The Devil's Excrement

It has been a long weekend, lots of things to say after Chavez, during Chavez’ one day visit to Venezuela, has
talked on and on and on all afternoon and evening, rambling as he welcomes the “peaceful” President of Iran, who “only” wants to obliterate Israel.This does not make the Venezuelan-Jewish community very happy,
they decide this is too much for their
dignity, as it should be. Will other groups take a stand or are they too busy making moeny?

Meanwhile, Rosales protested the closeness of
Venezuela’s relations with a terrorist country, which certainly sets
him appart from the autocrat’s view of the world. Chavez , on teh other hand, refuses to recognize Calderon as president of Mexico, clearly intervening in that country’s affairs when he refuses to accept
what Mexico’s Electoral Court did. So, we lose our good and close friends in
order to satisfy the whims and hormonal problems of the by now nutty
autocrat, whose agenda does not represent that of Venezuelan citizens or Venezuela, Venezuelans could not tell or empathize with an Iranian if they saw one (Some of my best friends are Iranian, but they left long ago!) and could care less about
those country’s problems, much like Chavez acts with this country’s problems.Yes, the problems for the average Venezuelan are
how to eat and how to survive, while Chavez keeps giving away the wealth
and the country to others. Of course, he eats well daily and he dresses even better.He is part of the new and wealthy Venezuelan robolutionary oligarchy.

As China decides to get caterpillar
tractors, Venezuela goes with crappy Iranian ones, Chavez lets these
foreigners run the joint tractor venture, despite the 50/50 split (Even if I
have no proof the Iranains ever paid their share). Very quickly, a strike
hits the plant as the Iranians refuse to increase salaries, because
profits will dissapear and they even try to fire people when they go on
strike. So, let’s now build a petrochemical plant! Wonder who will run it? You have to love fundamentalist capitalism, which contrasts
with XXIst. Century Socialism, which we are told we will find out what
it’s before Chavez leaves in 2027. Could Iranian capiatlism and the new oligarchy’s corruption decide one day to stop the robolution?

But it is late. I am tired, it has been a long weekend with orchids and all and I can only smile when I see where Alek showered
this morning, but have to wonder how many foreigners (or PSF’s for that
matter) even got the meaning of that picture. I can not even find the
link to the silly interview where our chief stupid President says Fidel
is and should be the President of Venezuela and the Universe. What is with Hugo
Chavez? Doesn’t he even have dignity? He acts around Fidel like a
little kid around Micky Mouse. Hopefully that silly bearded mousy icon will
be dead soon, so that Chavez and Venezuela can get on with their life,
their needs and the much needed agenda, because so far, it has simply
been…

EIGHT LOST YEARS! using a sign that you can see all over Caracas these days, except much like the picture above they are chopping off fingers as their goals and promises, like everything else, are simply reduced. Hopefully, they will lose at least one hand….

Yesterday
pro-Chavez newspaper Vea had the Head of Chavez’ campaign, Francisco Ameliach, who
“revealed” a list of the eight aspects that the opposition will use
to “attack and discredit the Government and candidate Hugo Chavez”.
Let’s look at it:

1.- Chavez is giving away the country
2.- Chavez aligns with and collaborates with terrorism
3.- Crime and corruption prevail in Venezuela as a result of the ineffectiveness of this Government
4.- Venezuela ahs a dictatorial Government which does not respect human rights
5.- Chavez wants to bring Venezuela to war with the US
6.- Chavez is buying votes with the people’s wealth for Venezuela to get a seat
at the UN’s Security Council
7.- Chavez intervenes in other country’s internal affairs
8.- The Chavez Government does not have respect for private property.

Now, I think the list can be looked upon in two different ways: What is true in
the list and what the opposition will use or not in its campaign.

