Derek Maine
The United States military, in a brazen act, swooped into Venezuela under cover of night, and extracted the President and his wife, extraditing them by force to U.S. soil and upending the country’s political order.
Dear Leader speaks to the American people on the Venezuelan regime change, “we’re going to run the country.”
1.8.26
High end sex workers were stranded in St. Barth’s over New Years Eve after air travel was shut down with the Venezuelan invasion. Yesterday, in Minneapolis, in America, an ICE agent shot and killed a citizen. Three shots, all of them unnecessary. Videos from multiple angles released by citizens on social media immediately. Dear Leader tells us what we see is not what we see, and his army of mouthpieces denigrate the woman, a mother and poet. America has seized Russian and Venezuelan oil tankers and are in control of the country’s massive oil supply. Dear Leader says he is setting up an offshore fund to place the proceeds from the sale of oil and he will decide how to disperse. He also tells the New York Times the only limits to his power are his mortality. The President of Venezuela and his wife are housed in a jail in New York, along with Tekashi 6ix9ine, Puff Daddy, the CEO killer, and Sam Bankman Fried.
Our opinions are being scraped and collected, indexed and recorded.
Our facts are fed to us.
Dear Leader cedes Taiwan – “He (Xi) considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing,”
1.9.26
A fifth oil tanker out of Venezuela is seized by the United States. Protests in Iran. China, Russia, Iran, and South Africa conducting joint naval drills. More federal agents descend upon Minnesota to deal with the protestors.
1.10.26
What’s pathetic is a 43 year old man addicted to his phone. An embarrassing, weak mind. This is what I possess. It’s a long story but the short of it is I was hired to cover a war but too terrified to get on a plane, and so now I live in the King’s Motel at the edge of a downtown mid-Atlantic city where I drink non-alcoholic beers, smoke weed constantly, take a menagerie of pills to try and match the lighting, and follow a war, a global new world order forming, and a domestic stew of chaos and cruelty on a 5.8 inch screen which also monitors my every move and sends every word and phrase to a data center in Scottsdale, Arizona to feed to the large language models.
Also, the screen affects my mood. The screen enrages me, delights me, bores me, all at its whim. I cede control to the digital muck and invisible forces. I order takeout. I order more nonalcoholic beers and two packs of Marlboro Lights to be delivered to room 26. I turn my screen onto a protest in Minnesota. I turn my screen to Iran.
But today I am making a change. I am buying stamps.
The editors at Farewell Transmission have agreed to accept my monthly column by post.
Yes, I will leave my room today for rolling papers and stamps. It must be done. I have labeled it an action item.
How I got here is irrelevant. My ex wife is in Baltimore. Irrelevant. I am here. This is what matters. I am here and this is the present. Very few of my old soldiers are left. I have alienated. Misfired. Spent myself. This is the present, tense.
I can count on my man in the statehouse. I can count on the courier. I can count on my editor. What’s left? Captain Jason and His Riches cannot set sail in international waters in these conditions. Likely he’s left drug running behind and is taking families out snorkeling in the Keys. Also, what else do I need? Three solid men are sufficient. Three solid men are more solid men than most have in their corner.
Dear Leader tells the world we back Iranian protestors, and warns Iran if they shoot innocent protesters then we will shoot. In Minnesota, meanwhile, protestors are deranged leftists who hate their country. We shoot them, “graveyard dead.”
1.11.26
America first but not Americans. Americans who do not side with Dear Leader are deranged, scum of the earth, ungrateful for all He and America has given them. America first. America is what I say it is, the adjunct professor and Dear Leader assure us. The television here at the motel is all fucked up and the night manager is a psychotic so I do allow myself ten minutes on the phone to peruse the war. Fifteen tops.
It’s my fucking job to bleed into the zeitgeist. It’s my fucking job to go insane.
I’m in every moment at once.
1.18.26
Because what the world needs is another stenographer of human atrocities.
Would be better to be a typist at the flower shop.
