There are shortages of everything but death and crime in the socialist paradise Venezuela (a miracle indeed), as this article addresses:
Venezuelans wait in lines outside supermarkets often for hours only to find empty shelves. It's hard to find bread, eggs and other basic items.
The country is also short on basic medicines, leaving some to die in hospitals and many to languish without proper treatment.
It's an especially tragic situation because Venezuela has more oil reserves than any other country in the world. Plus one of its neighbors, Brazil, is among the world's top food exporters.
Venezuela has denied food and humanitarian aid from groups like Amnesty International and the United Nations. Amnesty officials contest that the government doesn't want to accept aid because that would make the government look inadequate.
For a site that focuses on money issues, this CNN Money article doesn't even bother to note the reason for the problems--socialism.
Vast oil resources and a food powerhouse next door, yet still Venezuela can't manage to feed their people.
Bangladesh is doing better than Venezuela.
Also note that while leftists here like to pretend that socialism is a product of superior liberal compassion nodes in their nuanced brains, the socialist government would rather pretend they are competent than allow foreigners to help impoverished Venezuelans and make the government look inadequate.
Venezuela's socialist idiocy has proven that socialists can ef up an oil-wet dream.
Given that kind of stubborn refusal of the Venezuelan government to admit they have a problem with their socialist system, could my worries from a decade ago come true now? Could Venezuela target the Netherlands' Caribbean island possessions of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao to distract the people of Venezuela and justify any authoritarian measures to keep the people in line?
And if Maduro thinks that the Dutch are too small and distant to offer much resistance to the islands conveniently close to Venezuela we could have a role in helping the Dutch fight for their islands:
What if we could supply the logistics capability for allies without necessarily sending the U. S. Navy along for the ride?
The modular design of our new littoral combat ship (LCS) could provide a model for filling this capabilities gap of our allies that could leverage allied capabilities and bind our allies more closely to us.
Perhaps we could design modules that fit in standard shipping containers that would be available to be secured to civilian ships that could link the ship to our network, add command-and-control facilities and air defense capabilities, support helicopter operations from the deck, and provide for transfering supplies to another ship. The goal would be to basically turn a civilian ship into an instant logistical support ship.
Coincidentally enough, my initial notions on this blog made it into print this year (see page 50, "The AFRICOM Queen"). Yeah, SOUTHCOM could make use of modularized auxiliary cruisers, too, even if I think the options and need are greater in AFRICOM.
Really, what might Maduro and his socialist buddies do to avoid admitting that they are inadequate?