Of the eight items seven are obviously true and need no discussion: Chavez is
indeed giving away the country’s money, ask London, Uruguay, Argentina and the like,
Chavez does align the country’s foreign policy with country’s like Iran,
Hussein’s Iraq before he was deposed, Syria and its buddies. Crime and corruption have
increased n-fold during these eight terrible years, homicides are up three fold
nationwide and the evidence and results of corruption are out there for all to see. Human rights
are not respected and institutions like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International have clearly said so. We have all seen Chavez kissing butt all over the
world to buy votes for the Security Council. As for interfering with other
country’s affairs, ask Mexico,
Peru, Bolivia and
more to come soon. Finally, to say that this Government is respectful of
private property is a real laugher, the Constitution is not even followed when properties are expropriated or threatened with expropriation.

Now, the only item I disagree with is saying that Chavez wants war with the US or this will be a campaign issue. While
keeping his anti-Yankee, anti-Bush, anti-Condoleezza policy, Chavez has done little to provoke a war, nor does he seem to want it. In fact, even
today he is looking for some sort of meeting in Washington DC,
which he has desired and sought for ever since he became President.

What I think is stupid is to think that Rosales’ campaign will make an issue
of many of these topics. I don’t think Rosales is going to talk about Chavez’ autocratic
friends or his intervention into other country’s affairs or even talk much
about Chavez
buying votes for the Security Council. Rosales is clearly emphasizing all local issues: helping
the poor, crime, unemployment, investment and inflation. Remarkably only two of the these are in the list.

This simply means that, in the end, Rosales will make a big issue of only three of
the eight items in the list above: Giving away the people’s money, crime and security and property
rights. The rest are the issues that Chavez gives priority in his agenda, but
so far Rosales has been very good at not allowing Chavez to set his.

By election day, food inflation will have gone up nearly 40% for the year and if Chavez’ campaign thinks that this will not be the focus of Rosales campaign, then they are more out of touch than I previously believed.

What the list does show is that truly the Government is thinking too much about
Chavez’ international agenda, which most Venezuelans could care the least
about. Note that five of the eight items are part of Chavez’ international
agenda or issues that are not part of the day to day concerns of the average
Venezuelans, suggesting that even the strategy is an out of touch strategy
which may backfire is these are the issues the Chavez campaign will emphasize.

Chavez much like his arch-enemy George W. is now emphasizing his international agenda over local problems, a curious and common trait about ambitious leaders. But Venezuelans could care less. In the end it is day to day matters that count. I am pretty sure that within a month Chavez will no longer be travelling much and that the above list will be changed dramatically, unless his campaign is ready to make a colossal mistake.

So, Daniel squares off in London’s Evening Standard below with the
“International Secretary of the Hands off Venezuela Campaign” who
somehow wants to justify Venezuela subsidzing the diesel to the London
Metropolitan bus system, as a subsidy for the poor. This person should
travel to Venezuela and realize that the 10 percentile of the poorest
in London that rides that system is likely to be in the top 90
percentile of wealth in Venezuela. Poor in a city like London, with the highest
standard of living in Europe, could even be middle class in Venezuela, but
explain that to ignorant  PSF’s! That subsidy to London, is as nutty as the US$ 10
billion subsidy which Venezuelans with cars receive when they buy a
gallon of gasolline for some US$ 0.16. Those that have cars in this
country are in the top 30% of the population by wealth, if not higher.

Daniel
correctly points out that the Mayor of London will hopefully do a
follow up on the aid promised by Chavez, to make sure it is not more than the usual
bombastic announcemnet that our President has accustomed us to, such as
the eight employment programs that never materialized, the many joint ventures with companies abroad (Petrobras says deals with Venezuela have had a 100% failure rate) or the
Petrocaribe program, which one year after its creation, only 5 countries
are receving, of the 16 that signed up for it. Some countries did have the dignity not to do participate it realizing the meaning and objectives of the program.

Meanwhile Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual also puts in his two cents, calling the PSF Mayor of London “a pimp by vocation” in the artcile below blasting Hugo’s latest solidarity with the rich antics.

