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Here’s how most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again in 2017 In early 2017, a nationwide survey of the people of Venezuela showed that during the year 2016, almost 75% of the population had lost weight due to not having enough food, and that their average weight loss was 19 pounds.Before I explain how this came to happen, I want to start out by explaining what did not cause this to happen.Many media outlets have been blaming Venezuela’s food shortages on the 2014 collapse in the price of oil....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cks4OBHGG5U

Venezuela’s embattled socialist government is steadily moving the country toward the abyss, and the escalating crisis is taking on increasingly ominous tones. Venezuelans are caught in a fast-spinning economic spiral that has already devastated living standards and created a large-scale humanitarian crisis. But as Venezuelans take to the streets, so far the government has responded with measures that exacerbate tensions and make a peaceful political solution increasingly difficult. President Nicolas Maduro, the heir to the late President Hugo Chavez, was elected by popular vote in 2013. But the Venezuelan system of government can no longer be called a democracy. The...

Bernie Sanders offers a real solution that the current condidates wont have. Bernie Sanders would first of all return tax levels to the way they were in the 1950s, tax the rich 90% and use the massive massive massive surplus from that tax to create jobs for the unemployed. One trillion should be paid for rebuilding infrastructure and bridges and creating jobs. Another trillion will be used to create new healthcare opertunety for workers to earn doctors degrees and to heal the sick and poor. Bernie sanders will also create government funded industries and factories that will create paying jobs...

She’s a walking parody of an unhinged leftist ‘reporter.’...But even among leftist hacks, Amanpour is a special case: It’s almost as if she’s trying to mock herself — a Trump-is-a-Clinton-plant conspiracy theory, if you will, but in the mainstream media. She referred to devout Christianity as “totalitarian” in her August 23, 2007, CNN profile “Christian Warriors.” But in 2008, she fawned over the “progress” achieved by Fidel Castro, and in 2013 she wished Zimbawean dictator Robert Mugabe a happy birthday. If a higher-profile (read: important) person had such a rich historical cache of commentary, they would have already been driven...

Takeout food? Yeah! That's just the ticket! It's about as good excuse as consumerism to explain the economic woes of Venezuela. A few weeks ago reporter Nicholas Casey of the New York Times almost completely avoided any mention of socialism and placed the blame for Venezuela's economic woes on a vague "consumerism" during an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air as chronicled in Newsbusters by Clay Waters. Since that "consumerism" excuse seems to have been widely mocked, Casey went to bat with an even more laughable excuse, comparing Venezuela's economic woes to someone who has been ordering takeout food for years...

...Chávez was either admired as a progressive visionary who gave voice to the poor or dismissed as just another third-world buffoon. Reality was more complex than that: Chávez pioneered a new playbook for how to bask in global admiration even as he hollowed out democratic institutions on the sly.Step one was his deft manipulation of elections. Chávez realized early that, as long as he kept holding and winning elections, nobody outside Venezuela would ask too many questions about what he did with his power in the interim. And so he mastered the paradoxical art of destroying democracy one election at...

One of life's enduring mysteries is why the left -- against overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- insists on more taxation, more government spending and more government control over the private sector. Europe's socialism has, over the last several decades, generated few private sector jobs and lags in growth when compared to the United States with its comparatively lighter hand of government. What does it take to show that, good intentions aside, government bureaucrats cannot spend money as efficiently and as effectively as the people who produce the money? The most recent example is Venezuela. Hugo Chavez's handpicked successor now...

Some U.S. lawmakers still take their jobs seriously, especially members of the House Committee on Homeland Security. You see, as a crowning component of his fetish for “normalizing” relations with (embracing and subsidizing) the Terror-Sponsoring Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate (called “Cuba” by Obama and his lapdog mainstream media) President Obama has given rapid and enthusiastic approval for six U.S. airlines to start flying one hundred direct flights a week from nine airports in Terror-Sponsoring Cuba to fifteen airports in our homeland.In light of this, some members of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security thought it prudent to check on what security measures...

