So the Rich Socialists among us are sharing stuff like this:
I am not surprised they are gloating because they desperately need to get one win somehow and, of course, they need to lie.
What is the difference between bare supermarket shelves this week in the USA versus the bare shelves in Venezuela? That more than likely, the shelves in the US will be restocked the next day while the ones in Socialist Venezuela will take months (if ever) to be restocked.
While under Trump, companies have raised production (and thus unemployment dropping,) in Venezuela the opposite (read Socialism) happened:
In 1998, a year before the late President Hugo Chávez took office, there were 12,700 private companies in Venezuela. Over the next 19 years, until 2017, that number dropped to 3,200. And only in 2018, Conindustria calculates that another 1,000 stopped operating, which means that around 10,500 closed in the 2 decades that the “Bolivarian revolution” of Chávez and Nicolás Maduro has led.
“If we add the 700 industries that closed in the first two quarters of this year with that 7% that affirmed that it was not operational in the third period, and we add a projection for the fourth quarter, almost 1,000 companies closed this year. A drama of epic proportions ”, explained Juan Pablo Olalquiaga, president of Conindustria, in the presentation of the results of the Conjuncture Survey for the third quarter.
No country can endure a 95% reduction of their means of production and commerce. There is only one big business left in Venezuela, Empresas Polar, which produces whatever is left of the foodstuffs in Venezuela. Even dumbass President Maduro has realized that screwing with that private company will end up sinking what’s left of the nation and lets it be. But even so, Empress Polar cannot feed everybody and the other companies that covered the difference are now bones picked by Chavistas and cashed in hard currency for their own bank accounts.
Oh yes, they will show you some supermarkets well stocked with the best there is, but the prices can only be afforded by those with US Dollars or Euros as it is all imported and very expensive. They are the Venezuelan Equivalent of the Soviet Party Stores.
But how about the Worker’s taking Control of the Means of Production? They don’t need the owners or top honchos, right? Well, that old Communist dogma has been proven a complete catastrophe. It seems that people who bitched about the government not being able to patch potholes, actually believed that they were going to guide people into producing what the country needed with efficiency and at a low cost. Almost every single private company that the Socialist government has taken over, it has met with disaster and no consumer goods are being produced or they are, but at laughable levels and downright nasty quality. If supermarkets were to call the canning facilities under control of the government and place an order, they may get a shipment, more than likely less than half of what they ordered and delivered between 3 and 4 months down the road. In the US, supermarkets and big box stores are being regularly restocked every single frigging day and Mom and Pops probably no more than 24 hours after they place the order.
So basically dear Socialist Idiots (but I repeat myself) your one day inconvenience in the US it has been the official way of living for Millions of Venezuelans for years now. And that is what you will get in a Bernie government.
This morning I see this Tweet from CNN sentient potato Brian Stelter:
Surgeon General Jerome Adams used the word "need" while talking to the WH press corps. So I will too. He needs to spend his time educating the public about how to protect each other, not lecturing the press about what's newsworthy. https://t.co/1beTbBHZPWpic.twitter.com/VXFYkD19H9
“We really need you all to lean into and prioritize the health and safety of the American people,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams said at Saturday’s White House briefing. There’s nothing controversial about that — news outlets are empowering the public with health and safety information. But then Adams said this: “No more bickering, no more partisanship, no more criticism or finger pointing. There’ll be plenty of time for that. But we all need to hit the reset button and lean into moving forward the health and safety of the American people…”
What Adams called “bickering” and “criticism” is what most of us call accountability. Is there value in focusing on the future? Yes, but when Adams said he wants “less stories looking at what happened in the past,” I hear him saying “stop exposing the Trump administration’s failures.” There is value in all of the coverage. And government officials don’t get to decide that — readers and reporters and whistleblowers and editors do.
So Stelter admits that he is biased and projects his own anti-Trump hatred onto what the Surgeon General says.
The media would rather run with “make Trump look bad” than anything helpful to people.
Yesterday I went to the grocery store. There was no milk, bread, and toilet paper, and hardly any eggs.
Why is this happening?
Because the media is fucking dog-shit awful to a degree that is hard to fathom.
If the media were responsible, this is what they would be covering:
The United States, however, is more than self-sufficient on toilet paper and paper products in general. About 90% of US toilet paper is produced domestically. Most of the rest comes from Canada.
There is a reason for this. The United States has millions of hectares of harvestable forests in the Pacific North West. When you wipe your ass with a fluffy brand name two-ply paper, you are wiping your ass with some of the finest maple, oak, pine, and douglas fir ever cut down by American lumberjacks.
Chinese export shutdowns are not going to interrupt the toilet paper supply chain.
The is the same for food. In 2016, 87.3% of US food consumed was produced domestically. What we import is mostly specialty items like wines, cheeses, tropical fruits, and exotic items. Our staples are almost entirely US grown.
More than that, many of your staple items are produced within a couple of hundred miles from where you live. The milk I buy in Huntsville, Alabama, comes from a dairy in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, all of 112 miles away. I know, because I checked the milk code.
If you live in New York City, your milk probably comes from upstate New York.
There is no reason to horde milk or toilet paper or bread because of the Coronavirus.
BUT…
The media covered the Australian toilet paper hoarding and failed to explain any of this and people panicked and the shortages began.
