Salud chavista

Se ha determinado que la manipulación mediática es nociva para la salud!

Spot de la Campaña Nacional para la Salud Mental...

the equal sharing of misery

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” –Winston Churchill

The Socialist and the Stone

So one day I got into a discussion with Bernie, and he decided to share some of his personal philosophy with me in his usual plodding, enervated manner. Although I don’t know what inspired it, perhaps we had touched on free markets and competition. Anyway, he starts telling me about a wildlife documentary he had watched, and here is what he said (I’m paraphrasing):

“You know, there were these two rams in the documentary fighting for dominance, and one eventually won and the other ran off. But if you looked closely, you could see that it wasn’t that the ram really lost; it was just that he slipped on a stone and lost his balance.”

A black, a bronw or a red stone?

Capitalism

Source
A relatively simple definition of capitalism identifies at least three predominant elements in a social order for us to call it capitalist.
First, a capitalist order involves the private ownership of the means of production, that is, of land, factories, and other forms of capital that allows the production of sellable goods and services.
A second crucial element of capitalism, in its "pure" form, is that distribution and exchange are regulated via competitive markets. Competitive markets are an essential and integral aspect of capitalism, which help regulate not only distribution, but also prices and thereby guide what things are or are not produced. As long as owners are interested in making sure that they do not lose their investment to competitors who try to maximize their profit and who reinvest this profit in their business, all owners must aim to maximize profits. That is, private ownership of production combined with competitive markets also necessarily implies the pursuit of profit maximization.
The third essential element of capitalism is a regulatory system, a state, which helps correct capitalism's frequent dysfunctions and erratic behavior. That is, capitalism needs a state that not only makes sure that contracts between individuals, upon which exchanges are based, are adjudicated in cases where disputes arise, but also acts as a mediator in social conflicts, usually between owners and non-owners, who enter into frequent conflicts over issues relating to inequality. While social movements have historically managed to demand that the state responds better to their needs, mostly by democratizing the state, the state is to a large extent influenced by the owners of capital because these lobby, finance political campaigns and mass media, and generally wield much power in capitalist democracies.
Moving away from capitalism, however, does not, by itself, mean that a society is moving towards socialism. After all, it could move towards feudalism or towards some other form of undesirable social organization.
What, then, would constitute socialism or, more specifically 21st century socialism? Rather than engage in a long theoretical discussion of the matter, I will just provide a rough outline, based on what it is not (capitalism) and the fulfillment of certain social ideals or values. That is, I would argue that in contrast to the actually practiced socialism of the 20th century (mostly in Eastern Europe), 21st century socialism would fulfill all three aims of the French Revolution. State socialism of the 20th century fulfilled only the aims of social justice (or solidarity or fraternité) and, to a limited extent, of formal equality (since party members were “more equal” (Orwell) than non-members). 21st century socialism would thus have to fulfill (completely) the ideals of formal equality, liberty, and solidarity (or social justice). In other words, for 21st century socialism to distinguish itself from 20th century state socialism, it would have to be a libertarian socialism, which assures that the “free development of each is a condition for the free development of all” (Marx).

El espectro de marx

Source: THE WALL FELL AND FREEDOM SANG
By Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa

