019 . .  . ."Commerce and trade at any cost".

Bloomberg also either forgets, or ignores, that a majority of the people can always be forced to follow with a military or police state with enough guns, jail cells, and gallos. The entire Russia government was taken over by a few hundred Lenin thugs with guns and baseball bats.

What Democratic Socialism always leads to.

Winston Churchill said "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money?"

Venezuela has more proven oil reserves than any other country on earth.  And yet, through the socialist policies of its dictators, the country has fallen into civil war, riots, massive shortages of the basics of life, and hyper-inflation has made it where the currency is basically worthless.  It could happen in the USA as well.  In a matter of years.  Yes!!!!!!!  I can happen here.  

Reprinted from The Independent    September 24, 2019

There’s poverty in life and death in Venezuela's former oil capital!

‘If a family member dies, we can’t even bury him with dignity...
how can this be our reality?’

The hospital had run dry of painkillers and antibiotics, leaving Neiro Vargas moaning in agony. The 43-year-old security guard had been brought in with a gunshot to the neck. On the seventh day, his heart gave out.

But in Maracaibo, the indignities of life no longer end at death. An economic free fall more severe than the Great Depression has crippled this onetime oil boomtown, and those who have stayed are bracing for worse under painful new US sanctions. Venezuela’s second-largest city – and its industrial engine – is now the epicentre of the socialist nation’s societal meltdown. The collapse of civilization here is perhaps most evident at death.

On the afternoon of Vargas’ passing, Maracaibo University Hospital, suffering the same major power outages plaguing the rest of the city, was stiflingly hot. His destitute family was unable to immediately pay for a funeral. So doctors dispatched his body to “the basement”. The un-air-conditioned morgue. Even when the power flickers on, none of the morgue’s eight freezers work. On a recent morning, insects swarmed the seven decomposing bodies left on slabs and on the floor. A dead baby lay rotting in a cardboard box.

As temperatures in this tropical city soared above 32C, Vargas’ corpse spent three days on the morgue floor, while his wife, Rossangelys, borrowed money to cover a makeshift coffin and transport it to their home. In the family’s living room, in a lawless part of town pocked with abandoned homes, the family held a grim wake. The narrow, black casket lay across two metal stands. Mourners averted eyes from the deceased’s infested face. Rossangelys tried, and failed, to control the smell by filling gaps in the coffin’s wood with caulking.

They could afford no burial plot. So they dug up the bones of Vargas’s long-dead brother in a local cemetery strewn with broken caskets desecrated by graverobbers. Rossangelys wept by her husband’s resting place. The expelled coffin of her husband’s brother lay in ruins nearby. “I’m just feeling so much rage,” she says. “So much rage for what we have to go through now in this city, in this country. If a family member dies, we can’t even bury him with dignity. How can this be our reality?”

Maracaibo, the “Beloved Land of the Sun”, was a city of firsts. The first Venezuelan town lit by electricity. The first to open a cinema. In 1914, Venezuelan Oil Concessions struck crude on the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo, the petroleum-rich Caribbean estuary that laps at the banks of the city’s jagged skyline. Oil would change everything. A regional port bloomed into a metropolis of 2.6 million. By 1950, Zulia state – with Maracaibo as it capital – accounted for more than half of Venezuela’s GDP. Fueled by wealthy donors, its cultural life thrived. Maracaibo boasted three symphony orchestras and the continent’s largest museum of contemporary art.

But the depression that began here in 2013 has accelerated into a meltdown, the product of falling oil prices, failed socialist policies, mismanagement and corruption. In 2008, when prices and production were high, Maracaibo crude was generating an estimated $138m (£110.6m) a day. Output has collapsed to roughly $8.5m (£6.8m).

By some estimates, as many as 700,000 residents – nearly a third of the metropolitan population – have abandoned the area in three years, joining the larger exodus of hungry migrants fleeing Venezuela. Venezuela’s national power grid is failing, and its oil production collapsing. A country blessed with the world’s largest proven petroleum reserves is suffering severe shortages of gasoline.

