Tool Cabinet, 2026. In case you’re wondering, I use ~ 5 of these for 95% of my woodworking.

I am writing this on Sunday, January 4, functionally the day after US Delta Force troops seized the head of the Venezuelan government, Nicholas Maduro, from the Presidential Palace in Caracas. To call it audacious would be an understatement. A coordinated force, launched primarily from an offshore fleet, mobilized helicopters, a slew of different aircraft types, including a B1-B!, and successfully evaded detection by Chinese radar long enough to destroy the entire Chinese armament Venezuela had imported. It is unclear, at least to me, the extent that the Iranians had constructed drone factories inside Venezuela, but I suspect these were hit as well. Talk about a bad investment.

If you had to pick a scenario to illustrate the complexity crisis in memetics, you couldn’t pick a more profound example. The Left immediately condemned snatching Maduro, a mass murderer by anyone’s yardstick, under the worn-out aegis of colonialism, while Venezuelans themselves were dancing in the street. Immediately, the anti-colonial propaganda machine spun up the usual condemnations of the invasion, saying it was oil for Trump’s buddies as the primary reason for the war — a claim they have been pre-bunking for a while, in an attempt to discredit the sinking of drug running boats and submersibles out of the Venezuelan ports as being in the interest of the United States. As their lede goes, there can be no legitimate external or internal action to preserve the United States — as the most hegemonic, evil state in history, we’ve gotta go down.

Fortunately, not everyone in the current government agrees with them. The information flows in the country, increasingly complicated, and not supportable by the sophistication of the previous bureaucracy, was going to simplify and decentralize. Those are the memetic physics, and you cannot run from that. But the how of that transition matters a great deal to those of us that live here. MAGA has attempted to be turned into a slur by the Democrats — but for those of us that live here, and are not planning on exiting to a Riviera, Mexican, French or otherwise, has widespread support as a guiding principle. That doesn’t mean that the lumpenproletariat has any clue what actions this actually entails, other than not giving away a ton of foreign aid to other countries. But certainly, allowing Russia and China to build up a military force on the other side of the Gulf of America isn’t such a hot idea. That is definitely not in the national interest.

And so a realignment of the Venezuela junta, that spent a good hunk of time publicly declaring its hatred for America, was really inevitable. Those in power, and in the know, who do NOT want to leverage collapse to add to their personal family fortunes, were sooner or later going to be all in. It’s one thing to have a socialist/communist government in our hemisphere down at the tail of South America. It’s quite another to have one on your doorstep.

What’s amazing is that Venezuela, as a failed narco-state, is such an obvious one. Here’s a hint how you can tell. Any failed state will be accompanied by refugee outflows of the middle and upper classes before the peasantry starts hoofing it for the border. If you can get out, you get out. I got a window into that last year when I visited Costa Rica. Conversations with locals indicated that Venezuelan teachers, doctors and whatnot were showing up quite a while ago. What WAS interesting was that in places like El Salvador, who experienced their mass migration before President Nayeb Bukele took office, the Venezuelans merely showed up into empty slots that were waiting for them. So maybe, just maybe, the signal that should have been heeded was lost on the rest of the world — the bourgeoisie simply were too busy re-settling in their new environs.

But any country hemorrhaging its people is a failed state. People don’t leave until they have to. The semi-official number of people fleeing is in the neighborhood of 8 million, out of a country of approximately 28 million. That’s gotta be up there with Cambodia at the end of the US Vietnam period.

It should be said that any narco-state does not have the interests of the U.S. at heart. The drug war has metastasized into a full-on tool of internal destruction inside the U.S. Once again, numbers are hard to come by (amazingly). But at least 1/2 million Americans have died in the last ten years. What is even more tragic is the number of children — I deep-dove this figure and came up with about 5000 in the last ten years. That means 500 kids/year are dying from fentanyl poisoning. Because drug overdose is often self-administered, the old mental models get spun up in varying ways about the responsibility for the deaths. But kids are kids — and even if they’re 17, they mostly get a break regarding total accountability for their actions.

Why are we so stuck in the current situation? We’ve got the mass death at our door. But we simply cannot change our mental models on what non-kinetic warfare really looks like. In a best case scenario, we should sort allies from adversaries on whether they are cracking down on production of fentanyl and associated chemicals inside their borders. Yet the fentanyl still streams from China, as well as Venezuela, and especially Mexico. If you cannot control production of chemicals inside your own country, if you’re not registered as a failed state, you’re damn close. Or if not a failed state, a true adversary.

