Venezualepstein

 My mentor introduced me to a concept called "the parking lot" and it is probably by now a business training cliche for how to have more effective meetings. You may also know it as a "bike rack" the more eco-friendly urban planning adored alternative.

It's function is simple - whenever somebody interjects a "whattabout"-ism into a meeting, you write it up in a corner of the white-board or create a virtual post-it-note on the shared screen, and that interjection is now "parked" so it will not be forgotten, and the only person with authority to remove it from the bike rack/parking lot is the person who interjected it.

So say you are cussing out your husband for coming home drunk, and he is all like "whattabout that time you slept with one of your students?" that goes into the parking lot, to be dealt with, at some time, and when your husband is satisfied by the issue of sleeping with a past student, he can take it off the list of things to discuss. Now, back to how he is coming home drunk.

The DOJs bungling, incompetent non-compliance with their legal obligation to release the Epstein files is what was under discussion. The bill passed the House and Senate with bi-partisan support and the President didn't veto it. The deadline came and went and the DOJ made a partial release with both possible errors in relation to redactions - they both failed to redact information that they were meant to redact, and redacted information without explanation or justification that they were explicitly not to redact.

I am neither journalist, nor historian, nor scholar - the timeline is well documented on Wikipedia, prior to the Military abduction of Maduro and his wife from Venezuela, here is how I would have bet:

Trump was almost certainly in the Epstein files, we've already seen enough, though based on the released emails that mentioned Trump by the house oversight committee, I didn't expect anything more. I think Trump possesses (if nothing else) the basic competence of not placing himself in a position of responsibility, as was most public with his speech delivered prior to the January 6th Capital Riot/Insurrection in 2020. He spoke at length about fighting to avoid having the country stolen and injected a final "peacefully" qualifier. 

So I would have bet that what would come out was a lot of correspondence about Trump, and perhaps by Trump and photos with Epstein and Trump that would strain credulity based on what information about Trump's character is a matter of public record, that he didn't have sex with an underage sex-trafficked girl, but nothing concrete.

But now, Maduro was captured, and this dramatic event should, tactically and strategically speaking, have gone straight to the parking lot/bike rack. Press corp. questions about Maduro's capture and arrest should have been framed as "Given the DOJ's non-compliance with their legal obligation to release the Epstein files by December 19th 2025, what confidence can the public have that Maduro will be competently arraigned, charged, prosecuted and convicted?" and "Was this operation in Venezuala a desperate attempt to generate a smoke screen for what is now reported to be 2 million overdue Epstein files?"

Because now, based on how successful this Venezuala bullshit has been as a smokescreen, and furthermore the "Greenland" hypothetical that is obsessing the UKs press cycle, that is also bullshit (by which Rory Stewart explains the bullshit here) I would now bet the following:

Trump's depiction in the Epstein files is at least as bad as Andrew Windsor's (the former UK Royal) I would bet at this point, that the DOJ will not get around to releasing files that contain mentions of Trump until there is a change of government.

Yo Democrats

It is my opinion that Trump has been routinely overestimated, and overanalysed. 

Trump can be defensively summed up as "the loser's president" he is a loser, for losers. 

His success at winning the oval office, particularly in 2024 I assert will prove to be directly correlated to the creation of losers. For this, and the state of the world we live in, where effectively, the US is spiralling, the Democratic Party bares its fair share of blame in being an ineffective opposition. The nomination of Hilary Clinton as the 2016 candidate, particularly by the superdelegates, such as those in the largest state of California, who declared for Clinton long before the state held its primaries, communicated to me a myopic self-interest of the institution, and particularly in both the figures of Trump and Sanders, the Democrats in particular ignored a growing public sentiment demanding real change.

Change to what? It is probably best summarized as "neo-liberalism" or the "return to profits" of the Reagan-Thatcher years in the 80s that ended the post-war period and effectively social mobility and the middle class, albeit the existing middle class have to endure a long, slow, painful death.

I am tentatively persuaded that a more descriptive name than "neo-liberalism" for the cluster of economic paradigms broadly shared by the international business environment is "Asset management capitalism" the result of which is growing wealth inequality whereby the wealthiest are eating not only the middle class, but eachother to consolidate wealth and exacerbate inequality.

My feeling is, that for me it has always been a red-flag regarding identity politics, that it was embraced by left-wing political parties around the world, despite being niche, unpopular and most importantly despite, in the neo-liberal era, most left-wing political parties around the world having abandoned the working class.

In brief, I noticed that left-wing parties, including the Democrats, couldn't get shit done on climate change, a minimum-wage, housing affordability, education, poverty eradication etc. etc. shit that would help anyone outside the wealthiest 20% in wealthy countries, but largely performative taxing social rituals carried out by private citizens were embraced.

I appreciate that in the absence of campaign finance reform, being a left-wing party that stands for tackling the pressing distribution problem that faces wealthy nations, is difficult. But avoiding this challenge will simply allow more and more losers to be produced by the economy, and losers think "it's gotta be the shoes" losers think the way to prove you are strong is to pick fights all the time. Losers think both apologies and forgiveness are signs of weakness etc. etc.

A brief word on disqualifying the opinions of Celebrating Venezualans

Around the world Venezualans are celebrating the tentative deposing of Maduro, who seems by all accounts an utter pendejo to put it mildly. 

I don't give a shit. The Mexica peoples, better known in the Anglosphere as "Aztecs" were nasty and unpopular. As such, many indigenous groups such as the Confederacy of Tlaxcala, Tetzcoco, Totonacapan, Huejotzingo, Zaachila, Purépecha Empire, Otomi, Chalco, Xochimilco, Mixquic and Iztapalapa allied with the Spanish conquistadors and likely celebrated the downfall of the Aztec Triple-Alliance.

Now, I tend to agree, that colonialism is not all bad. Unfortunately for whatever can be said for colonialism, it is a violent and brutal process historically destroying not just people, but culture and heritage. World heritage. 

It was likely nice to end the Aztec practices of capturing slaves for ritual human sacrifice. Alas, becoming a Spanish territory is no picnic either.

Cortes vs the Mexica and his cousin Pizarro vs the Inca are the two big ones as far as conquest of the Americas go, but Venezuala, Columbia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Belize, El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, Cuba, The Caribbean etc. would all share similar stories with the exception of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. 

Furthermore, Columbus for which Columbia is named, was an objectively awful person by pretty much anybodies standard. There was nothing more devestating he did though, to American Indians everywhere than simply making contact and bringing European diseases to the Americas.

With this history in mind, I had thought that if anybody would take a pandemic seriously, it would be the Mexicans, and if any Mexicans would take a pandemic really seriously, it would be the indigenous scene who reminisce and tell it like it is when it comes to the impact of colonialism...

But no, expectations and intuitions were thwarted. The indigenous circles I was in denied the existence of Covid. Refused to believe in it, yet believed in contradictory conspiracy theories like lab-leaks and plandemics. Refused and avoided vaccinations. I met multiple people who lost one-or-both parents to Covid and still stubbornly clung to denial.

From the perspective of history, and with all due respect to those Venezualans that have been personally effected by the reign of Maduro, the Venezualans now caught up in the moment of Maduro's kidnapping and arrest, they are participating in a long held tradition of conquest, a tradition of fascist narratives and naivete:

Maximilian von Heune: The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans, but they do serve a purpose. Let them get rid of the Communists. Later we'll be able to control them.

Brian Roberts: But who exactly is we?

Maximilian von Heune: Germany, of course.