Fish Pic Friday - Yukai.sk

 With some lovely fish from Puerto Rico:

Capt. Shesla Krystal@ (Yukai)yukai.sk @eastfishingpr_ fishing charter / owner. Puerto Rico  

Linked at The Right Way in the weekly Rule 5 Saturday LinkOrama. The Wombat has Rule 5 Monday: Everything Stops For Tea up and at'em at The Other McCain.

Alexa, Play Despacito

"The sudden response to something sad happening. This sadness can go from mildly inconveniencing to a tragedy of some sort."

The Urban Dictionary definition of "This is so sad Alexa play despacito."

The sample use is dialogue: "Hey man my phone just died"/"This is so sad Alexa play despacito." It seems to fit the niche that used to be occupied by: "Cue the world's tiniest violin."

Here's the Know Your Meme article on "Despacito," including the video of the song (which I won't embed here, because I don't do all the remedial education anyone might need). It's the most-watched video of all time, I'm reading.

Here are the lyrics, translated into English, in case you're wondering what is ludicrously sad about it. Short answer: nothing. It's about sex:

Who is that girl? Zuleyka Rivera:

Zuleyka Jerrís Rivera Mendoza (born October 3, 1987) is a Puerto Rican actress, TV host, dancer, model and beauty queen who won the titles of Miss Puerto Rico Universe 2006 and Miss Universe 2006. She made her debut as a telenovela actress in Mexico's Telemundo's soap opera Dame Chocolate in 2007. She was also featured in the music video for "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi, the most viewed video on YouTube.

Why the frowny face, Donald?

Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: The Bikini Invitational" ready and waiting.

The Truth about Puerto Rico

The effort to Katrina Trump with Marie continues apace.

I know Trump fed his haters, yesterday morning on Twitter:

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.
...Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They....
...want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

That's aggravating, when people are suffering, but should it be called "demented" and "racist"? I can see why a Trump hater would jump at an opportunity to frame "They" as Puerto Ricans in general and, in addition, to see Puerto Ricans as a racial group being subjected to disrespect because of race. But that's a leap beyond Trump's text. And yet, if the text supports that leap, one might say Trump intended to cause his followers to make racist inferences.

This morning I watched George Stuffenenvelopes and his henchpeople on ABC "This Week" all but claim that Donald Trump personally whipped up Hurricane Maria and send it rampaging over Puerto Rico, and was certainly negligent in his handling of the rescue of the island (there was a token conservative hold out, but they cut him off repeatedly).

Here is the truth of the situation. The entire network of civilization that we rely on in this day and age has been blown away on an island with 3.4 million people, and the restoration is going to be difficult and time consuming because all the means we count on to restore services have been damaged and destroyed as well. For all practical purposes, Puerto Rico needs to be re-raised to the 20th, let alone the 21st, century: U.S. Military on Puerto Rico: “The Problem is Distribution” and Here's Why:

Col. Valle is a firsthand witness of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) response supporting FEMA in Puerto Rico, and as a Puerto Rican himself with family members living in the devastation, his passion for the people is second to none. “It’s just not true,” Col. Valle says of the major disconnect today between the perception of a lack of response from Washington verses what is really going on on the ground. “I have family here. My parents’ home is here. My uncles, aunts, cousins, are all here. As a Puerto Rican, I can tell you that the problem has nothing to do with the U.S. military, FEMA, or the DoD.”

“The aid is getting to Puerto Rico. The problem is distribution. The federal government has sent us a lot of help; moving those supplies, in particular, fuel, is the issue right now,” says Col. Valle. Until power can be restored, generators are critical for hospitals and shelter facilities and more. But, and it’s a big but, they can’t get the fuel to run the generators.

They have the generators, water, food, medicine, and fuel on the ground, yet the supplies are not moving across the island as quickly as they’re needed.

“It’s a lack of drivers for the transport trucks, the 18 wheelers. Supplies we have. Trucks we have. There are ships full of supplies, backed up in the ports, waiting to have a vehicle to unload into. However, only 20% of the truck drivers show up to work. These are private citizens in Puerto Rico, paid by companies that are contracted by the government,” says Col. Valle.