In the darkness the warehouse looks like any other, a metal-roofed hangar next to a clattering overpass, with homeless people sleeping nearby in the shadows. But inside, workers quietly unload black plastic crates filled with merchandise so valuable that mobs have looted delivery vehicles, shot up the windshields of trucks and hurled a rock into one driver’s eye. Soldiers and police milling around the loading depots give this neighborhood the feel of a military garrison. […] The fight for food has begun in Venezuela. On any day, in cities across this increasingly desperate nation, crowds form to sack supermarkets. Protesters...

A staggering 87 percent of Venezuelans say they do not have money to buy enough food, the most recent assessment of living standards by Simón Bolívar University found. About 72 percent of monthly wages are being spent just to buy food, according to the Center for Documentation and Social Analysis, a research group associated with the Venezuelan Teachers Federation. In April, it found that a family would need the equivalent of 16 minimum-wage salaries to properly feed itself. Ask people in this city when the last time they ate a meal, and many will respond that it was not today....

“Socialism failing to work as it always does, this time in Venezuela,” Scully said. “You talk about giving everybody something free and all of a sudden there’s no food to eat. And who do you think is the richest person in Venezuela? The daughter of Hugo Chavez. Hello. Anyway. Oh and two.”

In 2001 a group of Castroite spies in south Florida known as the Wasp Network were convicted of charges ranging from espionage to conspiracy to commit murder (of U.S. citizens.) They were sentenced to terms ranging from 15 years to two life sentences. According to the FBI’s affidavit, the charges against these KGB-trained Communist spies included: • Compiling the names, home addresses, and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers and that of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica Naval Station in Key West.• Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.This past April, on Obama’s orders,...

Food riots and violent looting have become a daily occurrence across scarcity-struck Venezuela and a major problem for the struggling leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro. Despite hours in lines, Venezuelans increasingly find that coveted supplies of subsidized flour and rice run out before they can buy them. Many are skipping meals, getting by on mangoes stripped from trees - or taking matters into their own hands.

What happens when a National Public Radio host interviews a New York Times reporter on the subject of Venezuela’s economic collapse? You get a perfect storm of cluelessness. The host is Terry Gross, the guest is New York Times reporter Nicholas Casey, and the program is Fresh Air. Gross asks Casey about the utter disaster that Venezuela has become. Casey understands the depth to which Venezuela has fallen–he lives in Caracas!–but he can’t bring himself to offer an honest diagnosis.

Until recently, Julio Noguera worked at a bakery. But he now spends his evenings searching through the garbage for food. "I come here looking for food because if I didn't, I'd starve to death," Noguera said as he sorted through a pile of moldy potatoes. "With things like they are, no one helps anyone and no one gives away meals." Across town, unemployed people converge every dusk at a trash heap on a downtown Caracas sidewalk to pick through rotten fruit and vegetables tossed out by nearby shops. They are frequently joined by small business owners, college students and pensioners...

The Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Amendment Bill eliminates all white people including the disabled. “The definition of black people is now clear and aligned with the Constitution,” Tlhoaele said.... Read more on South Africa Today

An Afghan national with ties to the Taliban — and a plot to carry out a terror attack somewhere in North America — was caught last fall after being smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico, an incident sure to further inflame the debate over national security risks at the border. The Afghan national’s alleged terror ties were not initially flagged in a terror database – and as a result, not initially reported – when the incident first came to light last November, according to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who obtained Homeland Security documents on the incident. It was only later...

A smuggling network has managed to sneak illegal immigrants from Middle East terrorism hotbeds straight to the doorstep of the U.S., including helping one Afghan man authorities say was part of an attack plot in North America. Immigration officials have identified at least a dozen Middle Eastern men smuggled into the Western Hemisphere by a Brazilian-based network that connected them with Mexicans who guided them up to the U.S. border, according to internal government documents reviewed by The Washington Times. Those smuggled included Palestinians, Pakistanis and the Afghan man who Homeland Security officials said had family ties to the Taliban...

The much anticipated OPEC meeting in Vienna on June 2 ended pretty much as expected: the group once again failed to put any production targets in place. Without a ceiling on output, all OPEC members will continue to produce as they see fit, leaving the oil market to sort itself out. The result was largely anticipated, given the lack of agreement at several prior meetings. However, the meeting in Vienna was not without some news. OPEC members managed to agree on several small bore issues, which could be viewed as a modest success, especially after the apparent hostility on display...