February is the shortest month of the year, but certainly not the sweetest; it’s the dead of winter, and the weather’s mean. The only good thing you can say about this month is that it ends quickly! And so do these shorter (but not sweeter) tributes to this week’s wanktards:
1.
Otto Fucking Odonga. “Private parts do not belong in the anus”, but heads apparently do. Now we know where Alan Fucking Keyes’ ancestors came from. UGANDA, where else?
2.
Helena Fucking Guergis. Wow, does SHE have great timing, or what? My money is on the square marked
“or what”. PS:
Happy fucking birthday to you, indeed, you entitled bitch.
3.
Steve Fucking Ellis. Basically, it was “you gimme fuckee, I let you become Canadian citizen-ee.” But she was all like
ewwwwwww, gross-ee. Then she turned him in-ee. So he didn’t get to take advantage of the pretty Korean refugee claimant after all-ee.
4.
James Fucking Lunney. He makes the list again this week because he’s still a whiny chickenshit afraid of a little opposition. Which will soon turn into a LOT of it, if he doesn’t cut the crap.
5.
Sarah Fucking Palin, for the umpty-ump hundredth time. While she’s out there prattling on about imaginary death panels and other evils of socialized medicine, her own grandson is benefiting from…wait for it…
socialized medicine. And the death panels? Well, those are real, but only in
capitalized medicine.
6.
Charles Fucking Van Zant. It’s not enough for him to force his own wife to squirt out the babies at lightning speed. No, now he wants to do the same to other women, too–under the guise of “compassion”. He’ll try to bring back the
Baby Scoop Era singlehandedly if they let him. Pray they don’t!
7.
Lauren Fucking Ashley. If you’re gonna quote Fucking Leviticus under the false rubric of “loving” the “sinners”, sweetie, you may as well stop
eating shellfish and
wearing mixed-fibre clothes. Otherwise, you too could be put to death under THAT “law”. Also,
God hates liars.8.
The Fucking State of Utah. Nice lawmakers you people have! Better pray that none of your female nearest and dearest ever have a miscarriage, or you might not ever see Mom again. PS: Please address your ongoing polygamy problem if you REALLY care about women and children.
9.
Rush Fucking Limbaugh, AGAIN. Far be it from me to defend Glenn Fucking Beck (and believe me, I’m not about to do it here); I just love it when right-wingers eat their own. It saves the rest of us having to do it. Now get a room, you two!
10.
John Fucking Yoo, AGAIN. How sharp a cleaver do you need to split hairs this finely:
Nuking civilians okay, crushing kids’ testicles NOT okay? Dude, IT’S ALL BAD!!!
11.
Peter Fucking Shurman. Christ, dude, learn some Canadian history. This nation has been around a lot longer than the modern-day (
apartheid!) state of Israel.
12. and 13.
Brad Fucking Trost and Maurice Fucking Vellacott. Such a cute couple they make. Such a pity they’re both such lying sexist wanks.
14.
Danny Fucking Williams. Paying for luxurious extras out of pocket does NOT make it the best healthcare, only the priciest. You could have had all that in Canada, except maybe the fancy furniture, the plush rug, the steak on the menu, and the private-duty nurse who gives blowjobs. Would sure be funny if he developed complications, would it not?
And finally, since we have no personal wankers this week (
¿Qué pasó?), let’s send out a pre-emptive tribute to Pat Fucking Robertson, who’s expected to
pronounce at any time about the Chilean earthquake and the tsunami due to hit Hawaii:
God don’t work that way, asshole.Good night, and get fucked!
Yer on fire, Sabina!
Great graphics, too.
Yeah, Pat is going to make the proclaimation that Chile is being punished for voting for a president that is aligned with the facist, pro-repression rightwing.
Not! I think ole Pat will sit this one out–the victims are too few and too light-skinned. When the images of tens of thousands of blacks impoverished and immiserated by old-style colonialism were fresh, Pat simply couldn’t restrain his odious, anti-human and odious nature.
What a horrendous prick-head and hypocrite.
Sadly, Pat just voices what a pretty sizable segment of the population are inclined to think.
You must have missed your hero Chavez’s latest televised screed against capitalism when the power cut out due to the now regular blackouts in Venezuela.
What a paradise he has created!
Nice choice of posts to wank on, Mike. You ARE aware, I hope, that Venezuela’s electricity is all hydro? And that there have been severe droughts there this year, due to El Niño?
But thanks for the laughs. Just for that, you get a slot all your own on next week’s list.
