The Thomas Chronicles

*** UPDATE BELOW ***

Our lovely dictator from Venezuela is at it again. This this time he’s threatening to nationalize supermarkets because, according to his odd logic, they’re hoarding food to artificially drive up prices. His accusations and direct actions have already caused the temporary closure of one supermarket chain “for pricing meat above allowed levels.”

In good socialist fashion, Chavez’s government has set a mandated price for meat and other foods. Of course, this creates a situation where business-owners are forced to sell food at a loss, which if continued will result in their bankruptcy.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that Chavez and his government are ignorant of the consequences of their policies. They’ve placed the grocery businesses in a double-bind gambit where they are essentially damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they proceed and follow Chavez’s edicts to the letter, they would be bankrupt through their inability to compete with marketplace forces. But if they disobey and raise the price of foods, Chavez will shut them down.

According the BBC:

President Chavez told a gathering of pensioners in the capital, Caracas, that he was waiting for the “first excuse” to take over privately-owned outlets that manipulate prices.

“If they insist on violating the interests of the people, the constitution and laws, I will take away the warehouses, the shops, I will take away the supermarkets and I’ll nationalise them,” he warned.

In a word, Chavez is searching for a pretext to nationalize supermarkets, which is what he’s intending to do anyway. President Chavez, as well versed as he is in Machiavellian maneuvers, cannot be ignorant of the basic fact that the majority of people are loyal to their stomachs, their allegiances begin and end at the bottom of a rice bowl.

Or, as the old adage goes, “We’re only one meal away from a revolution.”

It’s simple.

You control the food. You control the people.

As dictator, you can make yourself both tyrant (withholding food) and saint (giving food). Both are good in coercing a desired behavior from the populace.

It would be a mistake to underestimate Chavez through an inability to take him seriously– he’s veritably cartoonish in his villainy. Strangely, our reaction to Chavez as being cartoonish is remarkably similar our grandfather’s reaction to the German chancellor in the 1930’s. Before the start of hostilities in Europe, Americans of that generation couldn’t take Hitler seriously because he was so, well, cartoonish.

Let us hope we aren’t underestimating our cartoon bully from Latin America on the basis of his transparent buffoonery. We just might receive a rude awakening.

On Further Reflection 2/16/07:

It is surprising how dismissive the American people have been to Hugo Chavez. In light of all the threats arrayed against us— not least are the threats of Islamofascism, illegal aliens, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, FARC and Latin American drug cartels— you would think we’d be taking Chavez much more seriously as a people.

The foremost reason for taking Chavez more seriously is not because all the oil he exports, but because he is forming alliances with all our enemies. Unlike the Islamofascists, who more often than not stick out like a carrot top in a sea of brunettes, Venezuela already has our country penetrated, though probably not through any previous effort on his own.

Latin America’s illegal aliens and our drug smugglers have already carved pathways into the United States that remain largely undetected. Sanctuary cities like New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and others have well-worn networks and sympathetic local populations which can provide logistical support and safe houses for illegal activities. If you doubt how thoroughly we are penetrated by Latin American countries, the fact that 12 to 20 million illegal aliens are in the United States right now with more pouring in testifies to how porous and vulnerable we are as a country.

And if that isn’t convincing, ponder how easily one can buy cocaine or any other drug. Most of it comes from Latin American countries.

Hugo Chavez and his allies around the world could bring America to her knees if they can effectively exploit this gaping hole in our defenses. Chavez and our Latin America enemies can harm us much more effectively than the Islamofascists ever can.

Update 2/16/07 11:15 p.m.

Thanks for the link and trackback Hugo Chavez Watch!

Related Posts:

The Largest Minority: President Chavez Threatens to Seize High Priced Supermarkets
The Astute Blogger: CHAVEZ: “ALL YOUR SUPERMARKETS ARE BELONG TO US!”
Freedom Folks: Venezuela: Oh Yeah, This Is Going To End Well!
Hugo Chavez Watch: What’s the price of a gallon of milk? Ask Hugo!!
Say Anything: The Wonderful World of Socialism
Hot Air: Venezuela set to let Chavez rule by decree for 18 months

*** UPDATE BELOW ***

Well, perhaps that’s an overstatement.