On November 9, 1989, as I watched the Berlin Wall being torn down, I was deliriously happy.
Almost half a billion people who had been locked behind that wall and spent their whole lives with their mouths wired shut would now be able to speak freely and to discover a whole new universe kept hidden from them.
The heavy plaster cast that had straight-jacketed my freedom for most of my adult life also seemed to be crumbling at my feet. Communist Romania had just upped the bounty on my head to $2 million for my having helped to bring down the Communist curtain.
I was with Khrushchev when the idea of erecting the Berlin Wall germinated in his head. He had landed in Bucharest on October 26, 1959 to solicit Romania's support for grabbing West Berlin, which had become the escape-hatch through which millions of East Germans were fleeing westward, draining East Germany's already shabby economy. At the time I was running Romania's intelligence station in West Germany, so as the country's "German expert" I attended most of the discussions. "No power on earth can stop us," Khrushchev spat out. But President Eisenhower did stop him. On August 13, 1961, Khrushchev made the humiliating decision to close off East Berlin with barbed wire (which later became the Berlin Wall) and proclaimed that a major victory.
Freedom can be shackled, but never killed.
On December 26, 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted a magnificent concert before the fragments of that toppled Berlin Wall, which for so many years had "protected" tyranny from freedom. His centerpiece was Beethoven's Ninth containing Schiller's "Ode to Joy," in which the word joy (Freude) changed into freedom (Freiheit). The orchestra and choir were from both East and West Germany, as well as from the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union and the United States.
That concert celebrated the fall of the Soviet empire. A year later, the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
Twenty years after the Berlin Wall was torn down by people hungering for freedom, the world looks entirely different. Life on the opposite sides of the Wall, which had meant the difference between day and night, is almost equal. The freedoms of religion, expression and assembly have been restored. The barriers the Communists spent over 70 years erecting between themselves and the rest of the world, as well as between individual people, have been removed. The culture is reviving, and a new generation of intellectuals is developing new national identities for their countries.
All former Soviet satellites-including my native Romania, once the epitome of tyranny-abandoned their ruinous experiment with Marxism. So did Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, Greece. All are today strengthening their free market economies, and all are now pursuing various national versions of social and cultural conservatism. Even Russia has begun sailing through the uncharted waters of capitalism.
Alas, the specter of Marx's populist socialism has now started haunting the United States. According to an April 2009 Rasmussen poll, only 53% of Americans said they preferred capitalism to socialism; 27% were unsure, and 20% preferred socialism.
One of the most popular nightclubs in New York City's East Village is the KGB Bar. The place is jammed by writers who read from their works praising the meritocracy of Marx's socialism, under the club's symbol, the Hammer and Sickle.
Why are so many Americans now toying with socialism, in a country that created the most successful free market economic system in history and spent half of the last century fighting the heresy of Marx's socialism?
One reason, I believe, is that contemporary political memory seems to be increasingly afflicted by a convenient kind of Alzheimer disease.
Few Americans remember that the Free World spent 40 years and trillions of dollars fighting the plague of Marx's socialism, which dispossessed well over one billion people and transformed a third of the world into an immense gulag.
Another reason is simple ignorance.
The archives of the Soviet Union's KGB and Red China's equivalent-two political police organizations that between them killed over 100 million people-are still sealed, and people cannot visualize the enormity of the devastation Marx's socialism could cause.
The fact that leftists currently dominate the American media and academia does not help either.
French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who claimed he broke with Marxism but confessed to still being choked with emotion whenever he heard the "Internationale," reminds us that the first noun in Marx's Communist Manifesto is specter: "A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism." According to Derrida, Marx began his Manifesto with that word, because a specter never dies.
Derrida was certainly on to something. "Of only one fact do I feel certain, and it is that no thinking man can imagine that the ultimate result of the Great War can be anything but disastrous to humanity at large," stated Alfred Mosley, one of Europe's most celebrated economists, in 1915. He was prophetic. The Great War brought Marx's specter to life
in the shape of the Soviet Union.
Marx's specter came to life after another long war in another corner of the world. In 1945, the British voters, tired of five years of war and ignorant of world history, also turned to Marx's specter for help.
They kicked the legendary Winston Churchill out of office and brought in Clement Attlee, a Marxist leader of the Labour Party. Attlee started his reign by nationalizing the financial system, the health care system and the car industry. Since l'appetit vient en mangeant, he then went on to nationalize the coal industry, communication facilities, civil aviation, electricity, the steel industry, and the trucking industry.
In other words, stealing became a national policy in Great Britain as soon as Attlee grabbed the country's political power.
The economic collapse of the almighty Soviet Union proved that stealing does not pay, even when committed by a super-power. By the end of the 1940s, Great Britain had lost most of its economic vigor and international prestige, and the powerful British Empire had passed into history.
Famous British brand-names, such as Jaguar, became international jokes. "Apart from some Russian [car] factories in Gorky, Jaguar's were the worst," stated Ford executive Bill Hayden when Ford bought that venerable British carmaker from the British government in 1988. Other legendary British brand-names, also nationalized, became disgraced as well.
In 1950 the British voters repented and brought Churchill back to Downing Street, but it took Great Britain 18 years to repair the catastrophe generated by Attlee in a mere six years. In the process of recovery, the Labour Party was fortunate enough to acquire non-Marxist leaders, such as Tony Blair and Harold Brown, who have normalized the party again.
In 2008, while Washington was busy fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Marx's specter began haunting the United States itself. If history is any guide, the new generation of Americans calling for a government takeover of the private economy may be in for unpleasant surprises-and the rest of United States along with them.
Let's hope that the 20th celebration of the Berlin Wall's fall will rouse America.

