STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC

Israel and Venezuela once had good relations, but Venezuela’s tilt towards Iran soured that. From Wyatt Peterson at unz.com:

“The question is: who’s really in charge? I know President Trump appears to be. I’m not convinced that’s the case because remember… you had this giant Israeli flag suddenly appear in the middle of the Republican convention. And certainly in my lifetime… I don’t know of a single instance where either the Democratic or Republican parties held a convention and hoisted a giant foreign flag… I’ve never heard of that before.”

— Col. Douglas Macgregor on the Judging Freedom podcast

with Judge Andrew Napolitano (Jan. 3, 2026)

Just four days after Benjamin Netanyahu appeared as a guest on Newsmax’s The Record with Greta van Sustern and informed the insufferable newscaster that Iran is “exporting terrorism… to Venezuela. They’re in cahoots with the Maduro regime… this has got to change,” it was announced that U.S. military forces had carried out a large scale operation against Venezuela, capturing President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, who will both “face the full wrath of American justice” after being indicted on drugs and weapons charges in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The capture of Maduro occurred exactly 36 years to the day after US Delta Forces captured Panamanian President/CIA informant Manuel Noriega, and it’s unlikely that Netanyahu’s recent visit to the U.S.– the fifth in 2025 by the international fugitive — and the American operation are unrelated. While talk of ‘stolen oil’ and ‘narco-terrorism’ currently dominates the mainstream discourse, the fact that Israel has been seeking regime change in Venezuela since the days of Hugo Chavez has gone virtually unreported.

Prior to Maduro’s predecessor Chavez winning Venezuela’s 1998 presidential election, relations between the naturally wealthy South American country and Israel had been relatively good. Venezuela voted in favor of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947 — which allocated 55% of historic Palestine to the as-yet-unfounded Jewish state — and two years later voted in favor of Israeli membership to the UN. By the mid 1960s, Venezuela boasted a robust Jewish population equipped with an impressive communal structure of schools, synagogues and cultural centers organized by middle-to-upper-class members of the community. In 1967, Jewish ethnic solidarity inspired a large number of Venezuelan Jews to travel to Israel to fight alongside their co-religionists in the Six-Day War. Following the conflict, a large influx of Sephardic Jews from Morocco arrived and settled in Caracas contributing to the largest Jewish population in Venezuela’s history, numbering 30,000 at its peak, evenly split between Sephardim and Askenazim.

Continue reading

Trump’s imperialistic designs are no different from prior presidents’; he’s just more honest about what he’s after. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The empire needs its skillful orators and apologists like Obama, but it also needs its iron-fisted overt tyrants like Trump.

If you were wondering why the US establishment was so much more chill about Trump becoming president this term than they were the first time around, you’re watching the reason now. The powers that be were assured that he’d carry out longstanding imperial agendas like kidnapping Maduro, bombing Iran and overseeing a final solution to the Palestinian problem, and they trusted him to carry out those plans.

The MAGA narrative that the establishment hates Trump because he’s fighting the Deep State has never been true; there were certain factions within the US imperial power structure which disliked Trump, but that was only because he was not a proven commodity like Hillary Clinton and they didn’t trust him to be a reliable steward of the empire. Trump proved that he could be trusted with his advancement of longtime swamp monster agendas throughout his first term, and he plainly did enough during his time out of office to assure his fellow empire managers that he would do even more if re-elected.

The empire needs its skillful orators and apologists like Obama, but it also needs its iron-fisted overt tyrants like Trump. It needs good cop presidents to manufacture global consensus and expand US soft power, and it also needs bad cop presidents to inflict the hard power abuses the good cops can’t get away with. Both are essential components to the operation of the imperial machine.

Continue reading

One constant of American foreign policy is its overweening hypocrisy. From John Leake at lewrockwell.com:

U.S. launches military strikes against Venezuela and seizes Maduro while CIA escalates involvement in attacking Russian refineries.

I woke up this morning and saw the news that, last night, the U.S. launched a military operation against Venezuela and swiftly captured President Nicholas Maduro. The Trump administration released the following image of the detained man on board a U.S. military aircraft.

As I drank my morning coffee, my thoughts drifted not to Venezuela, but to the French diplomat and political philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America 1831-1832 to study our prison system. Along the way, he made many observations of American society, which he later presented in his book, Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840.

I’ve long been a great admirer of Tocqueville, who combined keen powers of observation with deep philosophical insights into human nature. Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution are masterpieces of social and political philosophy.