People do listen to the Dixie Chicks, just generally not the people who like country music.

Over the summer, USA Today and other news organizations reported that the Dixie Chicks had to rearrange their North American Accidents & Accusations Tour and reschedule many of their concert dates due to lackluster ticket sales primarily in the South and Midwest. Also, although their album, Taking the Long Way, initially had strong sales and ended around 2 million copies sold for last year, it was still a fraction of the sales from their debut album and certainly less than the 6 million copies that the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ new album sold.

Even newcomer Carrie Underwood out-sold the Dixie Chicks with Underwood’s sales for 2006 totaling at 3.7 million copies.

Like it as not, they are a political music group. Like other bands with heavy political overtones, such as Rage Against the Machine, the Dixie Chicks appeal to a core audience of liberal listeners.

In 2003 in Britain, they said they were “ashamed” of President Bush, and from that moment on, despite their half-hearted apology to the American public, country music stations in the South and Midwest have virtually boycotted their music. This year they had to cancel their tour in Kansas City, Houston, St. Louis, Memphis and Knoxville along with 14 other cities due to slow sales.

The Dixie Chicks have made it clear that they stand by their accusations against the President, and the Southern and Midwestern states have also made it clear that they stand by their dislike of them.

So, what exactly warrants the 5 Grammy’s that were awarded to the Dixie Chicks?

It is no secret that our artistic communities, Hollywood and the music industries and the like, are left leaning communities devoted to the advancement of their politics. If actual sales are indicative of where the American people are at, then it seems not very many people are listening to our artistic communities. Hollywood movies sales have been slumping for well over a decade with residual DVD sales keeping them afloat, and the music industry is on the ropes.

(As a sidenote, Hollywood is now pining their hopes of survival on the new Blue Ray technology. According to Reuters, “A large-scale failure of AACS could be a threat to the $24 billion DVD industry, which has started to cool and was counting on next-generation DVD sales to reinvigorate it.”)

So far as I can see, as with so many other things from our entertainment establishment, the Dixie Chicks were awarded Grammy’s not from the entertainment values of their music but from the vehemence of their politics.

(Photo By Dima Gavrysh, AP)

Update 2/15/07:

For the Dixie Chicks, politics aside, their core audience base have shifted significantly since their comment against Bush in 2003. Country music has traditionally been focused in the South, the Midwest and parts of the West. From what I understand, the Dixie Chicks’ fan base went from these regions of the United States to the coastal states.

However you cut the cards, that’s a dramatic shift in demographics; and an uncertain shift for any country western band since most country western acts don’t make successful jumps to the “mainstream” or popular music, even with few Grammy’s.

The list of attempts to go to “mainstream” from country is very familiar. Shania Twain, Lean Rhimes, even Garth Brooks (as Chris Gaines). Most of the time, the American public sees them as temporary novelties, which runs for a season; then we’ll see the novelty wear off. That’s when they plummet in sales.

Who knows if the Dixie Chicks have any lasting power in the music industry, but if past acts are any indicators, they’ll enjoy a nice run before people get bored.

Related Posts:

California Conservative: GOP “Frontrunners” And The Dixie Chicks
Fan of the Band: Country Radio Still Cold to Dixie Chicks
arubberdoor: Grammy Vindication for the Dixie Chicks
Texas Rainmaker: The Grammy’s are a joke

Battle between Turks and Christians by Tintoretto


Debbie Schlussel reported a couple of week’s ago that Imam Husham Al-Husainy, the imam who lead the Democratic Party in prayer, was a supporter of the Hezbollah and terrorism. (Of course, it was an imam and not a Christian minister. If it was a Christian minister, perhaps the ACLU would have been involved in a legal separation of church and state wrangle.) I also chimed in and gave my two cent about the matter and allowed it to end there.

