Tuesday’s Cloud Seeding
OMFG and Some Music
1.
One more reminder that tonight, Tuesday, January 6, Dropped By Birds will be making melodious notes of splendorous rapture at Sonora Moonshine Company, 6-8-ish. Join us for the camaraderie, tasty food bits, and splendid beverages with no cover charge. There will be dancing behavior…
Also, mark your calendar for the Birds to hit the stage at Monterey Court, Thursday, January 22nd. Special guest will be Clay Koweek subbing for Alvin. Click here to reserve your table.
2.
As we embark on this new year I hope to bring some information to the table that you may not have read or heard, as I’ve been doing for the last five years. Maybe you don’t want to read or see this stuff. Okay by me. I am nobody when it comes to politics — I haven’t even run for dogcatcher. Is there a dogcatcher?
I don’t have a political science background, nor a business background. I make stuff that a handful of people want and play music that another handful of people enjoy hearing. I’ll continue down that path because it interests me.
But what also interests me is observing the reality of the society I’m stuck with. It requires a bit of digging…and reading…and assessing. I do what I’m able with my finite time and brain cells. My format for posting what others have written, who are much more well informed than I, is to put their words in an oblique font. You know, slanted letters.
So carry on if you’re feeling it…I’m going to.
3.
I am still wrapping my mind around our military blundering into another country to kidnap their leader..and his WIFE. For Gawd’s sake, grab the wife, too!
We’re not getting much information from mainstream media but I’ll give ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and NBC’s Kristen Welker some credit for pushing for answers from Marco “Cokie” Rubio on the Sunday morning gab fests.
HCR reports that no Democratic congress folks were informed of this action, even though it was months in the planning: Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) who as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee is a member of the Gang of Eight, told CBS’s Margaret Brennan this morning that neither he nor House minority leader and fellow Gang of Eight member Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had been briefed on the strikes.
And, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)—also a member of the Gang of Eight—told reporters that he hadn’t been briefed either and that the administration had deliberately misled Congress in three classified briefings before the strikes. In those briefings, officials assured lawmakers that the administration was not planning to take military action in Venezuela and was not pursuing regime change. “They’ve kept everyone in the total dark,” he said.
Robert Reich reports that when *rump and cohorts suggest they will be “running the country,” U.S. troops are not prepared to occupy Venezuela. Trying to do so would be a disaster.
He goes on to say that Maduro’s system of oppression is still entrenched there. It includes the national guard, the army, the national police, the intelligence service, and the Colombian guerrilla group ELN. All remain intact.
Maduro’s top lieutenants also remain, including several who were involved in his alleged crimes. Not to mention his thugs and narco-traffickers who have been controlling Venezuela through violent repression and stolen elections.
Venezuela has roughly 28 million people. There’s no way to determine the emerging balance of power between pro- and anti-Maduro camps, but it’s a safe bet that any power void is likely to be filled with violence.
Heather Cox Richardson also spoke up Saturday morning that this non-congressionally approved provocation spits in the face of rules-based international order designed to prevent just this kind of action. Obviously, Russia has also ignored such rules after annexing Crimea and slowly chipping away at Ukraine for the last five years.
Again, Robert Reich summed it up: This is nuts. Trump is already on his way to destroying the rule of law in America. Now he’s destroying the rules-based system of international law and diplomacy that the United States created in the wake of the horrors of World War II.
4.
For a different angle on this “invasion” check out Dr. Stacey Patton’s view that *rump has merely pulled back the curtain on American hypocrisy.
Folks are out here acting as if Donald Trump’s latest military action is something America hasn’t excused a hundred times before. Like we’re not a greedy empire going for broke at home and abroad because white America knows the old order is slipping and they’re trying to grab everything that isn’t nailed down.
For decades, the United States has overthrown governments using humanitarian vocabulary and moral theater. First comes the villain that’s corrupt, authoritarian, drug-linked, dangerous to women, children, or global stability. Then comes the justification through sanctions framed as accountability, diplomacy, intervention, reluctant responsibility, blah, blah, blah. And somewhere offstage, resources quietly change hands. Contracts get signed. Access is restored. Profits move.
Trump isn’t inventing some new imperial logic. He is ripping the velvet curtain off American foreign policy and being honest and vulgar in a way that terrifies, shall we say, polite empire. And what’s rattling so many pundits isn’t that the logic is unfamiliar. It’s that it has no church clothes on. Trump isn’t sugarcoating the extraction and violence with morality. Which is why the reaction has been so freakin’ hollow. The same media ecosystem that nodded along through Iraq, Libya, Honduras, Haiti, and Afghanistan is suddenly aghast.
She wraps up with if journalism won’t tell the truth when it’s this freakin’ blatant and when a president is openly talking about running another country and taking its oil, then the press forfeits its claim to being a check on power. Instead, it becomes a translator for empire rather than a witness to it. And once that role is accepted, the slide is easy. Extraction becomes ordinary, sovereignty remains conditional, and the public is trained to shrug at things that should stop them cold.
To go a bit deeper in how this is all about the oil and money and oil and money, read Judd Legum’s piece on how the ouster of Maduro is a financial windfall for a prominent Trump-supporting billionaire, investor Paul Singer, who in November, 2025 acquired Citgo, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-run oil company.
5.
One more shameless act of revenge: The town drunk announced Monday that the Pentagon is taking administrative action to punish Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, by cutting his retirement pay for participating in a video where he and other Democratic lawmakers reminded US service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders.
I’m betting ol’ Pete is kicking back with a smirk on his face, a few pulls from a bottle of hooch stashed in his desk drawer, and slicking his greasy hair back with some Venezuelan crude.
6.
Today is, of course, the five year anniversary of the event that should’ve landed *rump into the hoosegow forever. Robert Reich penned a short, concise, and thorough account of that day in his post dated yesterday: Of the 1,424 people charged with federal crimes relating to the riot, 1,010 pled guilty and 1,060 were sentenced and served time in prison. Enrique Tarrio, then the chairman of the Proud Boys, received the longest sentence, a 22-year prison term.
Upon retaking the presidency, Trump pardoned them all.
We must never forget. We must teach our children and our children’s children and all future generations of Americans what happened on January 6, 2021— so that, as Mike Pence hoped, “history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”
January 6, 2021 was the most shameful day in American history. It should live in infamy, as should the traitor who refused to accept the election results and incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol — Donald J. Trump.
The death of the orange stain won’t mark the endgame for the tyrants now in power. As, once again, Dr. Patton writes, we need to be recognizing what we’re seeing as endgame behavior. We need to understand that the most dangerous moment for any system of power is not when it is rising, but when it senses that time, legitimacy, and consequence are slipping out of reach. That is when empires burn the whole freakin’ house down to warm themselves.
We all still need to speak up in whatever way we can. Cheers and onward!
And now…
Thanks Gary