Hugo saves London by Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual

Our guy, definitely is raving by now

His last crazy idea is astonishing: to sell, at reduced prices, below
those of the marketplace, 1 million 300 thousand barrels of diesel a year to the
city of London, whose city council will “pay” with technical advise to the City
Council of Caracas on matters of garbage collection, transit and others of the same
type. The diesel will be used to move the fleet of municipal buses of the English
capital. Thus, a small and backwards country, full of poor people, with its President
“concerned” for the poor of London, will insure them cheaper transport, while
in Caracas urban transport is one of the items that hits the pockets of the
poor the most. One of the Earth’s biggest powers, England, which on top of that is an
oil power, will receive such treatment form a poor country.

But, on his side, the Mayor of London. Mr. Livingstone, demonstrates an
amazing vocation as a pimp. With all his leftwing beliefs (the man belongs to
the Labor party’s left) all of those slogans about the solidarity among the
people and the like, which should have taken him to offer Caracas those
consulting jobs for free, he just flushed them in the toilet and grabbed that
easy offer from the irresponsible south American President, because that guy is
indeed an “internationalist”, tailored after the old revolutionary style. Except
that this temporarily wealthy President is inaugurating a new form of “internationalism”:
at the same time that he denounces imperialism, he helps solve the problems of
the great imperial powers. For the English, what is happening must be a source
of consternation, but for us Venezuelans it is a scorn, an outrage, an insult. To
the squandering of our money, to the giving away of dollars to other countries,
to demential projects such as financing a fort in the border of Bolivia with
Brazil, we now add this gesture towards the London Mayor, which simply overflows
our patience. It is one thing to express solidarity with those that are doing
worse than us, to which we will never refuse anything and a completely
different one to have delirious waste, carried out only to strengthen the pedestal
of the statute that Chavez is building at the planetary scale.

His non sense invades other areas too. As a continental referee, naming
the rope in the home of the hanged, he “evaluates” the possibilities of reestablishing
relations with Mexico
because, according to him. The elections in that country had “strange happenings”
You need balls!

Chavez protesting for electoral irregularities in
another country! He could not stand a report from the European Union about the Venezuelan
elections without being seized with a hydrophobic attack, but in a laid back
way becomes a busybody and intervenes in matters that he has not been called
upon to even give an opinion. As if that were not enough, he now offers help to
Iran “in any setting” if it
were invaded by the US.
Is he going to stop selling Venezuelan oil to the US in that case? Is he going to
send troops to Miami?
Is he going to send them eventually to Iran? Anyone can allow himself a
certain level of being a bragging, but without abusing it. This ridicule is
simply too big!

Gonzalo Garcia Ordóñez wrote this for Tal Cual today. I thought I would translate it and we could all add new questions in the comments and I will post the new ones at the end of the list as they appear.

The voters ask the CNE

1. Which law authorizes the military electoral operation the so called “Republic Plan” to operate the fingerprint machines?

2. In which article and of which law is the CNE authorized to use blank voting notebooks for its voters?

3. Which law authorizes the Directors of the Electoral Power to turn over the Electoral Registry to the political parties with no addresses?

4. In which part of our electoral legislation do electronic voting notebooks appear?

5. Why doesn’t the CNE give out information about the results of the in situ audits?

6. Why isn’t there a “social electoral comptroller” for the results, machine by machine, record by record, on the Internet, before a winner is declared?

7. Why don’t the military members of the Republic Plan have their right to vote guaranteed and appear in the electoral notebooks?

8. Why were voters changed, without authorization, from their voting centers and why their slow relocation to the original voting centers?

9. Why does the CNE authorize the mobilization of reservists outside their voting centers

10. When we are talking about violations of the Constitution on Electoral matters, why doesn’t the CNE act, for example, in the case of public workers in their Government jobs who are actively campaigning?

