A Nightmare Month Is Over
Fires in our neighborhood. A world threatening to ignite.
January 2026 ended last weekend. Good riddance!
Personally as well as politically and geopolitically: this was a nightmare month!
First, the personal stuff.
The place: Penco, Chile, a thriving town on the coast near the city of Concepción. My wife and I have been living here since last June, in a townhouse owned by her mother and where her sister also lives. (Why we moved here is a story for another day.)
On Saturday, January 17, shortly before sunset, alerts began sounding on all our phones. A wildfire had started in a nearby forest and was burning out of control. It turned out to be one of several blazes. Fire engines were sounding. Areas outside of town adjacent to the forest were being evacuated. Because of winds on top of dry conditions — no rain here in two months — the fires spread rapidly despite efforts to contain them. Thick gray-black smoke was pouring into the sky. We remained glued to our phones for news.
By midnight, a neighboring town was ablaze. As the hours progressed, so did fires we could see from our second floor balcony. We watched them come closer!
Our neighborhood — several blocks of small homes, apartment buildings, small businesses adjacent to the downtown area — is near the coast between that hilly region where the fires were and the Pacific Ocean.
The fires kept coming. At around 2 am, I took this with my phone.
More alerts came regularly as more neighborhoods were ordered evacuated.
I never saw my wife’s 96-year-old mother so scared.
At some point I’d quietly packed our crucial documents — passports, financial records, etc. — in case we had to make a run for it. All were in my large backpack and a medium sized cardboard box which also contained my Bible, my copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, my laptop, a booklet filled with wedding and other family photos including the final photos of my deceased parents (I’m sentimental about such things), a couple changes of clothing, as well as first aid supplies and other equipment.
My wife had gathered bags of food out of the refrigerator and cupboards. I could only think that this house was over 60 years old. She and her sisters grew up here. So did two nieces and two nephews. Her parents had bought this place new back in the early 1960s.
Layers and layers of lives hung on walls in every room, lined every hallway, stood on shelves, filled storage closets.
Where would we go? Probably onto the beach, initially. My wife’s sister owns the only vehicle. But roads out of town were doubtless clogged. Many were already closed to all but emergency vehicles.
By God’s grace our area wasn’t evacuated. The flames never reached our area. Electricity and water were out, and the air outside was unbreathable, but by the grace of God we were untouched!
That neighboring town I mentioned had been all but destroyed. The worst loss: my wife’s sister had been renting out an apartment there. Building burnt to the ground. Total loss. Which will mean a substantial loss of rental income, not to mention the value of the apartment itself! (There’s no homeowner and rental insurance here.)
Electricity and water came back the next day, the smoke slowly dissipated, and we put our lives back together.
No one knew for sure what caused these blazes which extended across two regions of Chile (also Patagonia, on Argentina’s side of the border).
I had a Stateside friend tell me it was the Israelis. I couldn’t substantiate this. Mossad isn’t everywhere, and as I say under such occasions, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
What this was, was the worst scare my wife and I’d had during our 11-and-a-half years of marriage. Worse than any of the occasional Earth temblors that plague this corner of the world.
For this past January, such an event was par for the course!
As the resident current events junkie, I could have told everyone that much of the rest of the world was on the verge of burning.
The world’s blazes are slightly easier to diagnose.
Venezuela and the Petrodollar.
During the early morning hours of January 3, the Trump administration launched the incursion into Venezuela that led to Nicolas Maduro’s capture and transport to the U.S. to be tried on drug smuggling and other charges.
There seemed to be a minimum of breakage.
I held off writing anything until more of the dirt cleared and perspective on the event was possible. That was before subsequent events sidelined any plans I might have had.
No one I knew was sorry to see Maduro go. He was, and is, a thug. He wrecked the Venezuelan economy. He’s the primary reason 8 million Venezuelans fled the country, many with nothing but what they could carry on their backs. Some came to the U.S. Some went to other places — including Chile which despite its problems is paradise compared to what they left behind.
Many hoped that Maduro’s being gone would mean restoring democracy.
Those hopes were quickly dashed. What happened the night of January 3 has been called a decapitation, not a regime change.
