This entry is apropos of nothing1, but was inspired by commentary regarding the current insanity with Iran2. I keep seeing people saying “they thought this would be like Venezuela: drop a few bombs and take over the country”.

That isn’t what happened in Venezuela.

Venezuela was a coup, carried out with the US as the tip of the spear in cooperation with participants in the Venezuelan government and military3. The moment CH-47s were filmed flying over predictable travel paths this was the only possible explanation.

Maduro was garbage4, and clearly some insiders in the Venezuela government, likely including the entire military chain of command, wanted him gone. So they all stood down and left him and his Cuban guards to be removed by a foreign element where they could claim no involvement and avoid blowback.

The US could strike a couple of vacant anti-air installations. MANPADS were locked away in bunkers. Some pawns had to be vaporized to make it all legitimate looking. What’s a little murder?

There were no magic weapons that discombobulated everyone. No super covert operation. Everyone looked the other way while a US team removed their nuisance. Everyone got their show and a story to tell of overwhelming military might achieving the goals with ease.

Some Venezuelan generals are probably living in the US now with a paycheck.

Which is why the new government plays ball with the Trump admin. They aren’t some cowering supplicant, but are partners in the action.

Hopefully it turns out well for Venezuela (which went from one group of despots to another). But it isn’t the precedent it has been held as.

Aside about Politics

After I wrote that “Dear America” piece, I received a dozen+ emails that were some variation of “I like your stuff, but please leave politics out of it”. Man, I wish I could just ignore politics, but every morning it’s some new thing from that freak show of depravity and attention-seeking trash.

The entire world would like if they would lay off the brinksmanship, theatrics, and war crimes for just a day or two. But they just can’t. Every single day it’s something new.

But ultimately I’m not too worried about losing “fans”. There are only two groups that are still team-Trump-

a) The impossibly stupid5. Look, it’s okay to be dumb. Live and let live, and genetics and environment rolls the dice and we all cover the gamut in our capabilities and aptitudes. But historically if someone were incredibly dumb, they’d focus on pursuits with their hands, contribute to society in meaningful ways, and so on. Now they’re dogshit MAGA loudmouths who think having opinions — the stronger held the better! — is the great equalizer.

The impossibly stupid are the vast bulk of the “still all in on Trump” group, and these idiots can barely read, so they’re not a concern.

b) The ultrarich who are profiting off of the catastrophic mismanagement of the United States. These people despise Trump and his halfwit cadre — they see him for the garish classless clown he is — but they like that he’s ensuring they can easily skirt tax, can operate lawlessly, and have an easy get out of jail card for any misdeeds6. The ultra-rich don’t care if people criticize the orange goblin, and they know he’s running on borrowed time. So hello to my ultra-rich readers, and you understand why I’m writing this.

Canadian Politics

While I was authoring this, an online firestorm erupted about a member of parliament from Winnipeg using the acronym MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. The speaker is an aboriginal opposition MP from a minority party, and the context is that she was criticizing the government for reducing indigenous funding, lamenting how that would affect some subgroup of that acronym. Specifically the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women part of it.

Indigenous women in Canada have dire statistical outcomes, for multi-faceted reasons and with no easy answers, and are grossly overrepresented in victim statistics. It’s a serious problem and a horrible tragedy.

Does the gigantic acronym help in any way? Absolutely not. It’s a ridiculous acronym that only a very tiny fringe of Canada takes seriously, treating it as some sort of weird oppression olympics where everyone is jockeying to get their own set of letters in the forever growing letter salad.

Eventually it will settle on being the “No Homers” club: Just call it the “No Straight, Conventional Males” and get it over with.

I don’t mean to be dismissive to a wide range of groups that suffer real harms and problems, but farcical nonsense like that acronym help absolutely no one, and it rightly rings of parody. The NDP7 repeatedly is the source of such nonsense, including another recent video where, in yet another display of oppression olympics, various speakers were all declaring that they were more aggrieved and entitled than other speakers, each adding more qualifiers to declare why they are out-oppressed.