Romanians, wake up

Source
By Claude G. Matasa
The recent Nobel Prize for literature is a wake-up call to the fact that, twenty years after the Berlin Wall was demolished, though we know how a democracy could be changed into a Communist police state, we are still learning how to reverse that nightmare.

Herta Müller, the 2009 winner, is a German novelist who left her native Romania in 1987 after receiving death threats from the Securitate (the Romanian equivalent of the KGB) for refusing to become an informant. “Simply living in Germany, hundreds of kilometers away, does not erase my past experience”, Müller has said.
I left Romania in 1970, after spending time in her gulags, and I know that Müller is right. Romania’s Communists have lost the power to terrorize people at will, but they still have the muscle to pillory anti-Communists as enemies even if they live in the West.
The extremely hostile reaction stirred in Romania by a HUMAN EVENTS article (“The Wall Fell, and Freedom Sang,” November 9, 2009) written by Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa, who played a role in undermining Communism, provides a
convincing example.
Republished in the Romanian newspaper Adevarul (“The Truth”), that article was followed by three pages of invective-laden comments against its author.
Traitor, pig and rat were the “friendliest.” The reason? Pacepa had betrayed the Securitate in 1978, when he became the highest intelligence official from the Soviet bloc to turn against Communism.
When people talk about Eastern Europe, they usually put all its countries in the same pot. In reality, Romania has been different.
"If I could grant you one wish, what would it be?” Pope Paul VI asked Romania’s Premier Ion Gheorghe Maurer in the 1970s, on a visit to Vatican. “Change our geographical position,” the Communist prime minister said, half jokingly. Indeed, Romania was the only East European country not bordering the West, and its Communist dictators had compounded the damage with decades of news blackouts. Even after the Berlin Wall collapsed, Romania was still so isolated that within two weeks Nicolae Ceausescu succeeded in pulling off a grandiose Communist Party Congress that re-elected him and his illiterate wife as the country’s benevolent rulers.
The fall of the others of the Kremlin’s East European viceroys was so peaceful that it enriched our vocabulary with the “velvet” revolutions.
In Romania, the upheaval cost 1,104 dead and 3,352 wounded.
Romania is also the only former Eastern European country whose anti-Communist rebellion had been stolen by the Communists, who are preserving the police state to hide their past and protect their current privileges. Under Ceausescu, Romania had one major intelligence service: the Securitate staffed with ca. 16,000 operations officers. Today’s Romania has six (SRI, SIE, UM 0962, STS, SPP, DGIA), which have absorbed most of the former Securitate
officers.
According to the Romanian media, these six ghosts of Communism are bloated with 30,000 officers. The SRI (domestic counterintelligence) alone, which has jurisdiction over 22 million people, has about 12,000 officers. Its French equivalent, the DST, covering a population three times as large, has 6,000. Its German counterpart, the BfV, which covers 82 million people, has only 2,448 officers. If the United States were to apply this Romanian ratio to its population, the FBI would have ca. 190,000 agents, not the 12,156 it has today.
Hangmen do not incriminate themselves. In the past five years, 6,284 people sentenced by the Communists for helping NATO to demolish the Soviet empire have asked to have their sentences canceled, but only three have succeeded -- because of media pressure. In 2009, Romania’s justice system declined to cancel a 1974 death sentence given to an American citizen, Constantin Rauta, a dear friend, who committed the “crime” of “betraying” Communist Romania and helping the U.S. defeat the Soviet evil. Rauta is a reputable NASA scientist, who over the past thirty years worked on important U.S. aero-space projects such as HUBBLE, KOBE, EOS and LANDSAT. To top it all, the Romanian government still refuses to obey the country’s Supreme Court Decision (No. 41/1999), which cancelled the death sentences given to Gen. Pacepa by Ceausescu and ordered that his citizenship be restored and his properties confiscated by the Securitate in 1978 be returned.
Over 500,000 Romanian patriots killed or terrorized by the Communists are still not rehabilitated.
At the same time, thousands of former Securitate officers and hundreds of thousands of its informants and collaborators who wrote the bloodiest era in Romania’s history get fat pensions and are still shielded by a veil of secrecy.
American philosopher George Santayana, an immigrant like me, used to say: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Romania is the only former Soviet bloc country whose government has avoided exposing
the crimes committed by its political police.
Three years ago I offered the president of Romania, Traian Basescu, $100,000 to help start building a museum of Communist crimes in Bucharest. I spent time in the gulags of the Securitate, which killed and terrorized more people
than any other Soviet satellite political police (except the KGB itself), and I wanted to help my native country know that Communism, not the United States, is the enemy of Romania. I’ve received no answer.
No wonder. The Romanian media just revealed that President Basescu, who is running for re-election, was a Securitate informant.
As an Honorary Consul General of Romania in the United States, I know for a fact that the Romanians are not anti-Americans. Indeed, a poll made in Romania before its admission in NATO, which for most Romanians means the United States, showed that 90% of the people were favorable -- compared to only 50% in Hungary. After Romania joined the NATO, however, the police state and the old rampant Communist corruption continued, discrediting the very meaning of the word Capitalism and bitterly dividing the country.
Two million people voted with their foot and left the country since Communism collapsed, and the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest receives b43etween 150 and 300 visa requests every day.
In life it is often more important what you represent than whom you represent. Romania has a strategically important geographical position, and improving the relations between my adopted and my native countries supersedes my duty as consul.
On November 22, Romania will hold presidential elections, and the voter turn-out is predicted to be very low. Most candidates represent the past, not the future, and the Romanians seem to be tired of fighting the wind mills.
There are over 500,000 people in the Romanian Diaspora in the U.S. and Canada alone, and well over 1.5 millions in various Western European countries. I appeal to them: Go out and vote! Vote against the former Communists, the Securitate officers and their supporters who all want to maintain the status quo.
Romania is a rich and marvelous country, and a new generation of people is struggling to give it a new national identity. Bring that generation to power!

