You ever watch any movies about life post or dur­ing an apocalypse?

There’s always one guy who says “Man, we should have stocked up on toi­let paper.  It’s got more value than gold right now!”

Who knew we only had to wait for a back­wards social­ist coun­try like Venezuela to give us another kind of pre­view of that future?

First milk, but­ter, cof­fee and corn­meal ran short. Now Venezuela is run­ning out of the most basic of neces­si­ties — toi­let paper.

Blam­ing polit­i­cal oppo­nents for the short­fall, as it does for other short­ages, the embat­tled social­ist gov­ern­ment says it will import 50 mil­lion rolls to boost supplies.

That was lit­tle com­fort to con­sumers strug­gling to find toi­let paper on Wednesday.

“This is the last straw,” said Manuel Fagun­des, a shop­per hunt­ing for tis­sue in down­town Cara­cas. “I’m 71 years old and this is the first time I’ve seen this.”

One super­mar­ket vis­ited by The Asso­ci­ated Press in the cap­i­tal on Wednes­day was out of toi­let paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shop­pers as the word spread.

“I’ve been look­ing for it for two weeks,” said Cristina Ramos. “I was told that they had some here and now I’m in line.”

Econ­o­mists say Venezuela’s short­ages stem from price con­trols meant to make basic goods avail­able to the poor­est parts of soci­ety and the government’s con­trols on for­eign currency.

“State-controlled prices — prices that are set below market-clearing price — always result in short­ages. The short­age prob­lem will only get worse, as it did over the years in the Soviet Union,” said Steve Hanke, pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at Johns Hop­kins University.

The new Pres­i­dent of Venezuela, Nico­las Maduro has of course blamed every­one else but his own poli­cies for the shortages.

He did learn from the appar­ent mas­ter of that, the late Hugo Chavez.

If his gov­ern­ment falls, it might be the first time the lack of toi­let paper has been cited as the cause of any form of civil unrest in mod­ern human history.

Always knew the Euro­peans had strange polit­i­cal tastes, but this is stranger than most.

On Sat­ur­day, Ice­land held national par­lia­men­tary elec­tions and the newly-formed Pirate Party of Ice­land won 5.1 per­cent of the vote. This earned the party three seats in par­lia­ment, mak­ing the new Píratar the most suc­cess­ful Pirate Party in any national leg­isla­tive body around the globe.

Iceland’s uni­cam­eral par­lia­ment, known in Ice­landic as the Alþing (“All-thing”), has just 63 mem­bers to rep­re­sent the country’s 320,000 people.

By com­par­i­son, the Czech Repub­lic has one Pirate Party par­lia­men­tar­ian, Ger­many has 45 state-level Pirate law­mak­ers (plus, recent party strug­gles), and Swe­den has two rep­re­sen­ta­tives of its Pirate Party in the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment. As is the case any­where Pirates hold elec­tive office, the group still rep­re­sents a tiny minor­ity in Iceland—most of the seats in the Alþing will go to the center-right Inde­pen­dence Party. In the United States, the Pirate Party has had very lim­ited suc­cess and is extremely unlikely to get elected to either the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives or the Senate.

Accord­ing to its web­site, the Pirate Party oper­ates in eight states — Yes, Wis­con­sin is one of them thanks to GAB approval — and it’s more or less a neo-liberal out­fit which sounds like an off-shoot of every other group of left-wing anar­chists out there.  The only thing that makes it “spe­cial” is two things: 1) It focuses on tech­no­log­i­cal issues like “gov­ern­ment trans­parency,” “hacker’s rights,” and 2) They’re clever with their nam­ings; such as call­ing the party chair­man “The Cap­tain,” vice chair­man “The First Offi­cer,” and so on.

The only “piracy” these guys advance is online with lit­tle regard to copy­right laws and cre­ator rights.  If that’s what floats your “Jolly Roger,” by all means, climb aboard.

Looks like it is indeed 2001 all over again…

An enve­lope sent to an office of Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) included a sub­stance that has tested pos­i­tive for Ricin, two sources say.

It was not imme­di­ately clear when the enve­lope was received or whether it was sent to his Wash­ing­ton, D.C., office or a field office.

Home­land Secu­rity Sec­re­tary Janet Napoli­tano and FBI Direc­tor Robert Mueller are brief­ing sen­a­tors now.

It’s hard to truly say that “vig­i­lance over ter­ror­ism” has been a top agenda item — hell top twenty if we’re lucky — of the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion.  They have spent the bulk of their time run­ning DHS hunt­ing after right-wing boo­giemen which never existed why at the same time going mealy-mouthed when they actu­ally have to con­front it.

Fort Hood?  Oh, that’s a “work­place inci­dent” even though the shooter was heard by a num­ber of wit­nesses to be scream­ing “Allah Akbar!” while fir­ing and known to fre­quently inter­act online with an al Queda mas­ter­mind.  That al Queda mas­ter­mind was so high up on the DOD’s kill list, he and his 16 year old son got taken out in an unmanned drone strike.

Beng­hazi?  That’s not ter­ror­ism, that’s over a video.  And besides…what dif­fer­ence does it make, right Sec. Clinton?

This ricin let­ter may or may not pan out to be real — the ones in 2004 might have been false pos­i­tives — but to see the non­cha­lant atti­tude com­ing from the White House and var­i­ous sub­or­di­nates in the past cou­ple of days is rather dis­tress­ing.  This is an admin­is­tra­tion that clearly doesn’t want to deal with ter­ror­ism, whether its right in front of them or not.