The government of President Nicolás Maduro, bankrupt and weakened, has sought to protect the capital, Caracas, from the worst of the crisis. In a trade-off, the government has let Maracaibo fall. Since January, electricity here has been rationed to no more than 12 hours a day – when there’s any power at all. Lines for gasoline stretch more than a mile; waits last up to 2 days. The queue at the pump on University Street one recent afternoon measured 86 cars. In one street market, a desperate university professor was trying to sell his possessions – T-shirts, jeans, a lamp – for food.

At the sprawling Zulia Museum of Contemporary Art, bathroom pipes and sinks have been stolen, as have printers, computers, audio equipment and a truck. Phone cables were also taken – making landline calls nearly impossible. The museum’s main hall has been shuttered, its leaking roof leaving pools of stagnant water. Amid a budget crunch, the staff has dropped from 150 employees to 14 – and half of those are unpaid interns. A dozen exotic palms have died out front because the museum’s gardener emigrated.

The Maracaibo Symphony, unable to cover its payroll, has shrunk from 90 members to 11. “Our musicians have left,” says one player, who speaks on the condition of anonymity because she is afraid of government reprisals. “They’re playing in subways in Buenos Aires, or the streets of Lima and Quito, for coins.” She fights tears. “We don’t have enough musicians to play Beethoven anymore,” she says. “This has been my whole life. It is so hard to see it crumble.”

Most traffic lights across town are dark – for want of electricity, but also spare parts. That’s less of a hazard than it might be, because with the flight of so many people, there are far fewer cars, and almost no city buses. Some neighbourhoods are effectively ghost towns. Maracaibo’s six newspapers have closed. 

Now, we are a dead city. A zombie state. And those of us left here are dead men walking

In March, desperate looters ransacked more than 500 businesses – supermarkets, electronic stores, hotels. Many never reopened. The Zulia state chamber of commerce says 30,000 business have closed in 10 years. Hundreds more are shuttering every week. “Maracaibo was a city of lights, a city of nightlife, a thriving city blessed by the Caribbean sun,” says Eveling Trejo de Rosales, Maracaibo’s former mayor. “Now, we are a dead city. A zombie state. And those of us left here are dead men walking.

Jose Moreno motored his boat towards the centre of Lake Maracaibo. The 31-year-old fisherman pointed to the rusting husks of oil drills that were built to draw crude from the lake bed. “This is the graveyard of the wells,” he says.

This Connecticut-sized body of water was once Venezuela’s economic lifeline. Now it’s an environmental disaster. The vast majority of the thousands of oil wells that pepper the lake stand broken and useless. Raw crude and natural gas bubble to the surface. The Venezuelan oil industry was built on Zulia’s light crude. The centre shifted two decades ago to the thicker oil of the Orinoco Belt farther south, but Lake Maracaibo remained vital to the national economy. Its decline is one of chapters. In the early 2000s, Hugo Chávez, the late father of Venezuela’s socialist state, broke the unions at the state oil company, PDVSA. Trained engineers, rig workers and managers were replaced with political appointees. They ran the company into the ground.

In 2008, when global oil prices crashed, Chavez nationalized firms that supplied, maintained and provided transportation to the lake’s drills. As the government under Maduro sank deeper into its financial hole, repairs slipped, then virtually stopped. Maduro claimed victory last year in an election widely viewed as fraudulent. The United States has backed Venezuela’s opposition in its efforts to oust Maduro and hold new elections. The United States was the largest buyer of Venezuelan crude. In January, the Trump administration prohibited US companies from purchasing the oil. For an industry already nearing a breaking point, it was like pouring hot water on third-degree burns.

Zulia produced 1.55 million barrels a day in 2001, according to Caracas Capital Markets, a Miami-based firm that focuses on the Venezuelan oil industry. By 2018, production had fallen to 250,000 barrels. Five thousand wells were operational in the lake in 2002. Today, union workers say, fewer than 400 are functioning. The Trump administration this month broadened the embargo, blocking all property and assets of the government and its officials, and prohibiting any transactions with them, the central bank or the state oil company.

