STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC

Technocracy is the doughnut; everything else is the hole. From Derrick Broze at tlavagabond.substack.com:

The US bombing of Venezuela and capture of Nicolás Maduro cannot be rationally explained as a drug enforcement operation, or even solely about recovering oil. The bigger picture is Technocracy.

In the early morning hours of January 3, 2026, the United States military launched military strikes on Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro and Flores have since been transported to the New York City to face charges relating to gun crimes and cocaine trafficking.

The move has divided the MAGA base—and the American public more generally—with a large portion of President Donald Trump’s base viewing it as a betrayal of the principles he claimed to champion. Specifically, Trump has claimed for years he would not start new wars of aggression.

While Trump has stated that taking out Maduro is not about launching new wars but instead a calculated attack to take out a man he blames for America’s fentanyl crisis, the facts tell another story.

Was Maduro’s Capture About Drug Trafficking?

In May 2025, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) released its 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA). This report mentions Venezuela trafficking fentanyl to the US a total of zero times. Instead, it blames Mexican cartels for the manufacturing and trafficking of fentanyl. This should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention, as these facts are common knowledge among the US government and drug-trafficking researchers.

A second key point is that although Trump and neocon Secretary of State Marco Rubio have repeatedly sought to tie Maduro to drug cartels, there remains scant evidence for the claim.

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Freedom still works! From Jon Miltmore at jjmilt.substack.com:

Over the last 35 years, Vietnam has undergone one of the most miraculous economic transformations in history. So how was it achieved?

Phung Xuan Vu was just eight years old when he accompanied his brother to the food distribution center. His belly hurt from hunger, and he was anxious—filled with worry that he would lose his food voucher or be chastened by the officials distributing food.

“The officials were not friendly. They were bossy and had power,” Vu recalled decades later. “We felt that we had to beg for food that was rightfully ours.”

Vu’s family was poor, but not by local standards. They owned a bicycle, something not all families in Vietnam could say. Yet waiting for hours for food was difficult.

In the book The Bridge Generation of Viet Nam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime, Vu recalled how schoolchildren, weak and thirsty, would wait hours on end in the heat for food rations only to get cheated by officials, who would mix rocks in with the rice to fool the scales.

“That made us angry, but we could not fight or argue with the officials,” Vu told authors Nancy Napier and Dau Thuy Ha. “What could we do, as children?”

How Vietnam Became the Poorest Country in the World

Vietnam is a country most people know, but for many the knowledge of its history stops in 1975 — the year Saigon fell, two years after the withdrawal of US troops.

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Kit Knightly is hypothesizing about the exact contours of globalist tactics, but he hits a bullseye on one. A lot of what goes on is meant to distract from what’s really going on. From Knightly at off-guardian.org:

I’ve had a cold, and as a cold Traditionalist, that means I’ve been sitting on the couch in my dressing gown, sipping herbal tea with honey in it. (The Zealots from The Church of New Colds would have me masking up and gaffer taping plastic sheets over my doors and windows, but they are odd people).

Naturally, it stands to reason that the first time I’ve been ill in years happens to be the same week the world decides to set itself on fire.

Or at least pretend to, but we’ll get to that.

Maduro has been kidnapped. Iran teeters on the edge of an old-fashioned colour revolution with a new Shah waiting in the wings, there’s talk of British troops on the ground in Ukraine and a US invasion of Greenland.

The New Year has dawned on a world bursting into chaos.

But is it genuine chaos? Or contrived chaos?

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Trump is now the new and improved neocon, and his result is going to be different than the neocons failed wars the last 25 years. SLL will take the other side of that bet. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Once a Neocon gets rolling, it is hard to stop the rolling. The mission is never accomplished. First Iraq. Then Afghanistan. That latter one took about 20 years – of Americans’ treasure and blood, not counting the cost to the Afghanis.

Well, here we again. Again.

