As with the old lady and the fly, Venezuela’s government may be running out of encores. It can crack down on black-market activity, but that won’t make the shortages go away. It might redistribute the suffering a bit, but that’s not all it will do. The black market is often a sort of release valve for bad policy; shut it down, and you turn the formerly annoying into the totally intolerable.
There is, as Adam Smith once observed, “a lot of ruin in a nation.” President Nicolas Maduro seems determined to find out exactly how much Venezuela has left.
This is always how socialism ends. They’ve run out of other peoples’ money down there.
Eich once made a $1,000 donation to Prop 8, in 2006, shortly before the pro-gay-marriage Senate candidate Barack Obama would be persuaded by the righteousness of the traditional marriage cause, and thus announce his conversion to the proposition that marriage must be as it had been eternally, a union between a man and a woman.
For some reason, the rabid Upper Income White Women (and Feminized White Men) of the tech industry don’t seem to think Barack Obama deserves criticism for that position, but they’re very sure that Eich should either recant or be fired.
As I noted on Twitter the other day, if I were Eich, I wouldn’t let these little fascists mau mau me. I’d tell them that if they really couldn’t tolerate working for such a hateful bigot, they know where the door is.
Not surprising — evolutionarily, we’re omnivores. Vegetarians have to rationalize that they’re eating healthier to justify their unwillingness to eat animals, but they’re not.
Yes. “The modern world is astonishing. But it has a price: sometimes the expectation of no communication is better than an expectation of communication that goes unfufilled.”
There is a lot of energy stored in the southern San Andreas, but I don’t worry about that one, as much, because it’s sixty miles away at its closest. I’m much more concerned about a seven on the Newport-Inglewood fault, which runs just few miles from our house.
Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton now and forever, at least until George P Bush marries Chelsea Clinton and the two ruling houses are consolidated into one House of Bush-Clinton-Rodham-Coburg-Gotha. I’ve nothing against Jeb Bush. I happen to disagree with him on “immigration reform”, but he was a competent executive of Florida and he’s a thoughtful and (on his game) gifted speaker. But there are over 300 million people in this country, and, granted that 57 per cent or whatever it’s up to by now are fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community, what is it about the Bush family that makes them so indispensable to the Republic as to supply three presidential candidates within a quarter-century? Say what you like about actual monarchy but at least you get a non-heriditary political class: this may seem incredible to Americans but neither Canada’s Stephen Harper, Australia’s Tony Abbott, New Zealand’s John Key nor Britain’s David Cameron is the previous Prime Minister’s brother or wife.
So who are these “influential Republicans” working to draft Jeb?
Many if not most of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s major donors are reaching out to Bush and his confidants with phone calls, e-mails and invitations to meet, according to interviews with 30 senior Republicans. One bundler estimated that the “vast majority” of Romney’s top 100 donors would back Bush in a competitive nomination fight.
“He’s the most desired candidate out there,” said another bundler, Brian Ballard, who sat on the national finance committees for Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. “Everybody that I know is excited about it.”
The guys who picked last season’s loser are already excited about next season’s loser. How exciting is that?