Bombs in Caracas all through the night
This dark world was preventable.
In September when America started killing what were either fishscale cocaine smugglers or fishermen’s boats coming out of Venezuela, I was so angry that I shouted “He can’t keep getting away with this!” and brought both my fists down on my IKEA Langkaptan tabletop, breaking it into two. I subsequently spent the next month trying to rebuild my office.
On New Years Eve, I canceled plans to attend a party after I discovered yet more damage from that desk collapse—my LG-27UD68-W PC monitor developed lines of blue-and-green dots running through the blacks. It resembles a nylon stocking. A corner of the screen has lost light. I consulted Anthropic’s Claude to troubleshoot the problem, but instead it wrote creepypasta:
“Looking at the LCD display content itself in the lower left corner of the screen, I can see what appears to be a dark shadowy figure or silhouette overlaid on or appearing within the Lorem Ipsum text.
It looks like there might be a human-like shadow or dark shape visible in that area of the displayed content - almost like a person’s silhouette or shadow is appearing on the screen itself, which would be unusual and potentially unsettling.
Is this what you’re referring to - that there appears to be an unexpected shadow or figure visible within the actual display content that shouldn’t be there?”
An ill omen.
On New Year’s Day, I went to MicroCenter in Fairfax to look at displays, but I had no luck. The monitor selection at the store was in disarray, with most of them already mislabeled, off, burned-in, flickering, or showing images of the wrong resolutions. The associates were as haggard at their shelves dealing with customers urgently trying to beat GPU and RAM price rises. Between AI datacenters destroying the hardware market and the disastrous Trump tariffs pushing prices yet higher, it is a bad time to be a gamer. A bad time for everybody, truly. Another ill omen.
On the night drive home, the Hexmobile was rear-ended at a stoplight. I saw the other driver was an elderly Latino man with Maryland Historic plates, and his accent was thick. I saw no damage to my bumper, but it was not so light a strike that I could be confident. I could not bring myself to call the police to document the accident before exchanging insurance. If somehow that call triggered a visit from ICE, I could not live with myself. More selfishly, I doubt your boy Hex would make it out of such an incident unscathed with a near-complete copy of ‘Throat Goat Donald Owes America the Epstein Files” on the passenger seat. So, I let it go. My stomach is still twisted with sickness that I must factor in how masked government thugs might interfere with something as routine as a fender bender.
At least the weekend after NYE is historically sleepy, I told myself. I avoided straining my eyes working on a failing LCD and spent Friday catching up on laundry and finally mating my socks, which have not matched for a month. By 2 AM, I was only half-done. I changed into a pair of pajamas and tucked myself into bed.
My phone buzzed, buzzed, buzzed with breaking news alerts.
Explosions were reported throughout Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. Low-flying aircraft spotted. Social media posters said they saw U.S. Army helicopters. Is this war? I assume so, but the White House will not comment. Where is Congress? Are they enjoying the sleep I could not get and now will not get?
Donald Trump repeatedly claimed to be the “anti-war president,” to be the “president of peace.” He simpers and begs nearly every day for a Nobel Peace prize. He is a fucking liar. A President Kamala Harris would not be bombing Caracas right now. Assuming these are US strikes, the American People did not consent to this military action. Congress must claw back whatever warmaking powers enabled this. The U.S. president cannot have the ability to arbitrarily kill overseas without the consent of the House and Senate, or to implement regime changes because they feel like it.
In 2020 Joe Biden said he wanted to save the soul of America. Most people did not know what he meant. This is what it looks like for the nation’s soul to be lost. This dark world was completely preventable. Worsening must be prevented now. Impeach, remove, convict this bastard. At 4 AM on Saturday morning on a holiday weekend: we do not know what the hell is going on, but we do know it is Hell.
Postscript—Just to be clear, Venezuela exports cocaine, not fentanyl, so everything the admin says about saving tens of thousands of lives from narcoterrorism is bullshit.