Jaime Acosta worked for a private contractor to PDVSA that operated six oil perforators. The company shut down two months ago because the state oil company wasn’t paying the contract. “I would agree with the sanctions if they end up helping us,” says Acosta, 62. “But to be honest, at this point, the sanctions are only making it worse.” Without his wage to live on, he says, his wife and children have left for Colombia to find work. “In Zulia, us oil workers were the ones who drove the economy,” he says. “Now our families are broken.”

In the shadow of Maracaibo’s half-empty high-rises rests the shantytown of Miracle Heights North. Four hundred families – a third of the residents – have left in recent months, and the exodus is accelerating. Hyperinflation has put all but the most basic foodstuffs and medicines out of reach, leaving those who remain thin, hungry and sick. In the absence of a functioning government, gangs and thieves rule the neighbourhood.

Neiro Vargas, the security guard, was walking home from his 14-hour graveyard shift when he was caught in the neck by a stray bullet. He was one block from his front door. “The government doesn’t do anything,” Vargas’s wife, Rossangelys Olivares, says. “It simply doesn’t care about us.”

Violence isn’t the only killer. The power shortages, and the worsening access to running water, aren’t just inconveniences – they’re potentially deadly hazards. Parents, unable to wash their children with water and soap, are struggling to control an outbreak of scabies. This year alone, 16 people in the neighbourhood have died, community activists say, including the elderly and children with illnesses caused or worsened by the lack of clean water, unreliable power and the unrelenting heat.

Three blocks from Vargas’ home, neighbours watched one recent afternoon as a small group of people carried the body of 11-year Tiany Chacin into her home in a coffin cobbled together from old pieces of furniture. A stomach parasite had reached her brain. Before she died, her mother says, the girl was vomiting worms. This year, her family has had almost no access to potable water, saysher mother, Yulimar Chacin, 33. They were left to drink from a stagnant drain. Since cooking gas is scarce and expensive, Chacin says, she could not always afford to boil it. “We had no other way, no other way to get water,” she says. “It’s darkness here,” the rail-thin woman says between sobs. “We are alone.”

Dark side of Finland's "free" health care!

In the words of Milton Friedman, "there ain't no free lunches, and nothing's coming in the mail".

"Free health care" isn't actually free and certainly not all it touted to be by politicians running for President today.   click here for the Dark Side

The destruction of a major Economy and World power

Just a few decades ago, Argentina was one of the top 10 countries in the World in wealth and agricultural production.  It was hailed as an example of excellent government and use of resources.

Today it is facing one more crisis that may eclipse the rioting, civil war, and economic collapse it had in 2001.

The same is happening in Venezuela now and that country has the largest proven oil reserves of any country on the planet.  

If it could happen in Venezuela or Argentina, it can happen anywhere.  When the printing presses are turned on to run continuously to print more and more money to buy more and more votes and influence, ruin is not far away.

Here is an excellent documentary on what happened in just a short period of time in a "great Nation"

Elizabeth Warren Cultural Appropriation if needed.

“I have listened and I have learned,” said Elizabeth Warren at a forum of Native American voters in Iowa last month. “Like anyone who’s being honest with themselves, I know that I have made mistakes. I am sorry for the harm I have caused.”

Did any reporter ask her what harm, specifically, she’d caused, or what, specifically, she’d learned? Did any reporter ask her if her “mistakes” were ones anyone could have made, or ones she believed any of her peers, either at Harvard or in the Senate, had also made?

No, they did not.

I suppose people think that the controversy over Warren’s past claims of Native American ancestry has been put to bed, with Warren rising in the polls because she has plans for everything, including for Native Americans. But in fact, the controversy has not been put to bed, and it shouldn’t be. It points to Elizabeth Warren’s ambitions and lack of integrity, and forces us to ponder whether the rules really apply to those who would make them.

The media have certainly done their best to help Warren in putting the controversy to bed, though. The Boston Globe in a story that briefly acknowledged that Warren’s “political enemies have long pushed a narrative that her unsubstantiated claims of Native American heritage turbocharged her legal career” — gave ample space to her own much-more-charitable version of events. Her reporter-defenders have pointed out that until a certain time in her life, she declined to participate in affirmative-action programs, though even they have had to admit that the crucial leaps in her academic career — her landing a job at the University of Pennsylvania and then moving on to Harvard — occurred after she began listing herself as a racial minority. The year before Harvard Law School hired her — and trumpeted her as the first woman of color so hired — it had been subject to major, headline-grabbing protests for giving tenure to four white men.