11. Has the Electoral Power seen the political advertising on the side of the UNEFA building, a building under a special military regime

12. Who allows Minister William Lara to give statements for the media with MVR propaganda on the background?

13. Why, if the law forbids it, does the Government candidate use the name of Miranda in his political campaign?

14. Why does the CNE allow that the Government, when using the space given to it under the Law of social responsibility of radio and TV, identify itself as the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela? What would happen if an adeco, copeyano, or justicial Mayor identified its Government as Adeco, Copeyano or Juticicial Government? For example: Justicial Municipality of Baruta?

15. Which law authorizes active military that are part of the Chiefs of Staff to participate in electoral political matters?

16. Was it a violation or provocation to the rule of law, the public and noted fact, as the Prosecutor would say, that active military who are part of the President’s security, accompanied the President dressed with red shirts on the day he registered his candidacy

17. How does the CNE plan to separate Government events from the political campaign, for example, billboards paid by Governors, Mayors, and Pdvsa?

18. Can all Venezuelans participate in the totaling of the tally sheets via Internet, that is, that each witness knows that the computerized results of his poll booth are the correct ones?

19. What will happen to the electoral waste accumulated at the CNE?

20. How can one trust CNE Board members who are pro-Government and a CNE committed to the revolution?

Dr. Tibisay Lucena, the people are not stupid and know what is going on, but they still aspire to free and transparent elections.

New ones:

21. Why is that the “Con Chavez el Pueblo es el Gobierno” and “Con Chavez todo el Poder para el Pueblo” slogans are not forbidden in official ads?

Of course we are going to enrich uranium, but first things first

From today’s Financial Times (subscription required after a couple of days)

Treating Chávez as a harmless idealist is dangerous by Richard Lapper in the Financial Times

Over
the past few months Hugo Chávez has put the most inveterate traveller
to shame. One minute the endlessly energetic, anti-American president
of Venezuela is in Moscow signing a deal to buy military helicopters
and manufacture Kalashnikovs; the next he is in Beijing promising to
step up oil sales to China; and then he is in Damascus threatening,
alongside Bashar Assad, president of Syria, to “dig the grave of US
imperialism”.

In between, he finds time to visit assorted African
and Asian capitals in order to press his campaign to win one of the
temporary seats on the United Nations Security Council. This week he is
in Havana where he is soon likely to be bashing the Americans again at
the summit of the non-aligned movement.

It
is still customary for critics, outside Venezuela at least, to dismiss
Mr Chávez as an eccentric idealist lost in the kind of romantic
fantasies that one of his favourite literary characters, Don Quixote,
used to pursue. Mr Chávez might sound like a dangerous extremist but
like Cervantes’ hero he is essentially harmless, the argument runs.

Apologists,
such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, al-ways
draw the distinction between what Mr Chávez says and what he does. “I
know that speeches often worry people. But a speech is a speech,” Mr
Lula da Silva told the Financial Times a couple of months ago. Mr
Chávez, after all, they argue, has been democratically elected. The
scope for radical action is tempered by harsh economic realities. He
may rail about blocking oil sales to the US but this is an empty
threat. Caracas is dependent on its hated northern neighbour for about
half its oil revenues.

Unfortunately, this kind of benign
interpretation of Mr Chávez and his government is looking a lot less
credible. Venezuela’s oil sales are being slowly diversified towards
China and other countries. Mr Chávez’s democratic credentials are more
than a little tarnished of late. If he is such a convinced democrat why
has he begun to talk about the need – as he did 10 days ago – for a
constitutional change that would allow him to remain in power
indefinitely?

Once seen as an outlier against a more moderate
underlying leftwing trend, Mr Chávez no longer looks so isolated in his
region. Cuba and Bolivia are firm allies. No foreign leader has visited
Fidel Castro more than Mr Chávez since the Cuban president’s stomach
surgery at the end of July. Politicians close to Mr Chávez are well
placed in upcoming presidential polls in Nicaragua and Ecuador.

Mr
Chávez’s latest phase of international activism has been accompanied by
ever more strident anti-Americanism. Underpinning this is a Manichean
view of the world. Listening to him, it seems that US “imperialism” is
responsible for all the world’s ills. Mr Chávez rarely misses an
opportunity to bait the giant. This week, for example, he claimed that
the US might have fabricated the September 11 2001 attacks on the twin
towers in New York.

