North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela

Shortages.

Electricity in Korea
With the announcement of an agreement in which it appears the sociopath dictator once again gets his way (50K tons of fuel oil now and another 950k tons later) it is being pointed out on the BBC that North Korea, when seen from space at night, is a vast area of darkness between South Korea and China.

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Cigarettes in Cuba

In Cuba, a shortage of cigarettes has driven the per pack price in Santiago from the equivalent of 33 cents to 95 cents.

It seems a government retail company in Santiago owes about $430,000 to the government's regional cigarette wholesaler, which in turn owes $95,000 to the government cigarette manufacturer.

The manufacturer stopped shipping cigarettes to the wholesaler after the debt extended past 30 days.

Juventud Rebelde said that officials were working to solve the payment problems and had begun to ease the shortage by bringing in cigarettes from other areas.

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Meat and Sugar in socialist Latin America.

Just to the south of Cuba, in the nascent socialist paradise of Venezuela, the news via the AP from CARACAS, is about a shortage of meat and sugar:

Meat cuts vanished from Venezuelan supermarkets this week, leaving only unsavory bits like chicken feet, while costly artificial sweeteners have increasingly replaced sugar, and many staples sell far above government-fixed prices. Shortages have sporadically appeared with items from milk to coffee since early 2003, when Chavez began regulating prices for 400 basic products as a way to counter inflation and protect the poor.

Yet inflation has soared to an accumulated 78 percent in the last four years in an economy awash in petrodollars, and food prices have increased particularly swiftly, creating a widening discrepancy between official prices and the true cost of getting goods to market in Venezuela.

"Shortages have increased significantly as well as violations of price controls," Central Bank director Domingo Maza Zavala told the Venezuelan broadcaster Union Radio on Thursday. "The difference between real market prices and controlled prices is very high."

President Hugo Chavez's administration blames the food supply problems on unscrupulous speculators, but industry officials say government price controls that strangle profits are responsible. Authorities on Wednesday raided a warehouse in Caracas and seized seven tons of sugar hoarded by vendors unwilling to market the inventory at the official price.

Major private supermarkets suspended sales of beef earlier this week after one chain was shut down for 48 hours for pricing meat above government-set levels, but an agreement reached with the government on Wednesday night promises to return meat to empty refrigerator shelves.

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Common Sense in the West
The world has gone mad and there seems to be a severe shortage of common sense in the politically correct, multi-culti, environmentally panicked west. It refuses to believe the bellicose threats of Ahmadinejad or the lying Kim il Jong but it also refuses to believe the constant reassures of Tony Snow that the US is not preparing for war with Iran. The world discounts or ignores the threat posed by the Wahhabists and their banished cousins, al-Qaeda but it sees the United States as the greatest threat to world peace. Crying "overpopulation will be the death of us" the west has gone into a demographic death spiral and is not replenishing its population while the third world which evidently didn't get the message, exports its children at alarming rates. Communism has collapsed, Fidel Castro is not long for this world, socialist Europe is living on borrowed time, Hugo Chavez is screwing South America and Democrats in the United States still want socialized medicine. Sometimes I feel as though I am in an alternate reality.