Hugo Chavez, after winning the elections, died of cancer. Argentina's President Christina Kirchner is in Caracas for the funeral, but she has decided to leave Venezuela as soon she heard that Ahmedenijad is planning to attend. Apparently, the Argentina Jewish Community entering into the political arena is working. Zionism works.
36 comments:
Will they pickle him and put him on display like all good Communists? For a bunch of "scientific socialists" it is a strange practice.
K
He is now in the Capilla Ardiente, a Catholic ceremony. Soon he will be remembered as a true Catholic. Which he was, Communism and all.
Catholicism and Communism are closer than you think. It is no accident that modern capitalism and the industrial revolution arose first in Protestant lands. Protestants believe you should bring the Kingdom of God to earth. Catholics and Communists are always putting the reward off to some future - after you are dead or once true Communism is achieved.
K
They both believe in saints and holy relics too. Maybe they will declare him Saint Hugo.
K
Some kind of cult will develop around his figure, for sure.
How did you know, K? The news is that "Hugo Chavez's body will be preserved and forever displayed inside a glass tomb at a military museum not far from the presidential palace from which he ruled for 14 years, his successor announced Thursday in a Caribbean version of the treatment given Communist revolutionary leaders such as Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh."
Now tell me in which stock to invest.
It was not a big leap. It is pretty much standard treatment for Communist/ cult of personality leaders.
Formaldehyde makers? Castro is next.
K
The current market for formaldehide manufacturers seem rather limited. Or do you foresee a new crop of potential clients?
I dunno. It takes quite a few liters. Apparently when Mao died, the Chinese were on bad terms with the Russians and didn't really know how to do this themselves, so they overfilled him and he swelled up like a balloon. Then they tried to squeeze out the excess and his skin tore. There is a hilarious but macabre account on the web written by Mao's doctor. In addition to the real Mao, they had a wax Mao made and it's not clear whether the one on display is the real Mao or a wax one. You could also buy stock in paraffin wax manufacturers.
K
It is Wall Street secret that Funeral Homes are a safe and productive investment. The market is growing and then you have the pets. Embalming is a great profession, better than water engineering. I have a friend doctor who started a good career in the morgue but became allergic to formaldehide and also his nerves werent strong enough and ended on tranquillizers.
Embalming is a great profession as long as cremation doesn't surge in popularity.
Was your doctor friend in Israel, J? I thought that Jewish tradition does not permit embalming. I believe that even deceased Reform family and acquaintances of mine were not embalmed before burial.
It's the Third Day already and the body is still in the glass tomb.
Mind you, it is South America...
Anon.
My friend was in Israel, his job was in the Pathology section. Not embalming at all.
What did you expect, Anon? That Chavez rise from the dead on the third day? Apostle Maduro said that Chavez had been crucified by the CIA, poisoned, injected with cancerous cells, etc. I think Hugo is in his way to beatification.
Hugo was a G.
I think it is technically possible to infect someone with a line of cancer cells, like that dog STD whih is actually a line of dog cancer from 5kya. Though Hugo probably legitimately died of cancer-his Indian side was not suited to living the good life for so long.
B, do you have a blog of your own? Same question for K. I come here for your comments as much as for J's amusing take on the world.
It might be possible to infect someone with cancer cells if they were severely immunosuppressed. Some strains of laboratory mice that are bred for reduced immunocompetence are used for experiments with human cancer cell lines. However, sometimes it's possible to induce tumors/conditions similar to the human ones in mice by genetic means. It's not sophisticated editing of large expanses of DNA code at this point but rather manipulation of single genes or a few genes, and some systems to accomplish this, like Cre/Lox, don't always work perfectly. It's actually a fair bit of work to create a line of mice with a specific mutation or inactivated gene.
Koko tells me the plan with Chavez is to spring him from the glass tomb, strap him to an Iranian Safir rocket, automate his smile and waving hand, and blast him off into low earth orbit; from which his most entertaining 4-hour speeches will be broadcast, courtesy of the BBC.
Anon.
That would actually work well as modem "art."
No blog of my own, no plans for one.
Same answer as B. J does the hard work for us.
A G?
There are infectious cancers like the one that is killing the Tasmanian devils, but I don't know of any human strains.
I wasn't aware of this, but Chavez has been sending (almost) free oil not only to Cuba but all over Latin America and the Caribbean - almost all of Jamaica's electric power is generated with free Venezuelan oil, ditto the Dominican Republic, Haiti, etc. It's hard to understand what he accomplished with this, especially since Venezuela itself could use the money.
K
A gangsta.
Sorry, I'm old and not up on the latest abbreviations.
A gangsta he was. Apparently there are cronies that have grown rich. No word yet of how many billions he has stashed in Swiss bank accounts or who will get them. It's possible that he was still the honest seminarian who sought only glory and not riches, but I doubt it.