Anyone the American empire opposes is his
friend, a stance that explains why he is such a fan of dictators such
as Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. Links with Iran and Syria have
become more prominent. Indeed, along with Cuba and Syria, Venezuela is
leading international support for Iran’s nuclear energy ambitions.

Membership
of the UN Security Council would offer Mr Chávez another platform. He
would not enjoy a veto over the body’s decisions. But his style could
make the search for the diplomatic middle ground harder. While Europe,
Asia and the US grope towards a more consensual, multilateral approach
to the complex problems of the Middle East, Mr Chávez or his
representatives are likely to grandstand and shoot from the hip,
creating conflict and division.

Mr Chávez is unlikely to win the
regional consensus that would automatically entitle him to the seat but
he could well win the two-thirds majority at next month’s general
assembly meeting. UN members should turn him down. Countries should not
be blinded by their own difficulties with the US into offering support.

In
Latin America, moderate leaders such as Mr Lula da Silva and Chile’s
Michelle Bachelet have a particular responsibility. Standing firm
against Mr Chávez is not the same as accepting the dictates of the US
administration. They may disagree strongly with the US administration’s
policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.

But they should not – in reaction to that – give encouragement to knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

As a blogger, I like to comment on the news, unless they leave me almost
speechless, like these essentially verbatim excerpts of statements by President
Hugo Chavez from Bloomberg and the
statements by the Venezuelan Foreign Minsiter Nicolas Maduro, suggesting the September 11 was a conspiracy between George Bush and the Binladen family:

Chavez:

“Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez said the U.S.
government may have been involved in the Sept. 11 attacks to help justify
invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq.

“The theory that is gaining force is that
the U.S.
empire planned and conducted this terrible act against its own people to
justify its aggression,” Chavez, 52, said during a ceremony broadcast on
state-run Venezolana de Television.

Chavez said the World Trade
Center’s twin towers
might have collapsed because they were dynamited and urged American authorities
to look into the theory.”

Maduro (Partially in English here):

“The Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro, spoke today about the
terrorist attacks on September 11^th. 2001 in the United States
and indicated that “it is worrisome to think it all that could be a
conspiracy”, when he related President George Bush to the family Al Qaeda leader,
Osama Bin Laden.

In an event called “breaking the wall of silence” in Bolivar Square of
Caracas, Maduro said he considered “the historical relations of the family of
Bin Laden with the one of George Bush very suspicious. It is not a secret that George
Bush himself had businesses with the brother of Bin Laden”.

“Five years after September 11^th.
a lot of answers are owed to humanity”, Maduro pointed out at a meeting with a
group of people present there.

He noted that on the five year commemoration of the attack on the Twin Towers,
“about that topic today, in the light of day, in the light of the time that has
gone by, it would seem humanity has more clarity about what happened, why it
happened, how it happened and what for. There is an open debate in the world,
in the international media and the national media”

He indicated that “there is a
debate in North American society about the events of 11-S, we encourage that
world-wide debate, we believe that sooner or later we will discover the truth.
The historical relations of the Bin Laden family with the family of George W.
Bush are very suspicious, we have permanently said it for several years,
product of the knowledge to which we have had access to by investigations of
journalists from several places of the world, which have managed to
successfully obtain information and reach very dangerous conclusions”.

Maduro affirmed that “it is
worrisome to think that all this could have been a great conspiracy against humanity,
somebody in the world must support this investigation, it has to be made
someday, an independent, international investigation that allows to discover
all the truth on the events of 11-S”.

According to the accusations by
Maduro, between the 11^th. and the 14^th. of September of
the 2001, the government of President Bush authorized private flights to fly
out of the territory of the United
States the whole family of Osama Bin Laden.
“Did you know that between the 11^th. and the 14^th. of September of the 2001, when flights were
prohibited, that airplanes would fly in the North American territory, dozens of
private airplanes were authorized so that they removed all of the Bin Laden
family from the North American territory”, he emphasized.