Not ALL of Venezuela’s power is hydro. Venezuela produces roughly 2/3rds of its power from hydro and yes its true that the strong El Nino effect has cut hydro reservoirs back. But, a similarly powerful El Nino hit Venezuela in 98 and there were “zero” power outages. Venezuela’s “fascist” neighbor Colombia also generates about 2/3rds of its electricity from hydro and has been hit just a hard by El Nino but hasn’t faced similarly large power outages.
Its like they say, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
If you’re going to accuse me of having my own facts, dude, maybe you need to look in the mirror. You should realize that the same Niño problem is affecting Brazil as well, and on a much larger scale. Brazil buys power from Venezuela. Venezuela has even had to cut back power sales to Brazil because of the drought–60% less rainfall than normal. Yet I don’t hear you accusing Lula of causing that problem, or of being a commie. Ecuador has the same problem, but I don’t hear you kvetching about Correa, either. Hmmm, funny dat…
You also forget (or conveniently ignore) that Venezuela has an opposition hell-bent on sabotage; it’s well documented, at least in the local alternative media, that they are actively wasting water and electricity and fucking with their meters in an effort to bring down the government. This is nothing new; they’ve done shit like that before. If there were “‘zero’ power outages” (love your quaint use of quotes–that’s very telling, because in fact there WERE power outages!) in 1998, it’s because a crapitalist corrupto was in charge then. Of course the moneyed classes had no motivation to monkey with their meters then, and as it was, a lot of those poorer households in the barrios, which are now on line for both water AND electricity, were not on line back then. Hence, no need for spiteful monkeying–the rich had their man in charge, the poor had nothing, and everything was hunky-dory as long as you didn’t count the 80% or so at the bottom of the heap. Rafael Caldera certainly didn’t, except when it was time to cash in on popular discontent to buy votes.
And, by the way, Chávez IS doing something. He’s building new plants and powerlines. Those take time to build, but they’re more than his predecessors ever thought of. This is why the oppos are gonna lose the next election, in September–they are building NOTHING. All they have going for them is sabotage. And in a drought year, that’s just doubly despicable. They’re gonna lose, and they deserve to.
Is this what you have a problem with? Chávez giving poor people water and electricity, when they had none before? And having to make do in the meantime with an antiquated system built by his capitalist predecessors (who are now his opponents), who had not the foresight to upgrade anything and didn’t give a shit whether the poor got the necessities or not? Is that your idea of a paradise? A place where private capital runs the show, and if you don’t pay, you don’t play? Well, guess what, dude…they tried that in Bolivia, with the water. Even rainwater was privatized. Bechtel got run out of the country for it, and a barely-elected “president” with a gringo accent likewise. How it’s supposed to work any better with electricity in Venezuela, I don’t know. Everywhere that scheme’s been tried, it’s failed, and miserably. But I guess, if one wants to get ideologically pure about the “virtues” of capitalism, riots and senseless mass death are better than socialism. It’s fucked, but yeah, I can see the ideological consistency of that argument, all right. It all looks great on paper, if nowhere else.
As for the part about Colombia being unaffected–well, see above. I’m very tempted to say you pulled that factoid out of your ass, since it’s unsupported (like the rest of your argument), but I know better why they don’t have a problem. They have their gringo buddies to take care of everything–for a price. And they haven’t addressed the needs of the poor, so of course they have no problems! How very convenient to just be able to leave out such a majority sector of the population. What a capitalist paradise Colombia is, indeed; it’s like Venezuela 11 years ago, only way more violent. But pay no attention to those leftist guerrillas in the hills. There are not one but two guerrilla factions, still going strong after nearly 50 years because in all that time, not one of Colombia’s real problems has been addressed by the endless succession of brilliant “democratic” capitalists in power! Pay no attention to the fact that the “democratic” leaders have all been “elected” either by apathy or abstention, or by blatant vote buying. Pay no attention, either, to all the massacred campesinos, otherwise known as “false positives”, murdered by the right-wing paramilitaries with whom the brilliant democratic capitalist Uribe happens to have close ties! 2000 campesinos in one mass grave alone, and it’s not the only one. No, pay no attention to any of that–after all, Colombia has no problems. Silly me for even suggesting that fascism is the real problem, and that Colombia has no left because the rightists keep killing them. And of course, it rains adequately in Colombia and not Venezuela because Colombia is just so beautifully run and not “tyrannized” by a big mouthy dude in a red shirt, eh?
You sure do snark a lot, but I don’t see you proposing a better way, probably because you don’t have one. Or because the way you believe in actually doesn’t work, and you know it.
But I totally agree with ya on just one point, dude–around here no one’s entitled to his own facts. Maybe you should try marshalling a few more of them before the next time you come sniping at me, eh?