I often wonder what Tocqueville would think about America if he travelled the country today. I’m confident he would be hard-pressed to reconcile the extreme malaise—both physical and spiritual—of the American people and their cities with the extreme confidence of their leaders that the United States should rule the world.

Continue reading

Controlled chaos (If chaos is controlled, is it really chaos?) has served Israel well all over the world. From Phantom Pain at phantompain1984.substack.com:

How Covert Operations and Strategic Instability Shape the Modern World

Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 27, 2024. Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images.

At the UN, Netanyahu held placards, declaring himself “The Blessing” as a leader destined to guide the Economic Corridor. Yet the reality was relentless assault on every nation along that path—everywhere but one. And then, as I traced this unfolding doctrine, the Somali fraud story went viral in America. What seemed like a random scandal revealed itself as a fragment of the same architecture of manipulation.

This Doctrine File uncovers, through documents, secret operations, and media orchestration, that Netanyahu is not “THE BLESSING,” but the “THE CURSE.”

I didn’t doubt the Somali fraud story. I had already read about it weeks earlier — in November 2025, in the New York Times— and initially reacted to it like many others. What began to trouble me was not the substance of the case, but the timing and intensity of its resurrection. As I was writing about Somalia’s growing strategic exposure, quiet diplomatic moves toward Somaliland recognition surfaced almost in parallel. At the same time, old investigations were repackaged as revelations, prosecuted cases reframed as discovery, and the outrage began to move faster than the evidence.

Elon Musk, newly rehabilitated after his early, costly dissent over Gaza, was suddenly boosting the story alongside Laura Loomer and a constellation of pro-Israel media accounts. The pivot was unmistakable: from Gaza’s unbearable clarity to a familiar moral panic about “Radical Islam,” precisely the reframing Israel’s own leaked research — as reported by DropSite News — later admitted it needed to survive the collapse of global sympathy.

Continue reading

They’ll probably find a way to stitch things together through benefit cuts, increased taxes, and a later eligibility age; all solutions that nobody will like. From Mike Shedlock at mishtalk.com:

Congress last made major Social Security changes 43 years ago.

The Wall Street Journal reports The Next Class of Senators Won’t Be Able to Dodge the Social Security Crunch

After years of Congress sidestepping and postponing the issue, the lawmakers will have to confront the program’s challenges before their new six-year terms conclude. Recent projections pegged late 2032 as the moment when Social Security’s reserves and incoming tax revenue won’t yield enough money to pay full benefits.

Failure to act would trigger automatic benefit cuts. Acting is no picnic either, because raising revenue or reducing promised payments could be politically painful.

The math is brutal for the program known for many years as the third rail of American politics. Social Security owes lifetime benefits to the huge generation of baby boomers who are already retired or almost there. That commitment locks in costs that are virtually impossible to dislodge and puts younger workers and future retirees on course for tax increases, benefit reductions or both.

Congress last made major Social Security changes 43 years ago in a less partisan Washington, staving off insolvency with just months to spare by adopting tax increases and benefit cuts intended to make the program last 75 years. Since then, Americans have been bracing for more changes, with polls showing many doubt they will get their full checks.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), seeking his fifth term this year, said the 1983 agreement between Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill is the model. 

Continue reading

Given socialism’s extensive history of failure, maybe the most accurate assessment of those who propound socialism is that failure is what they’re after. From Mark Jeftovic at Bombthrower.com via zerohedge.com:

This is Happening, This is Really Happening

On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of the financial capital of the world, with his hand on a copy of the Koran, and in his inauguration speech, he proclaimed:

“I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist.”

As a guy who normally tunes out political speeches (to this day, I haven’t a single speech by Trump, Trudeau, let alone Carney or Biden), this one got my attention to the point where I downloaded the transcript and read the entire thing.

It gave me some serious Pol Pot “This is Year Zero” vibes…

“Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously… to those who say the era of Big Government is over, hear me when I say this: no longer will city hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorker’s lives.”

Most people don’t know who that was. Except maybe the odd Cambodian.

The banger pull quote was this:

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

…and the crowds, no doubt cheered.

Continue reading

The Venezuela caper was about oil and empire, not drugs. From David Haggith at thedailydoom.com:

The Peace President acted this weekend like he was so angry over being spurned for the Nobel Peace Prize that he’s determined to show those dirty Norwegian rats that he doesn’t need it or want it. He’ll settle for imperial greatness, instead.

