Once again, socialism just isn't being done by the right people

Recently, Standard & Poor's declared Venezuela to be in default on some of it's bond debt. I don't know how many failures of socialism it will take to convince people that socialism doesn't fucking work:

Venezuela, a nation spiraling into a humanitarian crisis, has missed a debt payment. It could soon face grim consequences.
The South American country defaulted on its debt, according to a statement issued Monday night by S&P Global Ratings. The agency said the 30-day grace period had expired for a payment that was due in October.
A debt default risks setting off a dangerous series of events that could exacerbate Venezuela's food and medical shortages.

We keep hearing from leftists that socialism -- or, from the more extreme leftists, communism -- would work if only it was implemented by the right people. Well, who you gonna believe, them or your lying eyes?

Venezuela used to be the wealthiest country in South America. Now it is a basket case. Early in the 20th Century, Argentina was one of the ten wealthiest nations in the world. Socialist (and Nazi sympathizer) Juan Peron came to power right after World War II, turned the country socialist, and Boom! The country has been an economic train wreck ever since. Figure in every other socialist or communist country in the history of man, an what you have is a litany of failed nations. Yes, some still stand -- I'm looking at you, Europe -- but the economic burden is not sustainable. The most socialist nations in Europe -- such as the PIGS, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain -- are rapidly failing. The rest, except for Germany, are not far behind. Anybody want to move to Cuba? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Never saw that coming

If you want less of something, you tax it. The more you tax it, the less of that something you will get. Of course, that also means that you will get less tax revenue from taxing that something, because there is less of that something happening. That is simply how things work. Seattle, apparently, has not figured this out:

When the City of Seattle passed a tax on all sales of guns and ammunition, the measure was hailed as a way to defray the rising costs of gun violence.
But since the tax took effect, those costs have only risen as gun violence in the city has surged. And the tax has apparently brought in much less than city leaders projected it would.

The igno-liberal who brought this tax to the table thought it would generate $300,00 to $500,00 per year in tax revenue. Oddly, enough, that didn't happen, as gun stores in Seattle promptly move outside the city limits. Why? The law made it too expensive to do business in city limits:

Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess introduced the tax in 2015. It puts a $25 tax on every firearm sold in the city and up to 5 cents per round of ammunition. The measure easily passed and took effect January 1, 2016. Comparing the first five months of 2017 with the same period before the gun tax went into effect, reports of shots fired are up 13 percent, the number of people injured in shootings climbed 37 percent and gun deaths doubled, according to crime statistics from the Seattle Police Department.

That's a lot of extra cost. People can go where those extra costs are not imposed in a case like this, with a city tax. Just go to a store in the county where the tax does no apply. Simple. Apparently, city officials never contemplated this possibility. Libtards always do their tax-impact analysis on a static basis, as if increased taxes will not affect behavior. All evidence shows that higher taxes on a particular activity will result in less of that activity, but libtards keep pretending otherwise. Predictably, higher taxes never produce the revenue expected, and this case was no different:

In selling his gun tax to the public, Burgess predicted it would generate between $300,000 and $500,000 annually. The money would be used to study the root causes of gun violence in hopes of reducing the costs to taxpayers.
Seattle officials refuse to say how much the tax brought in the first year, only giving the number “under $200,000.” Gun rights groups have sued to get the exact amount.
But Mike Coombs, owner of Outdoor Emporium, the last large gun dealer left in Seattle, said the actual tax revenue is almost certainly just over $100,000, a figure based on information he says the city shared with his lawyers.
Coombs said storewide, sales are down 20 percent while gun sales have plummeted 60 percent.

Please note that there is only one large gun dealer left in Seattle. I assume his lease is too hard to break for him to leave the city. But he knows how much he pays in taxes, and I'll bet he can figure out how much the remaining small dealers pay under this (probably unconstitutional) tax. So if this guy says the city is collecting closer to $100,000 that $200,000, I believe him. I also believe the tax is failing to do anything except drive gun stores out of Seattle. It isn't driving guns out of Seattle, just the stores where law-abiding citizens can buy guns. Not sure how that is supposed to be a good thing.

It's almost like environmentalists just want to be wrong

I can't include the entire chart because that would be a copyright problem, but a poster at Red State has put together a succinct history of the failure of environmentalists' predictions, including these:

A Short History Of A Failed Philosophy

Year	Prediction	How It Turned Out
1962	DDT Would Destroy The Ecology	Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring triggered the move to over regulate pesticides and in particular banning DDT. How did it turn out ? Well we use more pesticides now than we have ever before, the big threat to birds these days are Windmills and most people are living longer than ever. Negative Results: Deaths in third world countries are estimated in the 10s of millions from diseases carried by insects
1968	Population Bomb	Paul Ehrlich’s prediction of Malthusian apocalypse for humanity. Overpopulation was predicted to exhaust all the earths resources, and completely exhaust our ability to feed ourselves. If we were lucky by that far future decade of the 1980s we would be living in a Mad Max desert scrabbling for buried canned goods. How’d that one turn out ? Well I see people trying to lose weight all over the place, and I have made a hobby of ordering foods I have never tried from strange places.
1970s	Global Cooling	Don’t let them snow you this was a real unreal thing. During the 70s and early 80s there were widespread predictions of a coming ice age* and we would all be moving south or living under glaciers. This was a bad prediction but a good look at how the greens use scare stories. Carl Sagan was one of the proponents of the original idea which he expanded into his Nuclear Winter scenario. The goal was to force disarmament on the U.S.
1972	Limits To Growth	Resource exhaustion: Collapse of world civilization by mid 21st century. Give them credit the people that came up with this one made sure they would never be called on it. 45 years in though it doesn’t look good. We have actually had several collapses in the price of basic commodities due to oversupply since the book was written. The U.S. is well on it’s way to being energy independent again (thank you fracking) and we are still eating more than we should and exercising not as much as we should
1980	Global Warming	Global Warming, climate change, man bear pig, is the follow up scare story to global cooling. This time around literally hundreds of predictions are being made. A cynic would characterize this a strategic decision to prevent it from being discredited. How has it done ? Well we have had no warming for nearly the past 20 years. (Well excepting that which comes from adjusting the temperature record up)

Go to Red State for the rest of the chart. Why does anyone ever listen to them?

Yeah, that ineffective solar-power plant you're paying more than a billion dollars for is even worse than you thought

The world's largest solar power plant, which has miserably failed to produce the amounts of power it claimed it could, has added to its aura of failure. Not content with killing thousands of birds or falling so short of production goals that if faces shutdown, the plant upped its fail quotient by setting itself on fire:

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a concentrated solar thermal in California and the world's largest solar thermal power station, suffered a small fire on one of its three boiler towers Thursday, according to the Associated Press. The fire caused the boiler tower to be shut down while firefighters ascended 300 feet to deal with the blaze, leaving the plant at one third power since another tower is already down for maintenance.

The Ivanpah plant works by using its massive fields of mirrors to direct sunlight towards the top of the three 459-foot boiler towers, which then creates the steam to drive turbines that create the actual electricity. But several misaligned mirrors directed some of this sunlight to the wrong place, starting a fire amidst some electrical cables, San Bernardino County, California fire Capt. Mike McClintock told the AP. Plant personnel had the fire out by the time firefighters on site.

You had one job: generate power. You failed. Did you have to make things worse by setting yourself on fire? Did you have to take a situation where you were figuratively setting fire to $1.6 billion in taxpayer subsidies and make it literal? Apparently, yeah. Still think it's a good idea for government to use your money as venture capital on jackass schemes?

Wow. Who could have seen this coming? Part II

Starting before the Democrats jammed Obamacare down our throats despite polls showing most folks didn't want it, opponents predicted that the law would drive up costs and force insurers out of the market. Emperor Barry I and his minions insisted this was poppycock, and by the way don't you love the emperor's new clothes? Well, many of us thought it might not work out well by changing insurance from covering risk by charging premiums appropriate to that person's risk into just covering every possible event without regard to anything except that the government just told companies to cover those risk events. We predicted that insurers would not want to play that game. Further, we predicted that charging older, sicker people less and trying to put the costs onto the backs of younger, healthier people also would not work. Hey, guess what?:

 Consumers have their plans cut out from underneath them each year as insurers have either pared back plans or exited exchanges altogether as Obamacare’s economic model continues to fail. At the same time, premiums and deductibles have continued to skyrocket, and tax subsidies cannot hide the impact on families.
What was promised as more “choice” is becoming fewer choices as UnitedHealthcare and now Humana begin to pull out of certain regions. An AP story in 2014 reported that of the 19 nationally recognized cancer centers that responded to a survey, only 4 reported access through all Obamacare insurers. Last month, Blue Cross Blue Shield released a report warning that costs under the president’s plan are unsustainable – fully 22 percent higher than people covered by employers. And The Hill reported that Obamacare insurers lost money in 41 states in 2014, which could determine whether big companies like Aetna stick with it.

Insurance companies are bailing out, because they aren't selling insurance anymore. If a sick person can wait until he actually has to incur health care costs to buy insurance, and the insurance company then has to sell him the insurance, that isn't insurance. It's insanity. It might make libtards feel good because people with poor planning skills or no money can get someone else to pay for their healthcare, but it is a really good way to get companies to stop paying for anyone's health care, including those folks who bought insurance the old-fashioned way, based on the risk that they would need it.

A post at Hot Air pulls together a number of stories that make it clear that Obamacare is not only failing to reduce costs but is failing to provide care. If you go 0-fer on your promises, why should anyone believe you?

The Fiscal Times story sums it up nicely:

Remember the now-infamous promise made by President Barack Obama when pushing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare? “If you like your plan,” the president repeated on dozens of occasions, “you can keep your plan.”
When millions of Americans got thrown off of their existing health-insurance plans in the fall of 2013, PolitiFact called it the Lie of the Year. Obama ended upapologizing for the lie in an interview with NBC News’ Chuck Todd in November 2013, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit that it was a lie. “We weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place,” was as far as Obama’s contrition went.

Almost three years later, there is little evidence of any more contrition on that failure, or others in Obamacare for that matter. Earlier this week , Charlie Rose interviewed three former Obama speechwriters on a variety of topics. After discussing their work on lighter-topic speeches, Rose asked whether they felt they had an impact on Obama’s more serious addresses. Jon Lovett replied that he felt most proud of his impact on “the most serious speeches – health care, economic speeches.”
That prompted his colleague, Jon Favreau, to interject. “Lovett wrote the line about ‘if you like your insurance, you can keep it,” he said, as the panel erupted in laughter. “How dare you!” Lovett shot back in mock indignation. “And you know what?” he asked as the laughter continued. “It’s still true … no.”

Are incompetence and deceit humorous? Perhaps in the Obama administration, the answer might be yes. For the rest of us, especially those who find themselves stuck between a federal tax mandate and an insurance market that has narrowed as significantly as its costs have skyrocketed, no is the correct answer.

The people behind Obamacare joke about what a lie it was. Think it's funny?  Gee, I wonder who could have seen this coming?

Market rejection for liberal talk radio

It would appear that even in big-time liberal cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, leftist talk radio is a failure:

2014 will mark the beginning of a massive change for liberal talk radio across the country. In New York, WWRL 1600 AM will flip to Spanish-language music and talk, throwing Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann, Randi Rhodes, and Alan Colmes off the air. In Los Angeles, KTLK 1150 will be dumping Stephanie Miller, Rhodes, Bill Press and David Cruz off the air in favor of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. In San Francisco, KNEW 960 will leave Miller, Hartmann, and Mike Malloy without a radio home in the market.

 All those lefties leaving the air in those big markets means that libs in those places will have to rely on NPR for their daily fix of left-wing horseshit. Fortunately for them, NPR doesn't have to worry about market forces to stay on the air, as taxpayers subsidize them. Interesting to see what happens to liberal talk radio without taxpayer subsidies. Not only do they get the boot, but in LA they're being replaced by conservatives.

Ever more comfortable lying without anyone believing him, Barry prepares to lie some more about his website

No longer concerned with whether anyone actually believes him Barry apparently is set to announce that his Obamacare website is all better now:

Administration officials are preparing to announce Sunday that they have met their Saturday deadline for improving HealthCare.gov, according to government officials, in part by expanding the site’s capacity so that it can handle 50,000 users at once. But they have yet to meet all their internal goals for repairing the federal health-care site, and it will not become clear how many consumers it can accommodate until more people try to use it.

Never mind that the damn thing has been in development for three years and that it was actually supposed to work two months ago when they launched it. Now, all is well, Barry says, so fuck all of you and he's going to go on vacation now. Think I'm kidding? Even money says he goes to Hawaii for about 2 weeks, and, oh yeah, that fucking website still doesn't work:

Administration officials have said for several weeks they define success as having “the vast majority of users” be able to navigate the site and sign up for insurance. While they initially did not define what that meant, White House press secretary Jay Carney said earlier this month that the administration’s aim was to have 80 percent of users enroll through the site. Those working on the project have set speed and error rates as a way of measuring that goal.

Just think if Travelocity only actually booked your flight four out of five times. Would you ever use it again? How about if only 80 percent of your orders on Amazon actually got made? Yeah, those companies would be out of business. That's why government simply can't do these kinds of projects. If they fail, there are no consequences. No one gets fired, no one can go to another company for the service, no one can do a damn thing about it.

Knowing that no one will get fired, government employees for the most part really don't give a fuck if it actually works: they will suffer no consequences. That means it won't work. Just think what would happen if a government agency responsible for fighting poverty actually succeeded and eliminated poverty. No poverty, no mission for the agency. Boom, they're all unemployed. The first mission of the bureacracy is to protect the existence of the bureaucracy. Why do you think we still have the Rural Electrification Administration? You can't make this shit up.

So Barry's web site still won't work. Probably a good thing, since if people were able to sign up in large numbers because the front end finally worked, everything would get worse on the back end where the system is unable to calculate subsidies or sent accurate information to insurers regarding applications:

The site's disastrous front end has overshadowed another set of serious problems on the back end. Insurance companies say they're seeing widespread errors in the trickle of applications they do receive through the exchanges.
And until those errors can be fixed, it might be best to leave enrollment at a trickle.
"Is CMS stupid enough to fix the front end of this thing before they fix the back end?" asked Bob Laszewski, a health care consultant who works closely with insurers.

I think the answer to that question is, "Yes."

Food porn failure haiku

My chili blowed up
For reasons not known to me,
but it blowed up. Fuck.

This has happened before. It sucked then, too. Lesson here? Fuck a bunch of trying to can chili. At least until I figure out what I'm doing wrong. OK, so maybe it didn't quite explode, but funk was coming out of the jar:

and the top was ridiculously swollen. No good could come of this:

On the up side, the second jar of chili shows no signs of going funky. We'll see. Yeah, it's in quarantine, because my expectations are low at this point.

I think this is about what you would expect

The mainstream media, ever since the launch of Obamacare on October 1, has been desperate to find success stories, people who didn't have insurance before but found  affordable, easily accessed insurance that suited their needs, just like the president promised.

Fail.

After searching high and low, they found one:

On October 1, Chad Henderson successfully signed up for a health care exchange as part of the Affordable Care Act. He was instantly catapulted into the national spotlight as the White House and every single media outlet in America sought to both confirm his story and celebrate his success. 

Media folks were excited. They followed Chad like a bitch in heat:

I’ve now been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post,Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Huffington Post, Enroll America, and POLITICO!! Those stories will be published in the coming days. I have a press conference call with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services later tonight. Also, local folks….. my interview with Kimberly Barbour Wrcb-tv will be aired TONIGHT at 5:30pm on WRCB Channel 3 Eyewitness News so be sure to check it out thanks for all your support! 

Oddly enough,  there arose doubts about whether Chad was legit:

Once in, Henderson said, he purchased two policies -- one for himself, and one for his father. He could have gone on his father’s insurance, at a heavily subsidized rate, because his father makes $24,000 a year selling shave ice. But “he's old school, so he wants me to take responsibility," the younger Henderson told HuffPo. Henderson said he purchased a $175 bronze plan for himself. Since he makes only $7,000 a year, that’s a big sacrifice. If Georgia had passed the Medicaid expansion, he could have gone on Medicaid for free, but Georgia, like most Republican states, declined. Ironically, his father, who has a much higher income, is eligible for the tax subsidies. Chad said his dad would be paying $250 a month.
But there was some weirdness about the story. In the run-up, many reports said that the exchanges were going live at 8 a.m. on Tuesday -- how was it that the only person anyone could find who had bought insurance managed to get in five hours early? Not impossible -- the servers could have been brought up early, or the reports could have been wrong -- but lots of people had been trying to log in starting at midnight, and no one else had gotten through. Yet Henderson had apparently created not one but two accounts. And why, if he had gotten insurance at 3 a.m., did he wait more than half a day to tweet about it?
This morning, Reason magazine reporter Peter Suderman -- aka the Official Blog Spouse --spoke with Bill Henderson, Chad’s father.
Bill Henderson told me that both he and his son were interested in getting coverage, but that he had not enrolled in any plan yet, and to his knowledg neither had his son. He also said that when they do enroll, getting the most coverage for the least money would be the goal, and that he expects that he and his son will get coverage under the same plan.
The local Blue Cross website says that the cheapest bronze plan available in Chad Henderson’s county costs more than $225 without subsidies, even for a 21-year old. Meanwhile, the price quoted for his father is too high -- with subsidies, Obamacare's subsidy formulas say, his policy should cost no more than 6.61 percent of his income, or about $130 a month. A subsidy calculator shows that he could add Chad to that policy for at most another $90 a month.

So, maybe Chad wasn't just a guy who was enjoying the bounty that is Obamacare. Maybe Chad is an Obama For America volunteer:

UPDATE: It turns out Henderson’s knowledge of OFA was not the result of his astuteness or political acumen. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is a current OFA volunteer. Maybe those many media outlets who spoke with him will make note of this seemingly relevant fact.

Maybe "volunteer" doesn't mean what it used to. Ace finds that Chad is maybe making a little change on the side from being such an Obamaphile:

So who's the bad guy here? Chad Henderson was not coy about his passionate support of Barack Obama, or his volunteer (???) position with OFA.
And here, he says "Something you should know about me..." and then discloses he's paid to post advocacy stuff.
All emphases added. And the (sic)'s, of course.  

I'm often labeled "the guy who always talks about politics" and it normally has negative effects lol so I'm here to clear things up: If you were to hang out with me one night and you'll see (sic) I'm not that obsessed with politics at all. Yes, I do post political stuff on here and other social networking sites. But it's for a good reason. For one, I think it's good if people get some insight into the world they live in. Secondly, I work for an organization that pays me quarterly to posts (sic) the political stuff as "advocacy" (so it's kind of my job). 

So, Chad, apparently the only man in America to successfully sign up for Obamacare on the first day, is a liar and a paid Obama shill. Surprised, anyone?

Hat tip to Ace, Hot Air. They gave me the links I followed.