Would be if I had something revelatory to say then all of this would come together. We are not in an age of coming together. These are not coming together times. These are the days of resentment and isolation, obsession with self, and war. These are wartimes we are living in. Revelations in war are hard to come by, and I am existing while it is happening and I am existing right along with you and wondering what the fuck is going on myself. I have an opinion about how we got here. I have an idea. But it doesn’t mean shit, isn’t worth shit. My ideas got me here, renting a room for the foreseeable future at the King’s Motel.
I see the meanness every day. It stays with me, vibrational, unhealthy.
I don’t even know what a column is or how to do it. Probably this is not how.
Dear Leader initiated a trade war with Europe to try and take Greenland peacefully, through economic pressures. New geopolitical world orders, while they are remaking themselves, unfurl quickly and then all at once.
I am not in the best shape to cover it. I am likely not the man for the job. I see it through screens like so many others. It turns people into something else entirely, divorced from reality. Divorced from several things actually.
I allow myself fifteen minutes a day on the screens to ingest news of the wars, if I’m a good boy, and it takes me the rest of the day to swallow it.
I am in less control of where this goes than an author can usually stomach, and the events are out of even my man in the statehouse’s control.
I found my editor at the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike. He had bits of fish sticks in his beard. He refuses payment and explains we will “tackle the copy editing on a Disney cruise – it’s how I do things”
1.21.26
And they will turn against their own people, and some people will cheer.
My grandfather was a farmer and a cattle man, fought the Germans in WWII. I am addicted to designer sunglasses and benzos.
The dark fleet of oil transfers, providing 1/5th of the world’s oil supply illicitly avoiding American sanctions against Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, has been decimated since Maduro’s arrest and the latest American asserted dominance over the western hemisphere. Back to the warm water ports. Ships registering in nations with friendly maritime laws. Flying under a false flag. Sometimes not registering at all. Stopping in the middle of the ocean to transfer the oil to a better painted ship.
More CS gas is released on American citizens in Minnesota by the occupying federal force. Indiana wins the college football championship. Adoption of AI is slowing, plateauing, and suddenly the Microsoft CEO is saying if usage doesn’t pick up then the energy required to run the machines will be a catastrophic waste, without purpose. He didn’t say that last part exactly. He said it, just not as well. Catastrophic, without purpose. Doesn’t this define the age? Although I suppose the purpose is always and everywhere the hoarding of resources. How long ago has it been since Microsoft bought Three Mile Island? The first year of the war I think, to power their ambitious, needy machines.
1.22.26
The widening gap between the wealthy and everyone else. The nihilistic death rattle. The feeling of no prospects, no future. The screen. The guns the dating pool the lack of human connection. The microplastics in our guts. The storms, floods, fires. The hoarding of wealth. The fear. The flippancy, the loss of respect for human life. The sitting ducks. The ice caps. The financialization of every difference of opinion. The divide. The tearing apart of community. The lack of faith. The godlessness of it all. The spiritual decay. The troops on the ground. The disrespect. The airing of grievances. The decommissionings. The revenge tour.
“Revenge for what,” Wyatt Earp asks Doc Holliday at the Hooker Ranch.
“For being born.”
1.24.26
They’ve killed again. The regime has sent its soldiers into our cities to kill, capture, and contain.
What’s coming is coming, they used to say. It’s here.
Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission
Editor’s note on the Venezuela job:
More details have emerged about the Cuban detachment, composed of 20 or so mid-to-senior level members of the Ministry of the Interior. Most notably, Col. Humberto Alfonso Roca (67), head of Fidel and Raul’s personal security in Havana. It is also reported that a small number of Maduro’s personal guards were from the Avispas Negras (Black Wasps), Cuba’s elite Special Forces unit.
Initial estimates were up to 100 dead in the operation, but unconfirmed numbers from Venezuelan and Cuban officials hint past the century mark: 83 Venezuelan and 32 Cuban (military personnel) dead, and an unknown number of casualties.
The remains of Cuba’s “fallen unit” were repatriated to Havana, where all 32 received full military honors. Raul Castro and current Pres. Miguel Diaz-Canel were said to have overseen the ceremony.