RICHARD FERNANDEZ ON MADURO: President Evil. “The inability of the Maduro regime to restore power supplies to more than an intermittent fraction of Venezuela’s population has provided the 21st century with its first glimpse of what a network collapse can do to a modern society. The EMP Commission Report anticipated civilization’s increasing dependency on electric power, telecommunication, banking, fuel, transportation, food distribution, water supply and emergency services grids. They concluded that if these crashed our seemingly solid world could come tumbling down faster than we think. . . . The situation has the air of a zombie movie. What happens when Venezuela winds down — when there aren’t any more groceries, bread, gasoline and comestibles left to loot — is the 64 billion dollar question. One tweet has already referred to Maracaibo as the capital of ‘The Walking Dead’ and another called it ‘Raccoon City’ because of the atmospheric similarities. . . . Even an authoritarian state can collapse from cascading chaos as their guns are powerless against this ineffable foe. It’s tempting when looking at Venezuela to think ‘it can’t happen here’. Yet if history teaches anything it is that collapse can suddenly overtake seemingly solid societies.”

Plus: “And the problem with millennial ideologies is they almost never accurately represent the state of the system. They are constructions of fantasy yet not above appealing to sunk costs. Someone has to provide the rescue money which they may never repay. The main argument for America not intervening in Venezuela is that it’s dangerous to come into contact with chaos.”