Once there was a shortage of one staple (toilet paper) it caused people to horde other items and eventually, it cased a societal cascade failure.
Why?
So because of the media’s malfeasance and desire to make Trump look bad no matter what, we end up with this:
Rather than telling Americans that it’s not worth fighting each other over the last package of toilet paper in Target like its guzzoline in the wasteland, they are reporting shit like this:
So far, the United States has seen forty-one deaths from the infection. Twenty-two of those deaths occurred in one poorly run nursing home outside of Seattle, the Life Care Center. Another nine deaths occurred in the rest of Washington state, leaving ten deaths (four in California, two in Florida, and one in each of Georgia, Kansas, New Jersey, and South Dakota) spread throughout the rest of the approximately 329 million residents of the United States.
By comparison, there were 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2019, the National Safety Council estimates. That represents an average of over one hundred traffic deaths every day; if the press catalogued these in as much painstaking detail as they have deaths from coronavirus, highways nationwide would be as empty as New York subways are now.
As of Monday, approximately 89 percent of Italy’s coronavirus deaths had been over the age of seventy, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sad to say, those victims were already nearing the end of their lifespans. They might have soon died from another illness. No child under the age of nine has died from the illness worldwide. In China, only one individual in the ten-to-nineteen age group has succumbed.
An example: there were 34,200 deaths in the United States during the 2018–19 influenza season, estimates the cdc.
This is outstanding reporting putting common fatalities into perspective.
If you are under the age of 70, you are statistically more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the doctor to get tested than you are of Coronavirus.
Remember that data from 2002 shows that 1.7 million people got a Health Care-Associated Infection (when you get an infection going to the hospital because you are surrounded by other sick people) and almost 99,000 people died from those infections.
That is what killed my dad. His cancer was in remission from the chemo, but that made him immunocompromised, not to mention that he was a 62-year-old diabetic. He went to the hospital, got pneumonia, turned septic and died.
It seems much more likely that an elderly patient going to the hospital with Conronavirus will die from a staph or strep or MRSA infection they picked up in the waiting room than of the virus itself.
It seems that the leading underlying cause of untimely death in Europe is being elderly.
But that reporting does not generate panic clicks, cause people to sit in front of the TV for hours waiting for updates, or make Trump look bad, so the major networks won’t run it.
When the dust settles and we figure out just how much damage was done to our economy and the fabric of our society because of media malfeasance during the Coronavirus outbreak, I think there will be hell to pay.
Update:
Jim Sciutto is Chief National Security Correspondent for CNN Newsroom.
He’s also one of the four major storage facilities for the National Strategic Douche Reserve, along with Brian Stelter, Jim Acosta, and Don Lemon.
He decided to Tweet this shit:
One consistent feature of Trump’s response is a stated desire to keep the number of confirmed cases down.
There is currently a Coronavirus test shortage. As such, it should be our priority to test high-risk individuals. The elderly, especially those who would have been in close proximity to other confirmed cases.
We don’t need a rush as every panicky idiot who watches the news thinks that their run-of-the-mill stuffy head and cough is Coronavirus and rushes out to get a test.
Does CNN’s Chief National Security Correspondent explain that?
No, he runs with a conspiracy theory that Trump is telling people not to get tested to keep the numbers of confirmed cases down because Bad Orange Man.
This is unbelievably irresponsible, but it makes Trump look bad so that’s what he’s going to do. If causes thousands of people to storm their doctors’ offices for a test because their spring allergies have them coughing, so what. Orange Man Bad is all that matters.
There is no reason whatsoever to be this aggres…. never mind.
.
https://twitter.com/_iB_Breezy/status/1238951593929834498
#BREAKING – Two Miami Beach Police officers have been taken to the hospital after, officials said, they were injured while responding to a disturbance call. They are expected to be OK.
We got a letter in the mail with an invitation to go to my2020census.gov and an access code. Maybe half a dozen question about how many people lived in the house, race and home ownership. That was it.
Apparently, their Jew-hatred doesn’t extend so much that they are willing to die for their principles.
Second, the leading Iranian religious authority, the Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem al-Shirazi, issues a fatwa: “If Israel discovers a vaccine for Coronavirus, it is permissible to use this Israeli vaccine. There is no objection to that.” pic.twitter.com/tQms8FJEZb
For once, the conversation over closing the US-Mexico border is being driven by Mexican health officials who say they are considering shutting out Americans to keep coronavirus out of their country.
Is this border closing a one way deal?
At a press conference on Friday, health minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell said: ‘Mexico wouldn’t bring the virus to the United States, rather the United States would bring it here.
To be fair, we do owe them for bring typhus, whooping cough, and measles back into the US.
There are currently more than 2,000 cases of the virus in the US and it is spreading rapidly. Forty-three people have died from it.
By contrast in Mexico, there have only been 16 confirmed cases and no deaths.
Why do I suspect that the Mexican government is even more incapable of mass testing than we are so their measurement is wrong? That the Mexican government lies as badly as the Chinese government so the numbers they are reporting are wrong? Probably both.
If Mexico wants to seal the border I’m all for it. If they want to just stop Americans from coming in and not stop their poorest from going out, which is what I suspect. Then I have absolutely no problem with Trump reciprocating.
The Left will still attack him for it, but at least he can say Mexico did it to us first.