They aren’t helping themselves. And they aren’t helping Canada’s image as time after time a far-left party, far into the weeds, is presented as all of Canada.

Of course the clowns of the internet8, including head jester himself ketamine-rot Elon Musk (and some of his brainless dipshit cling-ons like Rob Schneider, reminding everyone he pathetically is still alive), had to weigh in on this. Despite this woman lamenting the government of Canada, somehow this isolated case is the downfall of all of Canada, and merits its dissolution. It, these addled fools surmise, justifies Alberta separatism.

Which is…ironic. Alberta is 100% subject to aboriginal treaties that make separation quite literally impossible, and the foolish traitors who think they get to walk off with it ply a funny route when they make fun of…aboriginals or aboriginal issues. They are exactly as smart as we would expect (their leader literally defrauded relatives, so they have exactly the morals you would expect as well).

It’s time for Canada to start deporting these people. I’m not remotely joking. Send them to the MAGA cesspool that they so desperately want to recreate.

Footnotes

  1. My free time has been filled with work on my RTS/4X hybrid game that I mentioned previously, so apologies for the lack of content ↩

  2. I made my feelings known about this administration’s shocking gap of competence in my “Dear America” piece. Trump openly gloats that he surrounds himself with “losers”9 — he is quite proud of this — and the fact that this clown-show of depravity, grifting and idiocy fails at everything is utterly inevitable. The worst possible people in every position.

    Successful large entities, whether it’s the USA or Microsoft or Tesla, have a surprising amount of inertia, and can seem immune from the consequences of poor decisions for years on end, rolling forward on the success of the past. Until reality is no longer something they can hide from and the costs all come due at once. The illusion of invincibility disappears and the many faults are laid bare.

    The staggering level of damage that has been done to the United States by this circus in barely over a year cannot be overstated. I’d like to say that there’s an easy way out of this — “just vote blue in the midterms and voila, problem solved and everything is fixed!”10 — but the sad truth is that the damage is severe enough that decline is essentially guaranteed now. I say this with no glee, as not only do I not want to see the good Americans hurt, the fall of the US will invariably drag Canada along with it.

    Canada has been rapidly diversifying away from the US, not only because it’s an utterly unreliable circus (with shocking levels of in-the-open corruption just tolerated as a normal way things work, when in any functioning democracy with actual laws this stuff would see scumbags rotting in prison), but also because it’s a rapidly declining empire.

    The USD is done as the international currency of exchange. There is no going back. US payment networks are doomed everywhere they exist outside the US. US military suppliers are going to find extremely rough waters ahead. US organizations that always lean on the government to make threats to avoid accountability in foreign nations are not going to like what’s coming. US debt sales are going to find a cold market in the years ahead, and it’s unlikely those multi-trillion dollar deficits are going to be a thing of the future.

    Any agreements with US governments are worthless. Trump keeps flapping his idiot mouth about NATO, but the truth is that every NATO country is moving to a post-America reality, and absolutely no one expects the US to lift a finger if it were needed. Several NATO countries are going to come out of this as new nuclear powers (joining France and the UK, both of whom are going to expand their arsenal), and indeed we’re going to see unimaginable nuclear proliferation in the next few years.

    Endless words can be written about the generational, deadly destruction this crime spree has meted out to US institutions. All to then post a two trillion dollar deficit. Just shocking, stunning failure in every single dimension, which is precisely why they’re inventing some new distraction with every passing day.

    There are good odds that in the near future Taiwan simply joins China in a “two-state” solution (or I guess three-state?). Many alliances are going to shift in a way that Americans are going to be unpleasantly surprised by. Elections, it turns out, have serious consequences.

    Pax Americana is over, and everyone is going to suffer the consequences. Most especially Americans who have lived in ignorance of the systems that made them the richest large country on Earth.