I was informed the other day, however, as to what Al-Husainy meant by “oppression and occupation”. It is hard for Americans to wrap their minds around this but whenever an Muslim imam refers to “oppression and occupation”, they usually refer to the Jewish people, not our troops in Iraq (though they occasionally accuse us of it also). For instance, they would refer to the Jews in Palestine as “occupiers” and “oppressors”. They would also refer to the “oppression and occupation” in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Houston, etc.

This obviously offends our liberal vanities, but they make themselves absolutely clear. It is a point of fact that al-Quaeda’s first article in their terms for peace with us is for us to hand over all the Jews to them, or else kill them ourselves. For al-Quaeda, this is non-negotiable. Of course, there are the further articles such as our treatment of women and for us to all convert to Islam, etc. etc.

Clearly, we are going to do no such thing. Oddly enough, since 9/11, we’ve been trying rigorously to rationalize their demands and declare that “Islam is peace” when we have very little evidence of any such thing. One of the terrible things of modern era is our lack of moral courage and our inability to name things for what they are for fear of offending someone’s feelings. Political correctness has disabled all our defenses and has left us hostage to the “feelings” of others.

This past Tuesday millions of cellphones across Mexico fell silent. Reuters reported that omni-present ringtones and conversations conducted by solitary people on the side of the roads were suddenly treated to the golden silence that once pervaded all American movie theaters.

No, this was not due to a rediscovered sense of manners and propriety, but because of a “technical problem” with the cellular phone network.

According to the link provided by ZDNet News, they implied that these “technical problems” derive from vulnerabilities in the Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems on mobile devices. Because many cell phones, PDA’s and blackberries et al have internet access, particularly malicious websites or jpegs can potentially carry out DOS attacks, or Denial-of-Service attacks, aimed to render computer/internet resources unavailable to the user.

Apparently, the network was “saturated” with such errors and crashed yesterday for hours. The Telcel cell phone network, owned by America Movil, has 40 million people attached to it’s network, most of whom reside in an around Mexico City.

This is just another recent example of how dependent and, thus, how vulnerable we are to technological failures. We seem so impressed with our internet, TiVo, and digital cameras that we don’t realize we are a hiccup away from calamity, and the fact that this occurred in Mexico this time and not the United States shouldn’t offer any consolation. If anything such a potential disaster makes us more vulnerable than Mexico because of our utter dependence on this technology.

As the world races toward erecting wireless towers, busily plugging parts of the world’s cranium together with invisible cables, our concrete infrastructure deteriorates under a mindless negligence and an utter disregard of reality.

As wonderful and magical as wireless technology is, it cannot replace the physical infrastructure upon which it is built. A wireless capable laptop or blackberry is fundamentally useless without the energy required to send and receive the signals, from towers, from hotspots. What’s more, cell phone towers are inherently much more vulnerable to the whims of chance and nature than “land-lines”.

In the ongoing winter freeze sweeping across America, first in the West, then the South, and now the Midwest to New England, we have seen power lines and telecommunication lines bend and crack under the weight of hard ice. Hundreds are still without power. (Heck, I don’t even know if people in Colorado have electricity yet— and they lost it in December!)

If weather can do this to physical structures, it is not hard to imagine what would happen to wireless communications in such an eventuality, since wireless connections are, by nature, fickle and tenuous and very much at the mercy of its environment.

Like our aging power grid, most of our telecommunications infrastructure was also constructed about half a century ago and is in terrible need of an overhaul. Even at this late date, it is still within our ability to remedy this sad state of affairs and do it rather painlessly, if we would be willing to be inconvenienced by road detours and noise from all the digging.

Is that such a heavy price to pay if such an inconvenience would ultimately save lives and keep people warm?

If you have doubts at our vulnerability and the very likely chance of calamity, look to our already failing power grids in the Northeast and West, as well as Mexico’s temporary cell phone outage.

Mexico’s cell phone network fiasco didn’t even require severe weather, just a little sip of human sinfulness.

