patrick.net

This account from a Venezuelan security guard loyal to Nicolás Maduro is absolutely chilling—and it explains a lot about why the tone across Latin America suddenly changed.

Security Guard: On the day of the operation, we didn't hear anything coming. We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation. The next thing we saw were drones, a lot of drones, flying over our positions. We didn't know how to react.

Interviewer: So what happened next? How was the main attack?

Security Guard: After those drones appeared, some helicopters arrived, but there were very few. I think barely eight helicopters. From those helicopters, soldiers came down, but a very small number. Maybe twenty men. But those men were technologically very advanced. They didn't look like anything we've fought against before.

Interviewer: And then the battle began?

Security Guard: Yes, but it was a massacre. We were hundreds, but we had no chance. They were shooting with such precision and speed... it seemed like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute. We couldn't do anything.

Interviewer: And your own weapons? Didn't they help?

Security Guard: No help at all. Because it wasn't just the weapons. At one point, they launched something—I don't know how to describe it... it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.

Interviewer: And your comrades? Did they manage to resist?

Security Guard: No, not at all. Those twenty men, without a single casualty, killed hundreds of us. We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I've never seen anything like it. We couldn't even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.

Interviewer: So do you think the rest of the region should think twice before confronting the Americans?

Security Guard: Without a doubt. I'm sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States. They have no idea what they're capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They're not to be messed with.

Interviewer: And now that Trump has said Mexico is on the list, do you think the situation will change in Latin America?

Security Guard: Definitely. Everyone is already talking about this. No one wants to go through what we went through. Now everyone thinks twice. What happened here is going to change a lot of things, not just in Venezuela but throughout the region.

all our radar systems shut down without any explanation

About 2% of oil reserves are consumed each year, but about 0.75% in new reserves keeps being found each year.

I well remember that halcyon period in my childhood when government experts delivered the awful news that we were running out of oil. They said we might have a handful of remaining good years, and so the nation was forced by President Jimmy “the Nut” Carter to go onto gas rationing. This resulted in massive gas lines for consumers, and President Carter soon entering a new line of work. Yesterday, Fox-7 Austin reported, “Geological survey in Texas uncovers 1.6 billion barrels of oil.”

The ghastly gas lines of the 1970s were perhaps my first awakening to the deadly perils of experts.

In grade school, teachers taught gullible children the “fact” that oil was a “fossil fuel” that greedy dinosaurs made before they went extinct from climate change. Pretty soon, Ms. Skinner (grade 3) soberly instructed us that all the dinosaur oil was a “non-renewable resource” that would soon, any minute now, be completely drained— after which civilization would collapse (if, that is, the Soviets didn’t nuke us first).

So, Ms. Skinner explained, Democrat gas rationing just made sense. Plus overpopulation!

Now, 40 years on, there’s more oil than ever, and drillers are finding it far deeper than the deepest parts of the fossil record. In other words, oil is not brontosauruses that melted into goo. The now-accepted fact is —and I am not making this up— scientists don’t know where oil comes from. They’re baffled! And —I am not making this up, either— it comes back. Texas oilfields that shut down in the 1980s because they ran out of black gold are being reopened now and are flowing like rivers.

Basically, and unsurprisingly, the experts were completely wrong about everything they assured us were facts about oil. Oil is, apparently, a renewable resource.

Patrick says

all our radar systems shut down without any explanation

I wonder if this was coordinated by Maduro insiders who helped the US. I can see how even higher ups would tire of Maduro and his Cubans destroying Venezuela.

Oil is, apparently, a renewable resource.

Patrick says

all our radar systems shut down without any explanation

I wonder if this was coordinated by Maduro insiders who helped the US. I can see how even higher ups would tire of Maduro and his Cubans destroying Venezuela.

Patrick says

Oil is, apparently, a renewable resource.

Maybe not "renewable, but more plentiful that previously thought, especially with improved extraction techniques.

I always wonder what will happen to our continents when those holes deep down get too big?

FortWayneHatesRealtors says

I always wonder what will happen to our continents when those holes deep down get too big?

Scale. The deepest oil well isn't even 10 miles. The Earth is about 8,000 miles thick. Thos like worrying that a mosquito will plug his straw in deep enough to suck from your liver.

The deepest man-made hole on Earth is the Kola Superdeep Borehole (SG-3), located on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia near the Norwegian border.

It reached a maximum true vertical depth of 12,262 meters (approximately 40,230 feet, or about 7.6 miles). This record was achieved in 1989 during a Soviet scientific drilling project that began in 1970.

Drilling stopped in the early 1990s (with final abandonment around 1995) due to extremely high temperatures (around 180°C or 356°F, much hotter than anticipated), which caused equipment issues and made the rock behave more like plastic. Funding shortages after the Soviet Union's collapse also played a role.