Put another way, 80% of truck drivers do not show up to work, and yet again, it’s important to understand why.

There have been rumors that the truckers are on strike, but . . .

“There should be zero blame on the drivers. They can’t get to work, the infrastructure is destroyed, they can’t get fuel themselves, and they can’t call us for help because there’s no communication. The will of the people of Puerto Rico is off the charts. The truck drivers have families to take care of, many of them have no food or water. They have to take care of their family’s needs before they go off to work, and once they do go, they can’t call home,” explains Col. Valle.

It’s a dilemma with dependent conditions. The citizens need fuel and supplies brought in by relief efforts. The truck drivers who move the fuel and supplies from ports and airstrips need fuel and traversable roads—and before anything else they need supplies for their own families.

One of the guys I was fishing with the other day works in the Pentagon, and is currently involved in the Puerto Rican relief. He said much the same, the problem is that none of the infrastructure is working. The relief is there, but with everything depending of everything else, it's a matter of prioritizing the most important steps that will make the others possible.

Linked by Evi L. Bloggerlady  in "San Juan's Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz: What we've got here is failure to communicate..."

Venezuela Proves Bill Buckley Correct

In 1971 the conservative magazine editor and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. published “Cruising Speed: A Documentary” which recorded in diary form the incidents and events in Buckley’s life during one week in November 1970. Buckley relayed a joke castigating communism:

Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy. (As in the current jollity: What would happen if the Communists occupied the Sahara? Answer: Nothing—for 50 years. Then there would be a shortage of sand.)

No communist government has taken over a Sahara country, but a strongly socialist one has taken over Venezuela, and hence  Oil-Rich Venezuela Now Has to Import Capitalist Oil:

Well, in Episode 23,432 of the always popular, always predictable "Let's Mess With the Supply/Demand Curve," socialist Venezuela is now having to import American oil ...
... despite Venezuela having the largest known oil reserves on the planet:

Venezuela’s petroleum industry, whose vast revenues once fueled the country’s Socialist-inspired revolution, underwriting everything from housing to education, is spiraling into disarray.
To add insult to injury, the Venezuelan government has been forced to turn to its nemesis, the United States, for help.
“You call them the empire,” said Luis Centeno, a union leader for the oil workers, referring to what government officials call the United States, “and yet you’re buying their oil.”
The declining oil industry is perhaps the most urgent chapter of Venezuela’s economic crisis. Oil accounts for half of the Venezuelan government’s revenues, what former President Hugo Chávez once called an “instrument of national development.” The state oil company poured its profits, more than $250 billion in all from 2001 to 2015, into the country’s social programs, including food imports.

The South American country's oil revenue was the only thing keeping Chavez's socialist policies afloat. The commodity allowed them to keep the nation solvent to some degree. But now that oil prices have dropped, yet another country's government officials are being taught that "profit" doesn't mean "evil," it means "sustainable."

Meanwhile, the EPA is forcing Puerto Ricans to swelter in the dark (hey, it's better than freezing in the dark) by preventing the construction of a new, low pollution gas burning power plant:

Puerto Rico’s entire population is still out of power Thursday after a fire at a power plant shut down the island’s grid, and they have the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to thank.

The fire burned up an old oil-burning power plant that was going to be shut down and replaced by a new natural gas burning power plant. That is, until the EPA killed the plan.
Now, 3.5 million people are out of electricity.

EPA blocked Puerto Rico’s plans to import the liquefied natural gas (LNG) to run the new plant in the name of saving sea turtles. The agency has delayed the LNG terminal for more than two years by forcing design changes to limit its impact on coral reefs. No construction work has begun on the import terminal.

Update, the lights are starting to come back on in Puerto Rico 

Cheers erupted as lights slowly began to flicker on across Puerto Rico overnight as the U.S. territory struggled to emerge from an island-wide blackout following a fire at a power plant that caused the aging utility grid to fail.

More than 390,000 of 1.5 million homes and businesses served by the power utility had electricity restored by late Thursday, with cries of, “The lights are back on!” echoing through some neighborhoods.

Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla said he expected more than half of customers to have power by Friday morning.

Coming to a state near you. Maybe even your own.