Previous Post:

Al Gore = Nobel Peace Prize?
Al Gore and the Nobel Peace Prize part 2
A shadow of things to come…

Related Posts:

ShrinkWrapped: Irrational Terror
Nuclear is Our Future: NYT Does a Two-Bit Hatchet Job on Nuclear Power

The police apprehended a man in a city north of Tokyo today for stealing a police patrol car. He said he was just “too tired to walk.”

Um… What can you possibly say about that?

I once watched an interview of a German man, now in his high elderly years, remarking that when he lived in Nazi Germany, he remembered how the propaganda drenched every node, every corner of of their world. The relentless bombardment of Joseph Goebbels and his propaganda machine pierced down every street and stained every publication to where, when they called him to join the battlefront, he found it a welcome relief.

The strange thing about living in today’s hyper-linked world is that it seems we cannot escape the incessant politics of our times. It seems that nothing can be apolitical. If a minutiae of thought is uttered by a conservative, henceforth, all people who ascribe to that thought is a conservative. Likewise with all things liberal.

D’you believe that?

You a bleedin’ heart commie?

I think we left something back there when the counter-cultural revolution began that’s now almost lost to us. Civility and manners aren’t virtues we generate from thin air, nor can we suddenly resume and expect the kind of refinement we’ve seen from our past. They accumulate over time and with much practice.

Perhaps this is the fruition of a lifetime of indulged infantile selfishness from the Baby-Boomers who are now reaching their apex of power. (Who hasn’t heard all the whining on Capitol Hill. The President lied, misled, misled, misled! If it’s not perfect just the way I want it, then it’s rubbish! It’s no accident that most of the anti-war protesters on D.C. the other week were middle-aged former hippies.) Or perhaps this is the result of decades of ideological indoctrination in our schools, coupled to mindless, shouting television. The causes are too varied and too much to enumerate in detail here.

But there is so much hope still. God can snap His fingers and all these negative trends can disappear in a heartbeat if He grants us a revival. Who will tell Him no?

After writing my previous post on Al Gore and his nomination for the Nobel Peace prize, I got to thinking more about Mr. Gore and his “crusade” against Global Warming. The more I think and read about Mr. Gore and his eco-friendly fellow travellers, the more disturbing it becomes.

Environmentalists everywhere are elevating Gore to the status of sainthood because he’s made a movie and delivered lectures on the perils of Global Warming. But as they used to say in these here United States, “Talk is cheap”, or more metaphorically, “Where’s the beef?” If environmentalism is so important to this man, where are the actions to back up his claims?

Even in Alexander Cockburn old book, “Al Gore: A User’s Manual‘’, he wrote:

“Like a street mountebank fluttering a handkerchief to distract attention from his sleights of hand, Gore has always used his proficiency with the language of liberalism to mask an agenda utterly in concert with the Money Power.

“Nowhere is this truer than in his supposed environmentalism, which nicely symbolizes the chasm that has always separated Gore’s professions from his performance. He denounces the rape of nature, yet has connived at the strip-mining of Appalachia and, indeed, of terrain abutting one of Tennessee’s most popular state parks.”

Cockburn, for those who are not aware of him, is a left-wing columnist and is also perhaps one of the most “aggressive environmental journalists” around.

This begs the question: Why would such a staunch environmentalist go after Al Gore, who in the populist mind has become virtually synonymous with environmentalism? More importantly, is it true that Al Gore has been involved in strip mining?

The short answer is yes.

During Gore’s campaign for the presidency in 2000, the Wall Street Journal had an article by Micah Morrison titled, “Al Gore, Environmentalist and Zinc Miner“. In it, Morrison details the wheeling and dealings of Al Gore and his father, another former senator from Tennessee.

Here’s a short excerpt of that article:

A 1998 study by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based organization, criticized the zinc-mining operation for purchasing a toxic waste that included sulfuric acid and reselling it as fertilizer. The mine buys acid waste from steel plants, uses it as purification agent in zinc processing, and then sells the waste to fertilizer companies, according to a report in the Tennessean, a Nashville newspaper. Most soil scientists say the procedure is safe.