The Venezuelan Foreign Minister stressed that the consequences of the
attack on the Twin Towers of the World
Trade Center,
“had as its immediate effect the beginning of the war of invasion of Afghanistan, the justification for the War in Iraq, the coup
d’etat against president Chávez on the 11^th. and 12^th. of
April, this means that it served as justification for all the international
policy of the terrorist clan that governs the United States”.

It called on Venezuelans to work to find the truth of these events and
so that the people of the United States
and the international community, know the reality and can confront the
government of the United
States. “

Finally, on apparent unrelated news, Minister of Finance Nelson Merentes, said
that the sharp jump of inflation in the last four months (food was up 19.9%) was only due
to the seasonal increase in the price of
tomatoes and onions and not on the excess monetary liquidity, demonstrating
that either Venezuelans have a horrible diet or the Government is simply full
of clowns. You be the judge…

Trying to find a bright side to all this, I am just glad to know Osama is not the enemy anymore…

Everytime
there is a rally in Avenida Bolivar, we hear how many hundreds of thousand people
were there. Let’s put an end to vague numbers, let’s calculate how many buses
it takes to fill Avenida Bolivar or how many people can be packed there. As a
side result, we can put limits on last Saturday’s Chavista rally.

Using
Google Earth, I determined the length of Avenida Bolivar to be 1,255
meters. To determine this number, I used the “ruler” tool in Google Earth as
shown in the image below by the yellow
line

This
probably overestimates the size of the crowd as a stage is setup for those
addressing the crowd, which takes up some 20-40 meters depending on the type
of stage used.

After
that, I used the same tool to measure the width of Avenida Bolivar as shown
here:

This came
out to be 27.5 meters.

Thus, all
of Avenida Bolivar has 34,512 squared meters.

The
question is then, how many people you can get into a square meter. This is
usually the debatable point when estimating crowds. A very desnsely packed
crowd has 6 people per squared meter. A loosely packed crowd where people are
at a comfortable distance from each other has 1.0 person per square meter. Freites
in Venezuela
has counted 2 people per square meter in rallies and 1.5 in recent marches, but
the correct technique is to actually take an aerial picture and count. But of
course, flybys are not allowed during rallies and marches by the Government.

We tested
this at work today and six people per square meter is certainly invasive and
extremely difficult to put up with for more than a few minutes. We decided that
1.5 to 2.0 would be a more adequate number. Note what this says, Avenida
Bolivar, jam packed cuold hold no more 207,000 people, so forget all those
presidctions fo 300,000 or even 1.5 million like what was made for last
Saturday.

Now, a
more reasonable number if the whole avenue is filled and not too packed would
be 69,000 people.

I then
measured the length of Avenida Bolivar as filled by last Saturday’s march in
Google Earth:

This came
out to 851 meters in length, which gave an area of 23,400 squared meters.

Now, from
the traffic cameras
pictures, we know that the density was low in a large part of the area, so
that a density fo 2 would be too high and one probably too low, so that 1.5
seems fair and that is equivalent to some 35,000-36,000 people. From my earlier
collage of Chavista buses, we can say there are 12 windows per bus, times four
across it is about 48 people, 50 with the last row in each bus, so that 720
buses would be sufficient if nobody from Caracas goes.

Just for
completeness, here is an
analysis which correlates the same pictures I used directly with the
traffic pictures

Just keep in mind this same analysis would apply to any static rally on Avenida Bolivar, whether pro or against Chavez, so there has to be consistency in future discussions.

(While I don’t have equivalent pictures of San Cristobal, I am told they filled 11 blocks of Ave. Bolivar for Rosales’ rally on Saturday, which is 18 meters wide. Eleven blocks is 880 meters, thus the length was comaprable but it was not as wide. However, San Cristobal is not Caracas. In the absence of pictures I will not say much more)