Ah, Texas summer ...

... You scrofulous ball of suck and misery.

By way of Gunsmith Joe we have discovered a new summer cocktail.

Take:

1 oz of bourbon

3 ozs of ginger ale

Squirt of lime juice.

Pour the above over ice, and sip inside, under air-conditioning, like a civilised human being.

LawDog

Lord Acton laughs at your gullibility

The above meme is my picture, the quote is from someone else. 

Venezuela has the largest proven reserve of oil in the world. In 2014 there were just shy of 300 billion (that's 'b' - billion) barrels -- enough that at current rates the Venezuelan oil patch would be producing for the next two centuries.

On 01 JAN 1976 Venezuela founded Petroleos de Venezuela, SA and promptly nationalised their entire oil industry; a move that Hugo Chavez took advantage of in 2003 when he decreed that oil profits would be directly sent to "social spending".

Let me break that down for the cheap seats: the entirety of the profits from the world's largest reserve of oil, sold by the Venezuelan government through it's nationalised oil company, would be used for stuff like free medical care; free housing; free education ... you know, the normal stuff.

In addition, hydroelectricity powers -- or did -- 64% of the Venezuelan national grid. Coincidentally enough also run by a State-owned company.

This is pretty-much the ideal for a Socialist State. You can't get much better than backing your socialist programmes with the profits from the largest reserve of oil in the world.

Of course, it's cratered.

When we started hearing about food shortages out of the country with the largest oil reserve in the world, controlled by the government with all profits going to Socialist dreams, I looked at Herself and remarked, "Socialist massacres of the population in less than five years."

On Independence Day, the United Nations Office of Making The UN Pretend It's Competent issued a quiet report.

Buried in that summary (the full document is linked in the summary) is a bland notice of about seven thousand (7 000) "extrajudicial killings".

If it's just seven thousand, I'll eat my Stetson. Add another zero to the end of that number and you'll have a starting point.

This is yet another failing of Socialism, only the latest in an unbroken line of failures. And this failure should be particularly note-worthy because they started out with the perfect sodding recipe for a glorious Socialist utopia.

Of course, the Usual Useful Idiots are blathering about "corruption" being responsible for the whole cock-up.

Well, if you understand that "corruption" is short-hand for "people acting normally in this situation", I'd have to agree with them.

Lord Acton, in a letter to Archbishop Creighton, famously stated:  "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Outside of totalitarian dictatorships there is no more absolute power than that wielded by a bureaucrat in a Socialist government. That has been truth in the past, it is truth now, and it will be truth well into the future.

The on-going pulsating ball of suck and fail that is the Venezuelan socialist experiment should be an obvious no-duh lesson to those pushing so hard for socialism in the United States.

Or, so I'd like to think.

Sigh.

LawDog