Why they’re howling for Chavecito’s blood

I’ve gotten so much crapaganda from the lamestream media in my inbox lately. All of it about how the Venezuelan opposition is feeling persecuted lately.

Um, you might want to start learning how to spell PROSECUTED, lamestreamers, because anyone who supported the April 11 coup by showing up at Miraflores the next day to support the illegal “provisional government” of Pedro Carmona–and maybe make money or get jobs off it–is definitely complicit in high treason and should therefore NOT be eligible for US citizenship. Let alone of a preferential fast-track variety while real refugees are turned away. No, the only asylum these people deserve is the mental kind, because their thinking is clearly delusional. It’s pretty obvious to anyone not mentally impaired that the coup was not democratic but antidemocratic–every democratic institution was declared null and void for two days, and every freely elected official’s legal status was blatantly disregarded. Many elected Chavistas feared for their lives and had to go underground or be “arrested” in what amounts to REAL persecution. (And they didn’t flee on luxury yachts to Curacao, either.)

And as a glance at the timeline of that coup will clearly show, the entire thing was all about money, money and more money. (It will also show that the army, still under Chavez’s orders, took pains not to use violent measures against the opposition even when it was most justified in doing so.)

But then again, being lamestream, mainstream US media people just don’t grasp little nuance-y things like that. Nor will they give you an honest look at the “democratic” Venezuelan opposition. They much prefer to reprint whatever PR bullshit comes into their office over the wires. It saves them having to report and do any digging of their own, you see. (And it also saves them from all risk of having to go off the message the State Dept. wants Americans to get.)

So of course, I figured Chavecito must be doing something right again, and indeed he is. But you have to be able to read Spanish, and keep your eye on oil and money, to know just how right. So, with no further ado, here’s a little something from Aporrea:

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Stupid Sex Tricks: Blame the gays (again!)

The Peruvian tyrant apologizes

Although, if you ask me, I’d say his tears are of a distinctly crocodilian variety…

Peru’s President Alan Garcia has said his government has not done enough to improve the lives of the poor.

In a speech marking his first year in office, Mr Garcia – who has seen a sharp decline in his popularity – urged Peruvians to show patience.

He promised that increased investment would cut poverty before the end of his term in 2011.

Peru’s economy is booming, but correspondents say the poor are yet to feel the benefits of its growth.

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Festive Left Friday Blogging: Happy Birthday, Chavecito!

Posted in Festive Left Friday Blogging, Huguito Chavecito. Comments Off »

Bullshit is Bullshit

More double talk from Alvaro

Contradictions between right-wing assertions and fact are such fun, especially when they’re blatant. Check out, for example, the gulf between this assertion

President Alvaro Uribe said Friday that Colombia’s institutions are now free of infiltration and corruption by right-wing militias blamed for some of the nation’s worst human rights abuses.

In a nationally televised address, Uribe said his government has “overcome paramilitarism.”

“Today paramilitarism no longer exists because combat against leftist rebels is now, in practice, the exclusive work of our democratic institutions,” Uribe declared in the speech to Congress marking Colombia’s independence day.

…and this fact:

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Bolivar Bolivariano…

Stupid Sex Tricks: How NOT to prevent AIDS

From Indonesia, an unfortunate meeting of First World technology with Third World thinking…


Lawmakers in Indonesia’s Papua are mulling the selective use of chip implants in HIV carriers to monitor their behaviour in a bid to keep them from infecting others, a doctor said Tuesday.

John Manangsang, a doctor who is helping to prepare a new healthcare regulation bill for Papua’s provincial parliament, said that unusual measures were needed to combat the virus.

“We in the government in Papua have to think hard on ways to provide protection to people from the spread of the disease,” Manangsang told AFP.

What exactly is a monitoring chip supposed to do to stop AIDS, anyway? Will it pipe up to remind the infected carrier to use a condom when s/he is about to knock boots with a new partner? And if no condom is forthcoming, will it then bleep and shout “ATTENTION, ATTENTION, THIS PERSON HAS HIV, DO NOT SLEEP WITH THIS PERSON”? And if that warning goes unheeded, will it then send a distress call to the local Gestapo to haul the naughty fucker away to the nearest concentration camp?

Palestine is Still the Issue

John Pilger’s documentary of several years ago is still relevant today:

Warning: extremely explicit and gruesome. Does not show the Israeli military in a good light, but in an honest one.

What really grabbed me here was how much the illegal Israeli settlement (in Palestinian territory!) looked like a concentration camp in reverse–there is an electric barbed wire fence around the perimeter, but the prisoners are outside, while the “guards” live in relative luxury within it. Why anyone would want to live in such a sterile jail is beyond me. But then again, the settlers seem locked in a prison mind-set of their own. It is exactly like South African apartheid (which, as Pilger notes in another documentary, is still far from dead).

What gives me hope about all this? The fact that some Israelis, even those who’ve lost relatives to Palestinian suicide bombers, are thinking this through–and coming to the hard truth that it takes an awful lot of despair to become a suicide bomber. And that those thinkers are growing in number. They are drawing the once-unacceptable conclusion that repression does not work–and in fact, will only spur more and more violent uprisings.

Truth first, and justice–and only then reconciliation will be possible.

Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre