Maduro's elevator pitch while the elevator plummets
Maduro is making a last-ditch effort to defend his regime. Sounds like he's attempting to form ties with BRICS, and hoping to keep his people with him when USA STRONG attacks, as it surely will. Now that Trump is fully and enthusiastically owned by Deepstate, nothing can stop the obliteration machine.

Russia hasn't been friendly to Maduro, and doesn't seem impressed by the speech.

Maduro makes a few strong points:

Venezuela has never attacked or invaded anyone. Narrowly true. Venezuela has been disputing the eastern border with Guyana for 200 years, but the dispute never expanded into a real war. Similarly with the western border with Colombia.

His regime has followed the rules of "democracy". Mostly true, and overall better than USA STRONG's commitment to "democracy". Maduro holds elections and allows most of the results to stand.

Now he wants to expand the economy to include more than oil. This point is deeply annoying. As I've discussed before, Chavez and Maduro have run the country into the ground by Graybill's Law.

Venezuela has a tremendous variety of natural resources. Minerals, valuable crops like coffee and cocoa, valuable and unique types of wood, and oil. Previous governments were more self-sufficient, developing all the resources and all the skills needed to make value from the resources. When you make lots of different things, nobody can pin you down.

Chavez and Maduro got lazy and chummy with Exxon, letting everything else decline. When you let a globalist corporation run things, you're trapped. The corporation can smash you any time it wants, and Exxon has done just that.

It may be too late to follow Brazil's example of self-sufficiency.

Even so, the speech is a noble effort. Maduro is pleading humbly for forgiveness.

Will he pull away from globalism and become a fit ally for the independent side? Based on long habits of dependence, it's not likely, but I wouldn't blame the people for giving him a chance.

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Relevant footnote: Looking again at the source of info on Venezuela's exports in earlier decades. Here's coffee in 1898:



V was second after Brazil. More appropriate comparison, V was producing three times as much as similar-sized Colombia.

Now current rankings:



V is now 26th instead of 2nd, and is now producing 1/27 of Colombia instead of 3 times Colombia. That's an 81-fold reduction. Couldn't ask for a better illustration of Graybill.

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Irrelevant metrology footnote: In the same book, a peculiar usage in the section on climate:



DEGREES AND MINUTES OF TEMPERATURE! Clearly an inappropriate transfer from angles. It's doubly out of place in the tyrannically decimal metric system. The writer uses the minutes casually, so it must have been a common habit. /// Later: No, those aren't even proper minutes. If you're going to use minutes and seconds, you can't have 67 minutes. The author or typesetter must have been misusing the minute mark to represent decimals.

Another table lists the length of rivers in kilometers and the drainage area in square leagues. Equally inappropriate.

Labels: Make or break, Metrology, skill-estate

  ¶ 2:15 PM