Of course, Warren could have been deluding herself as well. She claims that her belief in her Cherokee heritage came from longstanding family lore. But the fact that she participated in the now-cringe-inducing Pow Wow Chow cookbook and plagiarized her recipes from a French cookbook suggests a certain awareness that she was perpetrating a racial fraud. And then there is the fact that Cherokee Indian is not so much a “socially constructed” racial category as a specific, legally defined identity: You are a Cherokee when the Cherokee nation recognizes you as a member on its rolls. Surely someone who identified as a Native American academically and socially in the way Warren once claimed she did would have sought such official status. But she didn’t.

Warren has repeatedly claimed over the years that her parents’ marriage was rejected by racist grandparents because of her mother’s Cherokee ancestry. But Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes has said there’s simply no evidence of Cherokee genealogy in Warren’s family. Warren’s mother was not some racial outcast, but the popular daughter of a prominent local family. And there’s no evidence of the romantic elopement, or racist animus on the part of her paternal grandfather, Grant Herring, who regularly played golf with Carnal Wheeling, a recognized Cherokee.

The media haven’t really known how to handle this story. Like a Geiger counter in a North Korean nuclear-weapons lab, the reaction of the “smart set” on Twitter was wildly disconcerting when Elizabeth Warren announced the results of her spectacularly ill-conceived DNA test earlier this year. At first, the trace amounts of Native American heritage were held up as proof against Donald Trump’s attacks. Then, as geneticists and common sense intervened in the discussion, it became obvious that Warren’s Native American roots were negligible.

As the social-climbing Warren begins to gain over actual socialist Bernie Sanders, I expect the Sandernistas to unload on the contradictions between the upwardly mobile Left’s hatred of cultural appropriation and the changing racial identity and falsified family history of its darling Warren. If she survives that and wins the nomination, she’ll face a general election in which the same basic problem remains.

I predict that should she make it that far, everyone will just try to change the subject.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.  @michaelbd

quotes heard today

"most people relate to you, in relation to their agenda for their life".

and a funny one:

"may the wind at your back not be your own".

Venezeula and its Collapse. Argentina next? USA when?

by Maybell Nieves, a professional physician from Venezuela.

Dealing with this subject has been quite difficult for me. Both the concept of the state stripping you of everything has diverse interpretations, so trying to approach this from a single point of view is a complicated task.

In my country, Venezuela, after 20 years of “revolution,” we have bottomed out and learned to live in situations we never imagined (so much so that I was able to write an article on survival techniques I never imagined myself using on daily basis).

It’s not that the governments before Hugo Chavez were much better. But there was a much more stable political and economic situation with access to the international market.

In 1999, when Chávez’s government was instated, oil prices were the highest in Venezuela’s history. The newly born Communist policy in the country was hardly felt and had very few repercussions on the professional citizens who lived on a monthly salary.

That’s probably why those first few years didn’t really feel like something was taken away from us. In addition, the newly elected president had a 60% popular approval rating and promised endless opportunities for the neediest people.

One of the first economic policies was the implementation of exchange control, currently in effect. Any operation with foreign currency was managed by the state. Later came the control of the prices of basic products, which caused the disappearance of those items and initiated a black market that is also very much in force to this day.

The real problem began in 2004 with the accelerated decrease in oil prices that translated into a lower income for the government. Remember that we are talking about an oil-reliant country.

The decay was soon seen in many aspects. There was no longer maintenance on public roads, and public services failed often until reaching the point of constant failures of electric service, even for days.

The public health situation is also getting worse and worse. As a health professional, I have seen this deterioration for the last 10 years.

I am an oncologic breast surgeon. In Venezuela, breast cancer is the main cause of death from cancer in women. However, in the hospital where I work, the most important hospital in Caracas, there are no basic services for this issue. No chemotherapy, the radiotherapy equipment has been inoperative since 2015, and surgical procedures are suspended every week.