There are any number of sources to confirm all the factual information (who generates how much power and by what means). I get all my data from Platts and its quite accurate.
While areas in the far north of Brazil are experiencing drought conditions, Brazil’s El Nino issues (for the most part) are the exact opposite as Venezuela and Colombia’s, they are getting too much rain in most of the country. Venezuela exported about 500 million KWH to Roraima and that’s because Roraima isn’t connected to the rest of the Brazilian grid in a significant enough way. While 500 million KWH certainly sounds like a lot, it was less than 1% of Venezuela’s total electrical output (about 85 Billion KWH). Interestingly enough, Roraima was able to make up for the cut in electricity imports by bringing two formerly idled thermal units back on line.
So your argument that the drought has devastated the region so equitably is lacking as Brazil is not effected in the same way that Venezuela is and Colombia has not suffered from the same kind of daily rolling blackouts like Brazil. Interesting side note, Colombia is actually negotiating to sell Venezuela excess Colombian electricity.
Your article about Venezuelan power outages in 1998 is a poor comparison. The power issues Venezuela experienced in 1998 were nowhere near where they are today. Venezuela experienced 67 “significant power outages” in 1998, they now experience that number (roughly) every month now.
And as far as the sabotage canard, you don’t have to sabotage a plant that is as poorly run as this one:http://realidadalternativa.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/fotos-planta-centro-totalmente-destruida-cadafe/
Do you realize that that single station is rated over 2000MW but is currently only rated for 250MW due to poor maintenance? Considering Venezuela’s entire grid is only 24,000MW, the loss of nearly 10% from negligence is criminal.
Chavez’s new power projects will take years to come online, and wont help in the near term. He has run not only PDVSA (another story for another day) and the Venezuelan national utilities into the ground. I know you love the guy and all, but his government is completely incompetent.
Pfffft. Accurate. Riiiiiight. If PDVSA is in the ground, as you say, why is it still up and running BETTER THAN EVER? Don’t answer–I know, but you do not, although you’re a better pretender than most. Still, you suck. You get your so-called information from bad sources. Try http://www.venezuelanalysis.com, that’s where the real brains go.
BTW, my “bad” information on the blackouts of ’98 came from the Economist–a right-wing source that actually recommended MORE privatization, in other words making the problem worse. Which should be right up your ideological alley; I certainly thought it would be. Thanks for a good laugh at your own expense.
Unfortunately, your three strikes are up. Buh-bye, Mikey.
PDVSA running better than ever? Is that some kind of joke?
Stratfor has an article up detailing a 1 million bpd discrepancy between PDVSA’s “official count” and what can be verified. Makes sense though, after PDVSA purged nearly 20,000 of its most highly skilled workers and diverted O&M monies into Chavez’s “social projects” things began to fall to pieces. It also doesn’t help that PDVSA hasn’t been audited since 2002.
And if PDVSA is doing so well, why has Venezuela had to import record amounts of finished petroleum products the past several years?
I never said your information was “bad”, only that you used it inappropriately. Considering that Venezuela is experiencing an order of magnitude more power disruptions now than they were in 1998 when a similarly bad drought came through, should lead you to conclude that their power infrastructure has degraded in the past 12 years. I wonder why that could be.
This is going even more poorly for you then I had imagined.
No, you know what’s going poorly here? Your efforts at disinformation. PDVSA has been audited and had its books open to the public for as long as Chávez has been at the helm–check Oil Wars if you don’t believe me. STRATFOR is a right-wing crapaganda site, dedicated to whipping up pro-war hysteria among the gullible. And the 20,000 “workers” who were “purged” weren’t workers, nor were they purged–they were middle-management bureaucrats, the excess fat of the organization, and they were absentees, legally fired for failing to show up to work because they were just another of the opposition’s lame efforts at sabotage. The fact that PDVSA doesn’t need them to function is obvious–it’s still running! And the gringos keep coming back for that oil, and are even willing to concede PDVSA majority ownership of the enterprise, which is the law now anyway. Just look at how much crude is leaving Venezuela if you don’t believe me. If the org is that badly run, no one would be doing business with them, but in fact, the whole world is. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, not in what you think of the guy who wrote the recipe.
Now fuck off, troll–unless you want to make TWO wankers’ lists running. I banned your ass before, and from now on, anything you write here is gonna be deleted. I don’t come to your site to shit on your floor, so stay the hell off of mine.
Those 20,000 “middle management bureaucrats”, as you call them, were the technical backbone of PDVSA’s extraction and refining operations. I should know, I work with two of them at Exxon Mobil. Firing skilled workers like process engineers, project managers, supply and logistic specialists, procurement specialists, outage coordinators, and the like are the cause of PDVSA’s dismal performance these past 10 years, coupled with a complete lack of internal investment from PDVSA.
