Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes

Drugs? No. War?! No, words have meanings and that's not what "war" means.

Ignoring diplomacy? Are you accusing the US of ignoring diplomacy, because that's the only half ways reasonable interpretation.

This is weak and pathetic misinformation. I guess it will take a few days before the propaganda machine gets going to try to justify this gigantic waste of taxpayer money and pointless destruction. Hopefully the pros get involved because this is just sad.

There is a science fiction book "The inhabited island" ("Prisoners of power"?) by A. and B. Strugatsky. In one of episodes they try to describe the feeling of being in a very human-looking but also completely alien culture (a different planet with humanoid inhabitants). So they describe how a group of people works out a credentials/paperwork situation (they need to move a prisoner from one place to another) but literally, as these actions are seen by the prisoner who does not understand the meaning. "This one gave that one a yellow rectangle but that one refused to take it and said something in a raised voice."

I always remember that episode as I see headlines like that.

If you’re tracking signals around geopolitical events, there’s a quirky one a few folks like to watch: the Pentagon Pizza Index. It’s a real-time dashboard that monitors pizza shop activity near the Pentagon as an informal indicator of unusual late-night activity. Historically people have pointed to spikes in food orders before major operations as a sort of low-tech OSINT signal. https://www.pizzint.watch/

Obviously this isn’t hard intelligence — correlation isn’t causation — but when combined with more grounded indicators (verified reports, diplomatic channels, satellite data) it can be a piece of the broader picture. Just a fun example of how people try to find patterns in publicly available data.

You would expect them to have started baking the pizza inside the pentagon already by now :)

It's explicitly about oil, right?

Wikipedia [1]:

> Andrew McCabe quotes Trump as saying of Venezuela "That’s the country we should be going to war with, they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”

> In June 2023, Trump said at a press conference in North Carolina, "When I left, Venezuela was about to collapse. We would have taken over it, we would have kept all that oil."

PBS [2]:

> "We want it back," he added. "They took our oil rights — we had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_invasio...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-we-want-it-back-...