And at a minimum, those states and their justifications are the last thing we should be listening to. It’s a war, folks, like it or not. You pay attention to your adversaries. But you don’t suck up their propaganda.

Understanding the Venezuela crisis also requires shattering of old models of how we perceive how we operate in our own hemisphere. Whether we exercised the Monroe Doctrine or not, we believed it to be true. But that’s not what has been happening Everyone from non-state actors like Hezbollah, to the usual suspects of Russia and China, have been operating in Venezuela. And their actions are profoundly not in our interests. But the American public can’t even conceive that Lebanese terrorists could be running around in our literal backyard. It never comes up in any discussions I read. And the fact that it took Trump drawing that hard line against them is more a sign of past managerial neglect towards the American empire than anything else. Once you get your government filled with enough globalists and collapse advocates, this kind of thing was inevitable. We are the world. Indeed.

And the connections between Iran and Venezuela are indisputable. Iranian drones were being manufactured in Venezuela. Do people really think that they were going to be used against Trinidad? But it’s all so fantastic, and requires a knowledge of geography elusive to the modern American, we end up back with the notion that it’s another war for oil. Look folks, oil is fungible — and what that means is that oil from Texas looks like oil from Venezuela like oil from Saudi Arabia, once you mess around a little with the chemistry and sulfur content. The per-barrel price is the only thing that dictates who gets it. But who gets the money FROM it does change. And that’s the North Star of how to understand any oil-related crisis.

What’s more interesting is tracking the stuff that is scarce. This piece by Tracy ShuChart (on Substack) is a must-read for all Illuminati wannabes. Venezuela turns out to be a much bigger play than oil. And as China attempts to use its various rare earth surpluses as a political tool to bring the US to heel — not too much, because if we stop buying their junk, their own middle class will revolt — Venezuela shows up there, conveniently, as a potential proxy supplier. If we had a news media that had some sense (we don’t — they are mostly composed of traitorous, whining fools) these folks would be getting out a global map and the red yarn to tie together the network China is using to corner the market on all the stuff, like tantalum and coltan, that makes all our new spooky devices actually work. So if you were China, why wouldn’t you reach out to an ally with no scruples, who could in combo form, kill off your adversary’s children with fentanyl, while destroying their supply chain for all their high tech? And why wouldn’t you help that same partner stock up on suicide bombers, still smarting from all the US action in the Middle East? It’s one helluva play — but if it went off, the chaos generated would be spectacular.

And the United States Lefty corps will be there to pre-bunk everything, and keep us in a state of paralytic senescence. We deserved it after all. Black Lives Mattered — until they became inconvenient as well.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that any functional state needs a national interest. And that national interest needs to be grounded and real. And the US is allowed to have one.It gets back to the whole Collapse Narrative thing I’ve been writing about. The short form for the cheap seats in the back — you can always tell a Collapse Narrative by its lack of anything other than babbling moral principles. It’s not that principles don’t matter. But if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

One of the most preposterous Collapse Narratives is that by snatching Maduro, somehow China and Russia are emboldened in their own personal territorial quests. “If they did that, we can do what WE want.” So far, Russia and China have proved to be far more rational, self-interested actors than that. They ain’t out there for world peace, folks. And any nation that would help create the chemicals for fentanyl production is no real friend of ours. When they see us grab Maduro, they know the marble game is for keeps. And only seditious traitors like Mark Kelley, the Senator from Arizona, are going to try to spin it differently. China and Russia aren’t going to feel like the door is more open for their own territorial adventurism. They’re going to know that if we say something is important to us, we mean it. That’s the way functional hegemons work. And ALL nation-states are their own little hedgehogs. Don’t fool yourself.

None of this means that the runway to a bright future for Venezuela is free and clear. Left in place are the various junta members that helped Maduro do the bad stuff he did. But they are a bunch of rats — that’s what happens to your soul when you justify killing your own people. Trump has announced that we’re going to run Venezuela (Marco Rubio must be rubbing his brow), and I’m sure part of that message was that he was gonna kill them if they didn’t do what he asked them to do. Sometimes, the way you approach societal evolution is to have your leadership order it. And then hope that it takes. To a far lesser degree, it’s what I do in my own classes in design.

But success in Venezuela is going to be hinged on one thing — remigration of its professional class. Our job has to be giving Venezuelans enough hope for a new society that those people will come back. Because societies fundamentally run on information and information complexity. But in order to have information complexity, you’ve got to first have information.

I’m saying a prayer for Venezuela. And crossing my fingers as well. We could use a little luck about now.

And don’t forget — sometimes you go the Great Game. But sometimes, the Great Game comes to you.