[See article for video]

“We are gonna start now hitting land,” Tiberius Orangicus Maximus told Sean Hannity. “The cartels are running Mexico. It’s very, very sad to watch and see what’s happened to that country, but the cartels are running and they’re killing 300,000 people in our country every single year.”

So many fascinating aspects to this.

Trump’s claim that 300,000 people are killed by the “cartels” being perhaps the most fascinating given the body count that can be credited to the cartels that operate not just legally but with Trump’s back-slapping approval in this country. How many Americans have been killed – or had their health ruined – by the drugs pushed by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson? The pushing part is a very important part, if you believe in moral culpability. The “cartels” Trump does not like produce and sell drugs to people who freely choose to buy and use them. Whether one approves or disapproves of this buying or selling is not the point that matters, as regards this discussion.

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Every time U.S. or British intelligence pulls one of their stunts against Russia, Russia strikes back, often in a creative fashion. This time it was a hypersonic Oreshnik. Putin talks softly but carries a stick for which Trump has no defense. From theconservativetreehouse.com:

President Trump, President Zelenskyy and the CIA continue to deny any involvement on the drone attack against Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s state residence.  However, Russia has released evidence from the drones that were shot down including the guidance and targeting systems.

Someone launched the drones from Ukraine and targeted them at Putin’s residence to send a message.  There is considerable debate online about it, but if President Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are speaking truthfully, the most likely suspect who launched the drones was British intelligence inside Ukraine.  Then again, if the CIA was factually involved, everyone would have to deny it.

In retaliation for the December 29th attack, yesterday Russia fired a hypersonic Oreshnik missile and counterattack drones directly into the heart of Kiev, Ukraine.

The use of the Oreshnik missile comes just hours after Russian President Putin asserted publicly that Ukraine, Europe and NATO have no defenses against the hypersonics.

President Zelenskyy said the Russian attack involved 242 drones, 13 ballistic missiles, one Oreshnik missile and 22 cruise missiles. However, as with all things Zelenskyy, this dramatic claim seems to be slightly exaggerated.

Russia claims they targeted key electricity infrastructure as well as the production facilities for building drones in Kiev which are collocated in residential areas.

Images of the hypersonic missile warheads hitting their targets is shown at left.  Much of Kiev is now without power and electricity.

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Philosophically, Paine got it more right than any of the other founding fathers. From George F. Smith at lewrockwell.com:

January 10 should be a special date in American history.  On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense rolled off the press in Philadelphia and ignited a drive for independence.  As Murray Rothbard wrote,“Tom Paine had, at a single blow, become the voice of the American Revolution and the greatest single force in propelling it to completion and independence.”

When Thomas Paine’s ship pulled into Baltimore harbor on October 30, 1802, a large gathering of friends and admirers were waiting at dockside to welcome him back. Others stood by as well, some filled with loathing, merely to observe a famous figure. Since leaving the United States in 1787 to find a builder for his iron bridge, Paine had authored some of the most incendiary tracts of the 18th century, had been imprisoned and narrowly escaped Robespierre’s guillotine, and was widely reported to be a drunk and an atheist.

When he journeyed to Federal City on November 5 to pay his respects to the country’s third president, he found that he needed an alias and help from a presidential aide to get a room at Lovell’s, the city’s only hotel. As he later wrote a friend and future biographer, Thomas Clio Rickman,

You can have no idea of the agitation which my arrival occasioned. From New Hampshire to Georgia (an extent of 1,500 miles), every newspaper was filled with applause or abuse.

The source of the abuse was the Federalist press, a collection of newspaper editors and writers who were the big-government allies of Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist Party. Thomas Jefferson, the new president, had unseated Federalist John Adams and many of his congressional cohorts in what Jefferson called the “Revolution of 1800.”

