Prior to the referendum in Venezuela, it was portrayed as being about a power grab on Chavez’ part. Which, in fact it was.
After the referendum, it is being increasingly portrayed as a move toward socialism. And, yes, it did have its socialistic elements. So the pundits are now bloviating about it being a rejection of socialism.
It was a package deal, of course. There was no option to vote for the socialism and not for the authoritarianism.
Tellingly, though, the power grab aspects of the referendum helped propel the socialist PODEMOS party out of Chavez’ camp and into the opposition. Prior to that, the socialist MAS party had previously parted ways with the Chavez-led coalition.
Moreover, the referendum failed at the polls, in contrast to Chavez’ past record of success. Add that to the defections of the leftist parties and the logical conclusion would appear to be that authoritarianism was rejected — not socialism.
But just try to get the establishment media to admit that.
Can you imagine if the government came out with a program legally requiring lenders to loan money at below-market rates to folks that would not normally meet their criteria so that the poor could afford to buy their own homes? (No insurance, no incentives, just a legal mandate — obey it or go to jail.)
You’d be able to hear the red-baiting insinuations on the moon.
Yet, when they undertake an intervention of comparable magnitude to bail out the relatively privileged (and to stabilize the extremely privileged financial system), it’s taken as a given that “something had to be done.” Meanwhile, folks go homeless because public housing and section 8 are chronically underfunded.
Because it’s a crisis if the privileged suffer. But only then.
Maybe I’ve mentioned it before, but it sure is irritating how most web sites that ask for such information force you to enter your credit card number as one huge, long, mashed-together string of digits without spaces or hyphens.
For Pete sakes, why? It’s not as if it’s a particularly difficult task to delete all the spaces or hyphens from a string (it only takes a single line in both Python and Perl, two of the most common back-end languages). There’s a very good reason credit card companies broke their numbers into four groups of four digits, after all. It’s the same reason the phone company (and the Social Security Administration) breaks their numbers into three groups: long, unbroken runs of numbers are difficult for humans to proofread or otherwise deal with.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to hit the “Submit” button multiple times, just because there’s an error lurking somewhere in a long choo-choo-train of digits. And all because some idiot programmer was too damn lazy to do a little bit of adaptive coding.
Just ran across a reference to this:
An ancient woodland of Caledonian descent,
with groves of trees bathed in the divine incandescent —
Ash, Aspen, Birch and Alder,
Holly, Yew, Hazel, and Juniper,
Rowan, Willow, Hawthorn, and Elder,
bedecked in stars and shiny ornament,
⋮
Where is the dominant tree species in the Caledonian forest ecosystem, Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris)? Missing, that’s where.
Perhaps I’m being a nitpicker to many eyes. To mine, however, I’m not: I find that error by omission fundamentally jarring. It is as if someone posted a poetic description of the Sonoran desert and left cacti out of it. Or a description of the forests of coastal Humboldt County that omitted redwoods.
It exemplifies my fundamental objection to the neo-Pagan path. It’s a belief system that is said to foster a connection with nature, yet it ends up obsessing about spirit-beings that are not known to exist, and overlooks very real things like pine trees that are definitively known to exist. That seems to me much more like fostering personal delusions about nature rather than fostering a connection to it.
Which is tragic, because the Caledonian forest is special and beautiful just as it is (and the pines form a key component of that beauty); go here to see some pictures.
Forget “intuitive spiritual wisdom;” I find the writings of natural scientists to be a much better way of fostering my connection to nature.
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