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Dr. Claude G. Matasa is professor of biomaterials University of Illinois/Chicago, president of Ortho- Cycle Co., and Honorary Consul General of Romania in Florida.

La muralla de Berlín de castro

Source

By Humberto Fontova *

The American Thinker
OK, a decent interval has passed since Freedom-Week, so I'm no party-pooper. The fall of the Berlin Wall certainly merited all the festivities. Its construction eventually whacked many of the "enlightened" on the head, grabbed them by the ears, and shoved their faces in for a close-up of an enclosure that had gone up fourteen years earlier: the Iron Curtain.
After September 1961, there was no denying it: the term "captive nations" was not a "McCarthyite" confection. All that barbed wire, those minefields, and those machine guns were not ornamental.
Those big, steely-eyed dogs were not trained to beg and roll over, but to rip apart anyone seeking freedom. The Berlin Wall (FINALLY!) bellowed high-decibel proof, even to the deafest leftist, that Communism was pure slavery (but obviously not for the slavemasters).
Now for some "party-poopery." Between two and three hundred people died trying to breach the Berlin Wall (i.e., the "anti-fascist protection barrier," as dubbed by the Reds and as probably thought of by the type of people who believe Cuba has free and exquisite health care and who pay to see Michael Moore movies). Between sixty-five and eighty thousand people (men, women, and children, entire families at a time) have died trying to escape Castro's Cuba. The former is now happily torn asunder. The latter is alive and kicking and glorified by everyone from the Congressional Black Caucus to Michael Moore and lavished with economic succor by many of the same governments who celebrated the collapse of East German Communism two weeks ago.
More tragically, I daresay that many of the Cuban freedom-seekers died more horrifically than the German freedom-seekers. He'd be loath to admit it, being a Che-T-shirt-wearer and all, but Eric Burdon of the Animals wrote a song that resounds with many Cubans: "We gotta get outta this place -- if it's the LAST thing we EVER do!"
The last thing, indeed, for an estimated one in three of the desperate Cuban escapes during the '60s, '70s and '80s. This is according to a study by the late to Cuban-American scholar Dr. Armando Lago. This hideous arithmetic translates into those tens of thousands of estimated deaths at sea over the past half-century. And from people desperately fleeing a nation -- this cannot be repeated often enough -- that previously enjoyed net immigration, that pre-Castro/Che took in more immigrants per capita than the U.S., including during the Ellis Island years.Many Cuban escapee-rafters perished like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst. Then there are others, gasping and choking after their arms and legs finally give out and they gulp that last lungful of seawater, much like the crew in The Perfect Storm. Still others are eaten alive -- drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks, much like Captain Quint in Jaws. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully.
As we've all seen on the Discovery Channel, sharks don't dally at a meal.
"In space no one can hear you scream," says the ad for the original Alien. Same for the middle of the Florida straits -- except ,of course, for your raft-mates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while watching the fins rushing in and water frothing in white -- then red -- they hear the screams all too clearly. Elian Gonzalez might know.
Every year in South Florida, the INS and Coast Guard hear scores of such stories. Were the cause of these horrors more politically correct -- say, if they could somehow pin it on George Bush, Glenn Beck, or Sarah Palin -- we'd have no end of books, movies and documentaries.
We'd never hear the end of it. Alas, the agents of this tropical holocaust consist of the Left's premier pin-up boys. 'Nuff said.
"Pin-up" along with "tattoo idol" boys, I should have clarified, as exemplified by many including Angelina Jolie. According
to Trisha Ziff, curator of a world-traveling Che-glorification museum show, Ms. Jolie sports a Che Guevara tattoo somewhere on her epidermis.
More interestingly, a few years back, Ms. Jolie won the U.N.'s "Global Humanitarian Award" for her "work with refugees."
Will someone please inform Angelina Jolie that her tattoo idol, with his firing squads and prison camps, provoked the most macabre refugee crisis in the history of this hemisphere.