K
That's just the way of the world. I don't see the American elite living in monklike self-abnegation. No, Chavez was a G in a good way-his takeover and continued hold on power were pretty impressive. That's a guy who knew what he wanted from his days in the military academy and took it. Too bad he didn't turn Venezuela into the Singapore of South America-he could have done it. I guess when you've been using a hammer your whole life, everything looks like a nail.
Yes, it's too bad that this socialism thing doesn't work - it looks so good and noble on paper. That was a credible excuse in 1917 but by the time Chavez tried it, it had been tried in a bunch of other places and it led to bad results everywhere. The only reason Venezuela doesn't look like Cuba yet is that they have the world's largest oil reserves (G-d has a sense of humor and gives the oil to jokers). The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
K
Venezuela has much oil but Chavez did what he could to destroy the industry. Nowadays they have only about 15 productive wells, all built by the hated yanquis, and not maintained since.
The system Chavez built worked out quite well for him. I can't help but admire the traits it takes to capture and keep power in a small nation when you are hostile to the regional/global hegemon.
Incidentally, reviewing the available open source material, I have changed my mind on the plausibility of Chavez's cancer being anthropogenic. Why?
1) The US government started working on ways to kill people surreptitiously with disease/poisons at the very latest from the end of WW2. Many of the scientists imported from Germany under Operation Paperclip had been working on the same kind of projects since the beginning of that war. For instance, Kurt Blome spent the war experimenting on human subjects in large part to find ways to induce cancer through a viral vector; after surviving Nuremberg through American behind-the-scenes intervention, he came to the US and continued work along the same lines.
2) Though the details are murky, it appears progress continued briskly, aided by a healthy amount of human subject experimentation. The latter was not just confined to MKULTRA-type bumbling. For example, Frank Olson, a CIA officer from 1947 and a scientist at Fort Detrick working on chemical and biological warfare during WW2, apparently was so aghast at witnessing "terminal interrogations" run by the CIA in Germany that he told his family that had the Germans won, the US would be on trial for war crimes. Shortly thereafter, he had an unfortunate fall from a high window, a la Masaryk and Forrestal.
3) That was 60 years ago. In that time, the US took the work of the Nazi rocket scientists from Op Paperclip and turned it into the moon missions, the Mars Lander, etc. Am I to believe that they were unable to build on the work of Blome in the same way that they did on the work of Von Braun? Did they not have the means, motive and opportunity?
4) It is funny, in light of all this, to hear about the unassailable moral high ground of the American People vis-a-vis the German.
5) All of which doesn't go to say that Chavez had help dying-just that he COULD have.
Chavez, another mulatto "big man" freak in the comedy of politics that is South America. Read Conrad's "Nostromo," based on his time in Venezuela, to see this. Nothing's changed in 100 years, nothing will change.
B, the weakness in your argument is that Americans are congenitally able to keep their mouths shut. Anything like this would have long ago ended up on the front page of the Washington Post. The Church committee blew all the secrets of the pre-70s CIA.
K
The system Chavez built worked out quite well for him.
Too bad about the other 29,999,999 Venezuelans.
While it is certainly quite an accomplishment to turn yourself into a beloved dictator with your very own cult of personality, personally I don't admire such people. I get the feeling that you do B, and it scares me a little. Remember that great rulers must have the quality of rachmones or they are not truly great.
K
Those people are quite able to keep their mouth shut, and still have a very cozy relationship with the press (there recently was an article with a couple of details in the guardian.) The Church Committee unearthed mostly throwaway stuff.
Hugo Chavez was no dictator. He won in clean elections with large voter turnout by a consistently wide margin. It's just that if a democracy doesn't do what the West wants it's officially not a democracy. You've really bought into the propaganda, K. Not to mention, the rightwing alternative to Chavez (eg those behind the 2002 coup attempt) is far more authoritarian. Neither was he any sort of dyed-in-the-wool socialist ideologue, except in his rhetoric. The poor over there really dig that stuff.
To the extent he was not a true socialist, he was a kleptocrat. The key difference between right and left is that the left has a magical ability to turn any economy into shit. The poor are stupid and don't know what's good for them as long as you throw them a few shiny trinkets.
K
Which is why, of course, the idea of giving them the vote is so brilliant. Yay for popular govt.
The American Founding Fathers (who invented the model for all modern constitutional democracies) had no intention of founding a popular government. They would have been horrified if you told them that Negroes and women and homeless people (not to mention the dead in Chicago) could vote. Just like teo says, we have kept the same document but distorted it's meaning in a way that would be unrecognizable to them.
K
Oh, the FF's would have been plenty able to recognize a system based on the generation of unfalsifiable bullshit to keep an elite in power. Since the dead and Negroes vote in exactly the way required by the descendants of those FF's (and their adoptees,) you could say that it is a natural extension of their setup-every member of the elite has an extra number of virtual votes, so as to be able to outweigh the Outer Classes. For convenience's sake, the virtual votes are attached to Negroes, the dead, etc.
In any case, it is the inherent nature of a limited franchise to expand-if they were such geniuses, the FF's should have known that.
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