Tennessee environmentalists disagree. “Clearly, when you spread those types of chemicals around on a farm or on the land, you’re going to get a lot of runoff,” Brian McGuire, executive director of Tennessee Citizens Action told the Tennessean. “So it’s going to get into the water. We’re poisoning ourselves.”

A Pasminco official noted that the mine has had few violations and works to uphold a “very strict standard” of environmental quality. The Gore campaign did not respond to requests for comment. But some Tennessee residents say Mr. Gore becomes testy when questioned about the zinc mine. Tom Gniewek, a retired chemical engineer from Camden, Tenn., has studied the zinc mine for years and tried to question Mr. Gore about it at town-hall meetings. “He gets real angry,” Mr. Gniewek says. “Instead of answering the question, he attacked my motives and accused people like me of vandalizing the earth.”

One might be tempted to say that this was ancient history and not at all relevant to what’s happening right now. But what is happening right now is actually equally as disturbing.

In a softball interview with Mr. Gore by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Gore was asked about all the pollution he engenders by flying across the globe to give his infamous slideshow lecture. Perhaps he could fly less to contribute his part in the mitigation of fossil fuels dumped into the atmosphere.

He airily answered:

“Beginning two years ago, I made a decision to live a carbon-neutral life,” he says, explaining that his family and businesses now do all they can to reduce their emissions and to “offset” the rest by giving money to carbon-reduction schemes in India and eastern Europe. He also says he has talked to Richard Branson at Virgin and British Airways about the problem with aviation fuel, one of the single biggest sources of carbon dioxide. “They’re aware of it,” he says. Mere awareness is hardly enough, is it? “There will have to be a day of reckoning that takes this into account,” he concedes.

“Offset”? What could he possibly mean by “offset”?

Apparently, whatever he meant by it, affluent people the globe over are participating and advocating the idea of being “carbon-neutral” by “offsetting” their emissions. All this is terribly vague.

According to the Seth Sutel’s AP article, “offsetting” pollution essentially means this:

Here’s how carbon offsetting works. Dowlatabadi figures that a small car such as a Honda Civic, driven the average of 12,000 miles a year, would produce about 3.5 tons of carbon dioxide in a year.

By putting money toward renewable energy sources, paying for more efficient cooking stoves in developing countries or other green activities, you can “offset” an equal amount of CO2 emissions. Offset everything you do, as Gore and others do, and you can reach the goal of becoming “carbon-neutral.”

To be sure, the amounts of CO2 actually being reduced by such offsetting activities are puny compared to the vast amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from industrial activities globally, and achieving meaningful cutbacks in global emissions remains an enormous task.

This entire idea is patently ludicrous by its very premise. To contribute to the solution of Global Warming by reducing your own CO2 emissions is one thing, but to throw money at Third World Nations to make them reduce their emissions is another. I cannot think of a notion so devoid of reality.

For one thing, even in developing nations, they have to process fossil fuels to power their cities. And with their low level of technocracy, there will be substantial pollution. So what exactly is being proposed here? That the people of Third World Nations should be deprived of electricity and energy so that Gore and his disciples (and they are legion) can fly around the world to give their lectures on the dangers of fossil fuels and Global Warming?

This is an arrogance beyond comprehension, and it doesn’t seem like anyone is going to call Mr. Gore on it. This man-of-the-people is deliberately paying to have the poor people of poor nations abandon their use of electricity and other modern necessities so that he can fly around the world in his planes.

Far from being criticized on his aristocratic callousness, the Guardian gives him a pass. Even more disturbing is how many people are taking up Mr. Gore’s “offsetting” comment and turning it into a positive ethic. This gives “environmentalists” a complete license to indulge themselves with their SUV’s and private jets and feel absolutely self-righteous. They’ve “offset” their carbon emissions, you see. Let the poor folks in India freeze and the folks in Africa walk while I fly around telling people about the horrors of Global Warming, even as I contribute to it.

Egads!