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AI, as it is right now, not in some nightmare or dream future, is perfect for the government. It collects massive amounts of data and slices and dices it. What more could a totalitarian want? And people talk about having the government regulate AI? Like it regulated the “danger” of COVID? From Roger Bate at brownstone.org:

Before Covid, I would have described myself as a technological optimist. New technologies almost always arrive amid exaggerated fears. Railways were supposed to cause mental breakdowns, bicycles were thought to make women infertile or insane, and early electricity was blamed for everything from moral decay to physical collapse. Over time, these anxieties faded, societies adapted, and living standards rose. The pattern was familiar enough that artificial intelligence seemed likely to follow it: disruptive, sometimes misused, but ultimately manageable.

The Covid years unsettled that confidence—not because technology failed, but because institutions did.

Across much of the world, governments and expert bodies responded to uncertainty with unprecedented social and biomedical interventions, justified by worst-case models and enforced with remarkable certainty. Competing hypotheses were marginalized rather than debated. Emergency measures hardened into long-term policy. When evidence shifted, admissions of error were rare, and accountability rarer still. The experience exposed a deeper problem than any single policy mistake: modern institutions appear poorly equipped to manage uncertainty without overreach.

That lesson now weighs heavily on debates over artificial intelligence.

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All governments devolve into tyranny. Give them the power to kill people for a “good reason,” like assisted suicide, and it will inevitably deteriorate into outright murder. From Frank Bergman at slatenews.com:

Canada’s euthanasia regime has claimed yet another young life after a 26-year-old man suffering from depression was euthanized by the government’s assisted death program, despite previously being rejected for the lethal injection by a doctor who said he was too “young and healthy” to be killed.

The devastating revelation was shared by his mother, Margaret Marsilla, in a heartbreaking Facebook post, who accused the socialized healthcare system’s doctors of using a “loophole” to kill her son.

Marsilla announced that her son, Kiano, had been killed through the Canadian government’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) system.

After previous failed attempts to euthanize Kiano for diabetes and visual impairment, he was eventually killed for “depression,” which was classified as “mental illness,” according to his devastated mom.

“With a broken heart, I am sharing that my baby boy Kiano passed away … after being euthanized,” Marsilla wrote.

The death was approved by Ellen Wiebe, a Vancouver abortionist and euthanasia practitioner, according to Marsilla.

Wiebe, also known as “Dr. Death,” has ended the lives of more than 400 patients.

Kiano was first diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was four and later became visually impaired.

In adult life, he struggled with depression brought on by his condition.

Four years earlier, his mother successfully intervened to stop a scheduled euthanasia in Ontario.

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h/t Western Rifle Shooters Association

More tyranny at home, supposedly to fight tyranny abroad. From Leo Hohmann at leohohmann.substack.com:

President calls for 50 percent increase in war budget and says there is no check on his power outside of his own mind.

There’s a powder keg building in Minnesota that bears watching.

I predicted several years ago that the easiest and most likely way for the globalists to orchestrate the final takedown of America would be to embroil the country simultaneously in a world war and a civil war.

With the events of the last week, that well-scripted scenario seems more likely than ever to be the one followed by the powers that be.

President Trump has lost court cases in recent weeks involving his plans to deploy federal troops in cities and states where the mayors and governors don’t want them.

The main reason he has lost those cases is because the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the federal government from using the U.S. military to conduct domestic law enforcement. But there is a way to get around those restrictions, and that is to invoke the federal Insurrection Act of 1807.

Given all of the power plays I see coming out of Washington, I have to wonder if the timing of the dust up in Minnesota is purely coincidental. As ICE agents swept into Minneapolis to conduct a new set of raids, one federal agent deployed lethal force against a woman, Renee Good, who maneuvered her vehicle in a questionable manner. Some say she tried to run over the ICE agent. Others say she was just driving erratically, got scared when she saw the agents and tried to flee the scene. I’m not going to weigh in on her motives or whether the officer’s use of lethal force was justified because I don’t know enough about the case. But either way, the shooting was guaranteed to touch off protests in the same city, Minneapolis, where the George Floyd protests started in 2020.

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