Trump instilled Maduro’s VP Darcy Rodriguez in there, under threat of severe punishment if she didn’t do what she was told. Almost as if Venezuela was now the 51st state (as opposed to Canada!). Best I can tell, Venezuelans’ own choice would have been María Corina Machado, who’d just won the Nobel Peace Prize Trump coveted. He dismissed her out of hand, promptly turned to U.S. oil corporations and told them openly of the coming opportunity to make money off Venezuelan oil.
Venezuela is now a U.S. vassal state, in other words. This confirmed what some of us were saying: Trump’s menacing Venezuela was about oil, not drugs.
To create and maintain the official narrative, this administration had no trouble sacrificing the lives of probably innocent Venezuelans in boats: around 80, at last count. I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but I never saw a scrap of evidence that those boats carried illegal drugs or were on their way with them to the U.S. For starters, I can read a map. They were too far from any U.S. coastline to have made the trip in boats that small.
Was the takedown of Maduro about the oil, then?
Yes and no.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world: 303 million barrels.
More than Saudi Arabia.
But this is what was important — and never reported to the public: Maduro was selling oil in yuan, rubles, and euros, not dollars!
That’s a definite no-no.
Here’s a capsule review of the history that matters:
In 1971, Nixon killed the gold standard. Everybody knows that. The dollar became a fiat currency, backed only by legal tender laws and people’s willingness to use it.
Three years later, Henry Kissinger developed (with Saudi cooperation) the petrodollar system. In a nutshell: everybody buys and sells oil priced in dollars using dollars.
This kept the fiat dollar viable by creating global dollar dependency: a system which has been in place ever since.
All the recent U.S. wars-of-choice and regime change operations have involved this system.
In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that he was going to selling oil in euros.
U.S. invasion, three years later. Hussein’s regime (originally a CIA creation) fell.
Hussein is hung the following year.
Iraqi oil went back to being sold in dollars.
I gather everyone over the age of six now realizes that the weapons of mass destruction narrative was a lie.
Fast forward a little to the Obama years. Moammar Khadafy was developing a gold-backed currency called the gold dinar intended for oil trade throughout Africa outside the petrodollar system.
Libya was attacked and destroyed. Khadafy was hunted down like an animal and knifed to death.
Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State, with a characteristic sociopathic smirk: “We came, we saw, he died!”
His gold dinar died with him.
Lesson: countries that tried to operate outside the petrodollar system and its satellites such as SWIFT came to bad ends.
Until BRICS nations united and began developing an off ramp against dollar dependency.
The U.S. couldn’t very well take down those nations’ leaders without provoking world war.
Venezuela had petitioned to join BRICS, and had developed back-door relations with China, Russia, and — gasp! — Iran.
Venezuela is a small country. Easily turned into a vassal state.
The Trump administration isn’t hiding this. Stephen Miller: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property.”
In other words, the U.S. owns Venezuelan oil because U.S. corporations went in there and began development a hundred years ago.
By this logic, every nationalized resource in history was “theft.”
The problem today: the petrodollar is dying, little by little, both because BRICS nations have figured out ways around it and because the dollar itself is collapsing.
Russia has been selling oil and natural gas in rubles and yuan for years. I submit that this is the real, outside-the-real-Matrix reason the country is so demonized in the controlled Western press.
The claim that Maduro was ousted because he dealt drugs is absurd! Fentanyl, e.g., comes from China through Mexico, not Venezuela. Cocaine? Less than one percent of cocaine entering the U.S. illegally comes from Venezuela.
Any claim that Trump wants to “restore democracy” there is equally absurd. Maduro may be gone, but the government he led is still in place.
January 3 was about trying to shore up the petrodollar. In America’s backyard, at least.
Old official narratives die hard.
Have you been watching silver and gold this past month?
Central banks the world over are buying as much as they can afford! Because the dollar is suffering the inevitable fate of fiat currencies. All the petrodollar system did was delay the inevitable. America’s national debt is pushing $38.7 trillion. The country’s total debt “obligations” are three times that.
They’ll never be paid.
What will replace the dollar? I’m glad you asked! My best guess at present: Technocrats will try to introduce a programmable, fully digital dollar, which will be heavily incentivized as the way out of larger economic immiseration and which peasants and peasant governments the world over will need digital ID to use.
