Venezuelan Inmates Reportedly Open A Nightclub Inside Prison

Venezuelan inmates have opened their own nightclub and hosted friends and family at an inaugural bash complete with strippers and a light and sound show, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The late-night party highlighted the plight of the crime-ridden country's overcrowded penal system, where criminals often use bribery and intimidation to exercise virtual control over the facilities built to incarcerate them.

The so-called "Yacht Club" at a prison on Margarita Island in the Caribbean boasts "professional sound, spectacular lights, air conditioning, strippers, bad girls and all the toys," the inmates wrote in an invitation to their opening night gig, according to the El Universel newspaper.

The party was attended by friends and relatives of the detainees, who publicized it through messages on social media, the newspaper reported.

It quoted sources in the Ministry of Corrections -- which has not yet commented publicly on the incident -- as saying the party lasted from Thursday night until the early morning hours on Friday.

Venezuela has one of the highest crime rates in the world, and its prisons are plagued by overcrowding and violence that has claimed the lives of nearly 600 inmates in 2012 alone.

A non-governmental agency, the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, estimates the country's jails house 48,000 prisoners, nearly three times the official capacity of around 16,500.

Copyright (2013) AFP. All rights reserved.

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What 'courage' Looks Like to a Big-Time Newspaper Columnist: Taxing Email

You've almost certainly never heard of
George Skelton, but he has been the main California-politics
columnist for the
Golden State's largest newspaper for the last two decades, and
he covered politics for the L.A. Times (in both Sacramento
and Washington, D.C.) for the two decades before that. You can
plausibly use him as a stand-in for the basic political values
commonly found in our nation's leading newsrooms.

And George Skelton not only wants to tax your email, he thinks
proposing a tax on your email marks the height of political
courage. Stand back, people,
it's newspaperin' time!

The most courageous politician in California — probably the
nation — is a Berkeley city councilman, Gordon Wozniak. His gutsy
act: proposing that the government tax email.

Wozniak, 59, suggested taxing email during a recent council
meeting as the city went on record opposing the sale of the
Berkeley main post office and urging the Postal Service to maintain
all its services there. [...]

An email tax — as part of a broader Internet tax — could raise
money to help keep the Postal Service afloat, Wozniak told the
council.

"There should be something like a bit tax," he said. "I mean, a
bit tax could be a cent per gigabit and they would make, probably,
billions of dollars a year.... And there should be, also, a very
tiny tax on email."

I don't know about taxing gigabits. I'm not even
sure what they are.

But email I'm as familiar with as a nagging toothache. I spend
way too much of my day, as do many workers who
depend on computers, hitting the delete key
or — even more time-consuming — routing spam into the junk file and
trying to block out the arrogant sender forever. [...]

So leave me alone. And stop clogging my inbox.

Or how about you leave me alone, George Skelton, by not
taking my money in the name of keeping open money-losing post
offices?

Read the
whole column for such columnar brain-fartery as "I'd allow
everyone a certain number of untaxed, private emails a month — 100,
maybe 200. After that, each message would cost one cent, up to a
certain size." Hat tip to Michael C. Moynihan.

Reason's past
George Skelton archive.

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