Blog Heap of Links for the day 26 April 2018

One of the stories about Venezuela that is darkly comic, out in the last couple of weeks, is that now thousands of oilfield workers, including almost all at the professional level, are fleeing the country with little more than the clothes on their backs. Reason? Maduro's answer to dropping oil production and problems in that sector was to arrest a lot of the people running it, and to place a General in charge who knew absolutely nothing about the oil industry. The General's answer to failing equipment and declining production was to bring his goon squads and threaten to shoot anyone who didn't make production go back up again. Surprise, surprise, everyone who has even the slightest bit of expertise is running away as fast as they can.

To run some of the refineries that don't have enough workers anymore, the General has sent in 20 year old illiterates with guns, and the only solution they know to something going wrong is to either yell at it or shoot it. Yep, that's a good way to stop that refinery from exploding.

…the real reason that prices are rising - Venezuelan oil output is crashing, badly…

If you love word play, you probably know that a word — or longer piece of writing — that reads the same forward and backward is called a palindrome. But what do you call a word that spells another word backwards, or a word that looks the same upside down? When terms for these orthographic puzzlers didn't exist, logolologists (such as the authors of the books listed below) were happy to invent some. Here are a few…

The handkerchief code (also known as the hanky code, the bandana code, and flagging[1]) is a color-coded system, employed usually among the gay male casual-sex seekers or BDSM practitioners in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, to indicate preferred sexual fetishes, what kind of sex they are seeking, and whether they are a top/dominant or bottom/submissive.…

…Congressman Louie Gohmert has had enough of the special counsel’s abuse of power, and he’s prepared to ‘unmask’ Mueller’s questionable history and total lack of judgment spanning decades.

In Robert Mueller: Unmasked, the GOP Representative pulls back the curtain and exposes the sordid truth surrounding the special counsel’s career.…

…For an entertainer in this day and age to risk his livelihood by openly going against not just the anti-Trump narrative but the broader Democrat-Left-Media Complex's 100-year anti-American narrative can be dangerous. And not just to one's career…