Tit for tat: The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier has advanced closer to Venezuela, which has responded in turn by assembling 200,000 troops, putting the whole military at the ready in case of an attack.
Of course, they don’t have much going for them, tech-wise, in the event of a conflict with the U.S.
“Venezuela is deploying weapons, including decades-old Russian-made equipment, and is planning to mount a guerrilla-style resistance or sow chaos in the event of a U.S. air or ground attack,” per a Reuters report—a “tacit admission of the…country’s shortage of personnel and equipment.”
The Navy said in a press release yesterday that the aircraft carrier and three warships crossed into the U.S. Southern Command’s jurisdiction, which includes Latin America (south of Mexico) and adjacent waters, the Caribbean Sea, and a portion of the Atlantic Ocean.
Now “the entire country’s military arsenal [has been placed] on full operational readiness,” said Venezuelan Defense Minister Padrino López. This includes “massive deployment of ground, aerial, naval, riverine and missile forces” totaling almost 200,000 troops.
“The shot clock has started,” Mark Cancian, a senior defense adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells The Washington Post, “because this is not an asset they can just keep there indefinitely. They have to use it or move it. And moving it would mean they are standing down.” TL;DR: It was moved to use against Venezuela. Aircraft carriers aren’t just moved around thoughtlessly, and there are only 11 total. They’ve previously been deployed during hot situations in the Middle East or when affairs with China heat up.
Since September, the U.S. military under President Donald Trump has killed 76 people in 19 strikes near Venezuela. Congress has attempted to curb Trump’s power to do so, but has repeatedly failed—and grown more discontent over the administration’s refusal to answer basic questions surrounding what evidence it has that the boats struck were in fact engaged in narcotrafficking.
Within Venezuela, there are plenty of doubts that the military is capable of providing much resistance at all in the event of a U.S. land strike. “Some unit commanders have even been forced to negotiate with local food producers to feed their troops because government supplies fall short,” two sources told Reuters. Basic military salaries are roughly $100 per month.
Other tactics don’t seem likely to work: “The guerrilla-style defense, which the government has termed ‘prolonged resistance’ and mentioned in broadcasts on state television, would involve small military units at more than 280 locations carrying out acts of sabotage and other guerrilla tactics.…The second strategy, called ‘anarchization,’ would use the intelligence services and armed ruling-party supporters to create disorder on the streets of capital Caracas and make Venezuela ungovernable for foreign forces, said one source with knowledge of defense efforts and another source close to the opposition.” (The military strategy is literally the meme “become ungovernable.”)
“We wouldn’t last two hours in a conventional war,” a Venezuelan source told Reuters.
Scenes from New York: “I cannot set forth a plan right now that takes money out of a system that relies on the fares of the buses and the subways,” said Governor Kathy Hochul on Saturday, referring to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s plan to make buses free, which would cost some $800 million annually. “But can we find a path to make it more affordable for people who need help? Of course we can.” Note that it already is affordable for people in need; weekly fares are capped at $17.
QUICK HITS
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The House might hold a vote today to decide whether to reopen the government. It has already passed the Senate, and if it passes the House, President Donald Trump has signaled he will sign it, ending the longest shutdown in history.
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“In 1967, only 5 percent of US families earned over $150,000 (inflation adjusted),” writes Jeremy Horpedahl. Now, “one-third of US families earn over $150,000.” He tacked on an addendum: “Several comments have asked how much of these trends can be explained by the rise of dual-income households. The answer is some, but not all of it, which I have written about before. Dual-income households were already the most common family structure by the 1980s. There hasn’t been an increase in total hours worked by married households since Boomers were in their 30s. You can explain some of the increase up until the Boomers by rising dual-income households, but this doesn’t explain the continued progress since the 1980s. And as Scott Winship and I have documented, even if you look just at male earnings, there has been progress since the 1980s.”
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But also consider, from writer Inez Stepman: “Yes, everyone knows electronics are cheaper than they were. Congrats. You know what isn’t cheaper: the actual basics of middle class American life you’re deriding. Housing, a decent education for your children that will set them up for success in life, healthcare for your family, and for those two-income households to pay for the first 3, childcare.”
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Neo is a “humanoid robot…intended to help out around the house, for the subscription price of $499 a month, or $20,000 to own an early version outright,” writes Leah Libresco Sargeant for Pirate Wires. “Early adopters, starting next year, will really get a two-for-the-price-of-one deal: a greyscale robot, and an anonymous tele-remote human operator, who puppets Neo from afar and watches you silently though [sic] its eyes. The company can’t master autonomous movement without a lot of training data, so they’re counting on enthusiasts to open their homes to their anonymous pilots.” But proceed with caution, warns Sargeant. What sounds like domestic deliverance may not be so: “It’s harder than the Neo’s creators would assume to neatly cleave off the parts of work that are annoying while keeping the meaningful parts.”
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“There are growing concerns within CBS News that [new Editor in Chief] Bari Weiss could gut or even disband the network’s Standards and Practices team,” reports The Independent, whose sources say Weiss complained about the division having “too much power.” Apparently, the head of the standards division resigned, and the network under Weiss disbanded the race and culture unit, “which advised on ‘context, tone and intention’ of news programming,” letting most of that team go. Weiss has standards, they just might not fully mesh with the standards used by that department.
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“I do not think that what afflicts America’s young today can be properly called a loneliness crisis,” writes Derek Thompson. “It seems more to me like an absence-of-loneliness crisis. It is a being-constantly-alone-and-not-even-thinking-that’s-a-problem crisis. Americans—and young men, especially—are choosing to spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people, because it has simply gotten too pleasurable to exist without them.”
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