    Even American media domination…I don’t think it continues. The lustre and illusion of America is pretty much tarnished worldwide. In a way that can’t be rehabilitated. The mythology has been undone, and every time that flabbering clown starts saying his vile, impossibly stupid nonsense and lies it suffers further blows.

    So everything is going to keep seeming to be normal for a while, but it isn’t. The collapse is well underway11 ↩

  3. Likely coordinated through Russia who was willing to give up Venezuela in return for some concessions on Ukraine. Ukraine and European allies are rightly treating the US as an untrustworthy partner. As an aside, Trump keeps talking about weapons to Ukraine, but just to be clear, the US is giving nothing. Everything is being bought by Europe, Canada and others ↩

  4. Think of Maduro as Venezuela’s Trump: A criminal grifter stealing from the people and ruining everything for his own enrichment and adulation. Pretty bad, right? ↩

  5. I should clarify that I’m not talking about the intellectually disabled, most of whom are actually wonderful people and have nothing to do with this. I’m talking about the mediocre 90 IQ dumbshits that absolutely dominate political discourse. They’re intelligent enough to realize that they aren’t exactly intellectual giants, but insecure enough that they think that they can rewrite the rules by just being as loud and as obnoxious as possible. This is MAGA. ↩

  6. The moment someone is exposed for fraud, sexual assault, or worse is the day they make the magical transition to being hardcore MAGA, probably claiming to be born again evangelicals to complete the scam. This act has become so transparently laughable, but somehow it still works on the ultra-dumb contingent ↩

  7. The NDP was once the “worker’s party”, advocating for worker rights and social programs for Canadians. Somehow they have evolved into the mass immigration party (perversely, as this is the greatest assault on workers and worker rights), coupled with making their core positions fringe issues and identities, devolving more and more away from rational positions. The NDP largely continues as a going concern via protest votes by people who are angry at the other two parties ↩

  8. Having Americans giving their takes on the “problems” of Canada — usually fringe nonsense — given the current situation there, is pretty bizarre stuff. It is a stunning lack of introspection when people in an unbelievably corrupt, failing empire/plutocracy have to desperately scramble to find fringe examples in other countries to feel better about their own lot.

    I think having a pants-shitting, dementia-addled self-dealing rapist criminal dismantling democracy, while plying by far the most corrupt administration in US history (tinpot dictator levels of corruption, in the open), might be a bigger concern than some fringe politician in Canada saying an acronym you don’t like. What a pathetic situation ↩

  9. As pathetic as this administration is, nothing tops the pathos that are JD Vance and Marco Rubio. These clowns aren’t as stupid as the rest of Trump’s criminal administration — both are fairly smart guys, which is why they both have a long history of warning about the dangers of Donald Trump — but they thought they could wallow around in the sewage and then redeem themselves at the end. There isn’t going to be a redemption arc. These foolish opportunists cooked themselves, and their future is burned. To ensure this, Trump periodically has both of them go in front of the cameras and eat dog turds, figuratively, in displays of shocking humiliation ↩

  10. Everyone realizes that there will be no fair and open elections with this administration, right? Surely people aren’t walking blind. Trump’s various illegal voting proclamations are purely to muddy the waters such that he/they (his criminal garbage conspirators like Mike “Fanatical Evangelical Nutbag” Johnson) can dismiss results they don’t like. That’s how criminal liars work, and it was utter folly to give this malignant narcissist the reigns again.

    Trump is openly promising pardons to everyone in his circle, overtly and directly encouraging criminal acts. This is so astonishingly outrageous that it should lead to a military ouster of his whole administration. It is perverse. But the US has fallen so far and so fast that it’s just another day in the crime-spree that is Trump, a foolish clown that American voters decided to give another shot at looting the country. Astonishingly sad stuff. ↩

  11. The most bizarre cope for the obvious decline are those so deep in the cult that they try to make lemonade out of these lemons. Apparently being a collapsed once-empire led by oligarchs is some achievement. Because you’ll, like, make your own gravel or something ↩

See Also

  • Dear America

    Canada and America are children of a common mother. But we are not the same.