A consistently hot item on Cuba's black market is used motor oil: poor man's shark-repellent, they call it. Perhaps for a few minutes.
I suppose we all cling to false hopes when desperate. And people get no more desperate than when they have a chance to flee the handiwork of Norman Mailer's, Oliver Stone's, and Charlie Rangel's hero.
"I Hate The Sea" is the title of a gut-gripping underground essay by Cuban dissident Rafael Contreras. It's about some young men Rafael met on the beach near Havana. They stared out to sea, cursed it and spit into it. "It incarcerates us," they fumed, "worse than jail bars."
Yet mankind has always been drawn to the sea: it soothes, attracts, infatuates. The most expensive real estate faces the sea. "Water is everywhere a protection" writes anthropologist Lionel Tiger, trying to explain the lure, "like a moat. As a species we love it."
Yet Cubans now hate it. Che was right: the Cuban Revolution indeed created a "New Man," but one more psychologically perverse than what even Che's fevered brain could conjure. In Cuba, Castro's and Che's totalitarian dream gave rise to a psychic cripple beyond the imagination of even Orwell or Huxley: the first specimens in the history of the species to actually hate the sea, the first to regard it not as protection, but as equivalent to the barbed wire and machine guns of the late Berlin Wall.
Yet all we hear about Cuba is the horrors at Gitmo, where the criminals and terrorists are behind bars. On the rest of the island, this sort runs the country.
A seventeen-year-old named Orlando Travieso was armed with only a homemade paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March 1991.
His crime was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was fifteen when he was machine-gunned to death for the same crime.
Owen Delgado was fifteen when Castro's police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy where he sought asylum and clubbed him to death with rifle butts.
After so many machine-gun blasts kept disturbing their coastal subjects, the Castro brothers hit upon the scheme of having their Soviet helicopters hover over the escaping freedom-seekers, and rather than machine gun them to death, simply drop sandbags onto their rafts and rickety boats to demolish and sink them. Then the tiger sharks and hammerheads could do the Castroites' deputy-work.
Four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Michael Moore's, Jesse Jackson's and Charles Rangel's gracious hosts were machine-gunning desperate Cubans who tried to swim into our Guantanamo Base, then retrieving their corpses with gaffing hooks. "This is the most savage kind of behavior I've ever heard of," said Robert Gelbard, deputy assistant secretary of state for Latin America during the Clinton administration (no less!). "This is even worse than what happened at the Berlin Wall!
So what's the alternative if you can't flee Cuba? Well, in 1986, Cuba's suicide rate reached twenty-four per thousand -- making it double Latin America's average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, and making suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48. At that point, the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter.
The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.
But apparently not the MSM's gynocracy. Take Barbara Walters: "Castro's personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding. Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to his country".
Here's NBC's Andrea Mitchell: "Castro is old-fashioned, courtly -- even paternal...a thoroughly fascinating figure."

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* Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite
Tyrant and Exposing the Real Che Guevara. Visit hfontova.com

Marxi la vaca socialista

Con pedigree de ganado siboney de castro (raza castrista de turbovacas de 100 l/día que ha transformado a Cuba en potencia lechera)
Reconocibles sobre todo por la boina del che! Pero roja rojita!

Fuente

Una de las características más llamativas del presidente de la república es que en todo momento éste anota, planifica y dibuja todo lo que sucede y lo que se le va ocurriendo en una hoja que, normalmente, la audiencia nunca ve. Sin embargo, el equipo investigador del Chigüire Bipolar logró tener acceso a las anotaciones presidenciales realizadas en el programa “Alo Presidente 333” trasmitido ayer desde la finca “La Bandera” en el Estado Táchira.