Don’t believe me? The numbers don’t lie.
The fact that PDVSA’s extraction operations as well as its refining operations have seen their outputs plummet is a good enough argument that you don’t replace competent people with political apparatchiks. The Curacao refinery is an example of the systemic problems with PDVSA’s refining group. Did you know that this one facility, a 350,000bpd refinery, hasn’t operated at full capacity for 6 years?
Perhaps this is why Venezuela has resorted to importing a record amount of refined petroleum products these past several years.
Perhaps this is why Venezuela’s oil exports have fallen to such low levels … they aren’t event producing to their OPEC quota.
But I know, these are all just fascist lies. After all, you wont find this information on Oilwars or venezuelanalysis.com, so it must not be true.
On PDVSA production, here’s the relevant link:
http://www.mees.com/postedarticles/oped/v52n18-5OD01.htm
On power generation, Vzla’s GDP (and consumption) is significantly higher than what it was in 1998, too.
PDVSA’s audited financial statements may be found at:
http://www.pdvsa.com
(follow the link “Informes Financieros” at the right of the page). There were delays in the publication of the statements between 2003-6, the ones later (2007-09) have been on time.
Funny how our little troll (who claims to work for ExxtortionMobil, which explains a lot!) hasn’t been able to dig those up. You’d think, if he were as armed with the facts as he claimed to be, that he would be able to find those and issue a decent apology.
Well, Mikey? Don’t keep me waiting. And if you spout more shit about how much better paramilitary-ruled Colombia is (what a fucking joke!), I’m not gonna bother fishing it out of the spam filter anymore. I’m just gonna flush you with the rest of the garbage peddlers. Capisce?
Meanwhile, some REAL facts:
Colombia manipulating stats to try to make its murder rates seem lower than they actually are. What a surprise! Also, Venezuela’s murder rate is actually decreasing as of ’07. Dramatically. Coincidence?
More inconvenient facts to debunk Mikey’s insane, five-year-old statistical spin…pay special attention to the segment in bullet points, Mikey, you may find it VERY interesting.
Oh look! Another debunker, this one financial. Venezuela’s not going broke after all! Damn, Mikey! How disappointed you must be!
And just for good measure, here are some real experts on Latin America, all questioning the same highly politicized “facts” that Mikey tries so hard to peddle here for his own ends. But pay no attention to them, Mikey–after all, they’re only genuine experts with extensive experience in Venezuela and you are not!
Mannat: While GDP and consumption are certainly higher, the Venezuelan government has not brought any significant new capacity (aside from hydro) online in the past 10 years. The Venezuelan government promised to bring the Josefa Camejo plant in early 07. Well, its March 2010, and the plant is operating at just over 120MW or about 25% of its rated capacity. But hey, look at the bright side, it’s not as if the Venezuelans need the electricity or anything.
Don’t any of you think that regurgitating information from the Venezuelan government and its state run functionaries is not entirely on the level, especially when multiple independent sources are saying the exact opposite? Can you really believe a non external audit of PDVSA or take what the oil minister says at face value?
If you can, then I want to talk with you all about some exciting real estate opportunities I have involving bridges and lakefront property in New Mexico.
I really enjoyed the link to the Democratic Underground forum that detailed Colombia’s efforts at manipulating its murder rate data … except that the article dealt specifically with kidnapping (not murder) data and the official in question didn’t argue that kidnappings were decreasing, only that the Colombian government was overestimating it.
You should really try and read links before you post them. Makes you look silly.
Mikey, where the hell did you get the idea that corporate “data”, from corporations with active interests in trying to own Venezuelan oil, is “independent” in nature? And where, conversely, did you get the silly-ass idea that the Venezuelan government would lie, while corporations with an active interest in robbing it would tell the truth?
Oh. I know. You work for a company with a history of hostile takeover attempts (CF Industries, of Deerfield, Illinois–and does your boss know you’re trolling strangers’ blogs on company time and company machines? Would you like him to know? I can certainly let him know. IP numbers don’t lie, pal!) You know only one thing, and that’s corporatism. So of course you’re well schooled in parroting the corporate line: We are independent because we’re not government, squawk!
Doesn’t help your credibiltiy an iota, though. Corporate and independent are two separate words for a reason. And your use of corporate computers on corporate time to troll me is very interesting, to say the least. Makes you look like a goldbricker, and makes my fingers itch to shoot an e-mail to your boss, letting him know that you’re taking time out from doing your job to spread stupid crapaganda.
If I were you, Mikey, I’d make myself scarce around here from now on.