For me, as a doctor, it is frustrating not to be able to help my patients in any way. Just last week two breast cancer patients who were going to the operating room were suspended for the fourth time in a row. This time the anesthesia machine was failing.

The purchasing power of the Venezuelan citizen also decreased. It seemed to have happened from one day to the next, but if you look at the political situation since 1988, the decline took a long time; all that was left was to hit rock bottom.

Finding ourselves in extreme situations makes our defense system act in a primitive way. This means activating the fight or flight response at any time within any context—and yes, the state takes advantage of that.

The state will rip you off, but it doesn’t happen all of a sudden. There are a lot of logistics; it takes a long time to develop the kind of policy that makes citizens totally dependent on the state.

You start by losing something unimportant, like some kind of monetary bonus now given to you as government-run grocery store credits, and you end up losing your freedom and all kinds of rights, including freedom of speech and protest, but these issues are so extensive that they require an article of their own to explain them properly.

The state has taken charge, with great success I must say, and you are now living in fear of the so-called public authorities, meaning police and military police, since they serve as pro-government forces of repression.

Many of us have lost the incentive to go out and protest. We did it for more than 10 years. However, I have seen the evolution of the manifestations before and now.

I remember 2003 when repression was minimal, almost non-existent. Today many friends who still have the strength to continue have gotten gas masks in order to defend themselves from the hundreds of tear gas grenades used by the authorities that should be defending people.

In any public protest, savage repression is a constant. That violence is what we Venezuelans have become used to.

When there is no public or social security, when the devaluation of the currency is occurring on a daily basis, and when you don’t know if the bakery on the corner is going to be broken into tomorrow, at that moment, the debacle has already occurred.

Defending oneself from these kinds of problems is as difficult as trying to explain them. Many have chosen to leave and seek a future in other countries. That way the state even strips you of your own country by causing you to become self-exiled.

I don’t blame them. We all have more than one family member or close friend who has been kidnapped or stolen from violently, and sadly, all we can say is “You should be thankful you weren’t killed”.

Personal security becomes a problem of epic proportions, to the extent that going out on the street is considered a risky activity—a risk to which, unfortunately, you have to get used to in order to live a normal life.

Living in that state of continuous stress in which your rights are violated, in cities where, despite paying high taxes, everything seems to be in ruins, is part of that hopelessness that the state achieves in the individual.

Living in a place where a good monthly salary fora top executive, for example, does not reach $100 a month, is not easy, especially taking into consideration that a basic shopping list for a family of four can cost up to $140 monthly.

So the mismanagement of incompetent and corrupt civil servants results in the deep separation of three social classes: extreme poverty, which represents more than 80% of the population and is totally dependent on the government; the working middle class, which manages to subsist through one or two basic incomes plus the economic help of family members abroad; and those who do business with the government and can live in a very comfortable, ideal world that has nothing to do with reality.

Of course, there are exceptions to this, and some people have high incomes without being involved in dubious businesses.

It is sad to see how fourth-level professionals, trained in the country, must leave in order to provide for their families.

I know it is not a unique situation in the world—it has happened and will continue to happen—but it is very different to read about it than to see it sitting in the front row or even being the leading character.

Nowadays it is the common denominator, and more and more qualified professionals and technicians step into the international airport in search of a better quality of life.

That’s why there is a whole generation that has no kind of roots in their country and only waits for the opportunity to leave.

I think the worst part of all this is the desolation sown in all of us. It seems to be an endless story, with the political disqualification of opposition leaders, political prisoners, and many more vexations.

Writing all this is not easy, but it makes me reflect. It is an exercise in introspection. Without a doubt, the state strips you of everything in its eagerness to stay in charge. That’s the way they do it.

There comes a point at which the only thing in your mind is to know if you will return home alive. Everything else is secondary. At that point, the state has already massacred you internally. You can never be the same again. I’m sure I am not.

Even if you are a person who is not involved in politics, an “apolitical” citizen, in this state of anarchy, you have to fix your position.

As Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.