As we all know by now, the Don just started a new war in a country the US has never had a war with by launching the biggest attack the US government has ever made in the past eighty years (taking the president’s word on that) against a small South-American nation. He abducted its illegal president, made emphatically clear that regime change is the order of the day in Venezuela as the nation will, for now, fall under US puppet rule, and promised to pillage their primary national treasure—oil.

Don’t take my word for it; take the president’s own words when he announced the roaring success of his new war in the West:

“Overwhelming American military power, air, land and sea was used to launch a spectacular assault, and it was an assault like people have not seen since World War II,” Trump said…. “This was one of the most stunning, effective and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history…. All Venezuelan military capacities were rendered powerless….

“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition [regime change]…. So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years…. So, we are going to run the country.

As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust—a total bust…. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping…. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a much larger attack if we need to … a second wave if we need to … a much bigger wave actually….”

It will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent and safe….

(from thevideo below)

Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, added his own little summary of the action:

“Nicolás Maduro had his chance, just like Iran had their chance. Until they didn’t and he didn’t…. He effed around and he found out.” (Zero Hedge)

He found out what happens when he doesn’t take the Don’s shots over the bows and into the hulls of his drug-running boats seriously enough. Now President Trump says Moduro will be tried for his crimes in a US court of law.

Continue reading

The last thing Maduro can expect is anything approaching a fair trial. From Max Blumenthal at thegrayzone.substack.com:

The US Department of Justice indictment of Venezuela’s kidnapped leader, Nicolas Maduro, is a political rant that relies heavily on coerced testimony from an unreliable witness

The January 3 US military raid on Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores was followed by the Department of Justice’s release of its superseding indictment of the two abductees as well as their son, Nicolasito Maduro, and two close political allies: former Minister of Justice Ramon Chacin and ex-Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello. The DOJ has also thrown Tren De Aragua (TDA) cartel leader Hector “Niño” Guerrero into the mix of defendants, situating him at the heart of its narrative.

The indictment amounts to a 25 page rant accusing Maduro and Flores of a conspiracy to traffic “thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States,” relying heavily on testimony from coerced witnesses about alleged shipments that largely took place outside US jurisdiction. It accuses Maduro of “having partnered with narco-terrorists” like TDA, ignoring a recent US intelligence assessment that concluded he had no control over the Venezuelan gang. Finally, the prosecutors stacked the indictment by charging Maduro with “possession of machine guns,” a laughable offense which could easily be applied to hundreds of thousands of gun-loving Americans under an antiquated 1934 law.

DOJ prosecutors carefully avoid precise data on Venezuelan cocaine exports to the US. At one point, they describe “tons” of cocaine; at another, they refer to the shipment of “thousands of tons,” an astronomical figure that could hypothetically generate hundreds of billions in revenue. At no point did they mention fentanyl, the drug responsible for the overdose deaths of close to 50,000 Americans in 2024. In fact, the DEA National Drug Threat Assessment issued under Trump’s watch this year scarcely mentioned Venezuela.

Continue reading

h/t el gato malo

In industrial farming, quantity of food goes up, quality goes way down. From Colin Todhunter at countercurrents.org:

Supermarket shelves have never been fuller, yet diets have become poorer. Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories alongside widespread micronutrient deficiency, ecological collapse and rural precarity. 

This is the outcome of an agricultural model that equates food security with yield and mass production with nourishment. Sustained by billions in subsidies, industrial agriculture increasingly resembles a welfare state for agribusiness and retail giants whose profits depend on public money. 

Nutritional decline 

Corporate-driven industrial agriculture claims to feed the world but too often delivers empty calories while starving populations of nutrients. Consider that high-yield rice produces empty calories while becoming nutritionally impoverished. Since the 1960s, the concentration of zinc and iron in wheat and rice in India has fallen by 30 to 45%. In contrast, millets and pulses deliver far higher levels of protein, zinc and iron per square inch.   

This is not unique to India: Rothamsted Research in the UK has evaluated the mineral concentration of archived wheat grain and soil samples from the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment. The experiment began in 1843, and their findings show significant decreasing trends in the concentrations of zinc, copper, iron and magnesium in wheat grain since the 1960s. 

At the same time, nutritionally dense millet acreage in India has declined by 60% over the last seven decades. The decline is a result of structural shifts in Indian agriculture following the Green Revolution. 

In the UK, the logic is similar, albeit expressed differently. Ultra-processed foods dominate, monocultures deplete soil and calories are abundant while nutrition is undermined. Obesity coexists with micronutrient deficiencies; grass-fed livestock and diverse rotations have largely been replaced by input-intensive systems, while supermarkets dictate production priorities and shape farming.

Continue reading