Minneapolis continued.
Just four days after Maduro’s capture, an ICE agent shot and killed a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis. On January 24th, two Border Patrol agents shot and killed another U.S. citizen there.
The city has experienced severe unrest ever since, with unrest evident all across the country.
My argument is not that these two people, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were saints. Good was involved with a leftist group called ICE Watch, which follows and harasses ICE agents. A video surfaced depicting Pretti screaming at ICE agents, spitting at them, then kicking a taillight lose, after which he was confronted and forced to the ground but not arrested (which is a shame because he’d probably still be alive).
That said, my more detailed account of these cases — based on my best imperfect judgment of what happened — is here.
I’m not defending ICE or Border Patrol. They’ve carelessly pulled too many U.S. citizens into their dragnets, including some who had no involvement in the protests but were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like this woman (scroll to 0:50). One of several.
Department of Homeland Security officials, as I also noted in that earlier article, lied brazenly about these incidents. They concocted narratives about “domestic terrorists” that were easily refuted by multiple videos from those on the scene.
We conservatives favored deporting criminal illegal aliens, but what we’ve seen is sloppy and clumsy at best, and with abundant evidence of racial profiling at work, plays right into the hands of those screaming racist!, racist!, racist!
Now, as Rand Paul (one of the few remaining voices of reason left in the U.S. federal government) observes, ICE has a trust problem. It is up to DHS and ICE to restore trust. They have their work cut out for them, since trust is hard to build, easy to shatter, and far harder to rebuild once shattered.
So a plague on both houses! Seems to me, the unconstitutional DHS has recruited, en masse, many of society’s dregs, including more than a few sociopaths. (Immigration enforcement should never have been pulled under the DHS umbrella.)
I’ve no doubt there are insidious forces at work in Minneapolis, aiming to destabilize the place as much as possible. Some of these forces are well bankrolled and working through left wing outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy. They are using color revolution tactics.
Against the Technocrat-backed Trump administration?
The idea’s not crazy.
First, cultural leftists hated Trump from the get-go, possibly because he openly despised them and appealed to people (white MAGA males) who despised them.
Now, cultural leftists would destroy America to take Trump down, and his administration would lay waste to major institutions (e.g., Ivy League universities) to take the cultural left down.
I don’t think that’s the whole story, though.
Technocrats try to be precise, scientific thinkers and planners. Technocracy self-identifies as the “science of social engineering,” after all.
Trump has served them well, but in the final analysis, he’s erratic, unfocused, and unpredictable. I’m sure that makes Technocrats uncomfortable with him, which is why they got behind Silicon Valley / Peter Thiel schooled J.D. Vance as Trump’s VP. Vance proved to be a quick study and is very focused. Sure, it’s speculative, but I have to wonder if the billionaire Technocrat class’s support for Trump included, from the start, a “trap door” (maybe several) that could be used to get rid of him. Something in the Epstein files, perchance. Or possibly his involving the U.S. in another ill-conceived war of choice.
Vance, I suspect, will turn out to be their man of the future!
Greenland, Trump at the WEF, Norway, Etc.
I’d be remiss if I said nothing about how these have added to the geopolitical nightmare of the past month.
This will be a potpourri. Some of these are too bizarre to spend much time with, except to note that any one of them might eventually pull open one of those “trap doors.”
Trump has said repeatedly that the U.S. must gain full control over Greenland for “strategic national security and international security” purposes. This makes no sense to anyone who knows that the U.S. has had a base there since 1951, the Pituffik Space Base, which under the Greenland Defense Agreement of that year can be augmented at any time, the only condition presently being that Danish and Greenlander authorities are informed.
What capturing Greenland would do is align with Technocrat goals going back to the 1930s which involved pulling the whole of North America — including Greenland — under the umbrella of a North American Technate which would also extend through Central America through Panama, actually reaching Venezuela.
As I’ve observed, in the 1930s this was a wild fantasy. The technology to do it did not exist.
It does now.
It also aligns with the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy, which is to establish and maintain U.S. dominance in the entire Western hemisphere in the multipolar world superseding the “rules based international order” of so-called liberal democracy.
Although Trump told the World Economic Forum globalists he wouldn’t use force to take Greenland from Denmark, who knows if he’ll stay this course or change his mind again next week?
Speaking of that confab, the speech that garnered the most attention was Canada’s Mark Carney, speaking of the “rupture” we’re presently living through. Incidentally, the “Larry” whom he thanks in the first few seconds of that video is Larry Fink, CEO of what is arguably the world’s most powerful corporation, BlackRock as well as Klaus Schwab’s anointed successor.
As for the speech itself, my primary takeaway: globalism is not dead. It’s just adapting to a world in which the “rules based international order” narrative has collapsed. Carney, too, is a Technocrat and also a pragmatist.
This was an uncharacteristic confab, though, because of how Trump served as disruptor, even as he abruptly changed course on Greenland. His full speech is here; note that he was focused enough also to thank “Larry” within seconds of taking the podium.
Worth noting, also, might be Trump’s bizarre communiqué to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre. Here’s the full text (larger context here):
Dear Jonas:
Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.
I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States.
The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.
Thank you!
President DJT[5]
This gave many thoughtful observers (and not just those on the left) reasons to wonder about Trump’s fitness for office. It confused Norway’s government with the independent Nobel Committee based in Norway which had chosen Machado over him. The former has no control over the latter. Did Trump not remember that? It had been explained to him. Did he also not know that there are several “written documents” recognizing Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland?
Trump continues to rattle sabers against Iran: another thuggish government which I wouldn’t shed a tear if it fell. The U.S. pushing it, however, could further destabilize the entire region and risk a wider war that would be extremely dangerous if either Russia or China (or both) decided to prevent any effort by the U.S. to turn Iran into a vassal state.
Venezuela, Greenland, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East…. I’m reminded of a line in a movie, I don’t remember which one. The line went something like, “Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of a kingdom of idiots fights a war on twelve fronts.” Well, Trump isn’t up to twelve fronts … but he seems to be working on it!
Oh, one final thing: the unveiling of the Trump / Jared Kushner (Technocrat) “Board of Peace” which proposes to transform the Gaza Strip into what will amount to another playground for the superrich coupled with an industrial park revealing the real religion of the West these days: money. This dystopia (seen from the standpoint of us peasants for whom the almighty dollar is not our god) would be built on top of wrecked Palestinian land and destroyed communities. Would there be any place for Palestinians at all? I’ve seen moves to bring “Palestinian Technocrats” on board, in writings that used that exact phrase.
There will be little or no place for the rest who lived on that spot before the Israelis laid waste to it while killing over 70,000 of their number. I suppose it is possible that a few will be allowed to work for starvation wages cleaning the toilets and taking out the garbage.
So here we are, a little over one full year into a Trump 2.0 administration controlled by Technocrats and Zionists.
I can look out our bedroom window and see the areas of burnt forest and a few ruined homes on that hillside, not terribly far away. I can also open any reliable news site (assuming there are any left) and see a world threatened by metaphorical fires, most of them marked Made-in-the-U.S.A.!
Yes, yes, I know. Kamala Harris would have been equally disastrous; the disasters would be different ones, that’s all. We’re seeing the political system of the Western hemisphere’s dominant power unravel in front of us and thinking irrationally that we’re going to stop the Chinese and the Russians from doing as they please.
The idea of a (most likely manufactured) national emergency of an unprecedented nature, sufficient to suspend November’s elections, has occurred to a number of writers and observers.
That, of course, would lead to a really nightmarish scenario.
One fears that, in the immortal words of Bachman and Turner, we “ain’t seen nothing yet.”
_________________________
Steven Yates is a recovering ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. (Obtain his recent slim tract on the “wisdom” of obtaining such a degree here.)
He taught for more than 15 years total at several colleges and universities in the Southeastern U.S. He has authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012, he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: many of the problems in the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere.
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His cosmic horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) (written for the sheer fun of it) can be gotten here.
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This is powerful stuff. The parallel between the literal fires in your nieghborhood and the geopolitical ones burning globally is really striking. I lived through a wildfire evacuation a few years back and that feeling of helplessness stays with you. What gets me is how these global "fires" are being set intentionally by people who'll never feel the heat, kinda like ur point about the petrodollar system.