Let's Keep The Tin Foil Hats Off for Now
MEMORANDUM
TO: Fellow Pattern-Recognizers and Historically Traumatized Observers
FROM: Someone Who Also Remembers the 1980s
RE: Let's Keep The Tin Foil Hats Off for Now
DATE: October 24, 2025
Alrightey. A carrier group heads south, boats get struck in Caribbean waters, a Colombian president gets sanctioned, and those of us who stayed awake during the Iran-Contra hearings feel that old familiar tingle. The one that says: "I've seen this movie before, and it doesn't end well for anyone who isn't Halliburton."
Now I say this as someone who just spent an embarrassing amount of time connecting dots on a mental cork board—we need to keep the aluminum millinery in the Costco cart for now. Not because the suspicions are crazy. They're not. They're actually pretty reasonable given, you know, gestures vaguely at the entire 20th century. But because calling it early doesn't make us right; it just makes us unfalsifiable, which is the intellectual equivalent of being THAT guy at parties.
Yes, Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves. Yes, there's a carrier group where carriers don't normally loiter. Yes, "counter-narcotics operation" has been diplomatic jazz-hands for "we'd prefer a different government" since roughly 1983. All true! But also: narcotrafficking out of Venezuela is genuinely a documented problem, carriers do more than one thing at once, and sometimes a military deployment is both a deterrent signal and an enforcement operation without requiring a Langley brainstorming session to explain it.
The smarter move—and by golly, I'm tired of having to be the smart one about this—is to watch what happens next. Do interdiction numbers actually track with the hardware deployed, or does the math stay fuzzy? Does the mission quietly expand from boats to infrastructure, from "maritime security" to something that rhymes with "regime change"? Do energy concessions start appearing in the fine print of any future negotiations? Do regional players—Brazil, CARICOM, the usual crowd—treat this like legitimate law enforcement, or do they start using words like "encirclement"?
Those are the signals that tell us whether we're watching counter-narcotics with a side of strategic opportunism, or strategic opportunism with a counter-narcotics garnish. Currently, it could go either way, and the exhausting part is that we have to sit here and wait for the pattern to finish revealing itself, knowing full well that by the time it does, the people who should be paying attention will have moved on to the next thing.
The other reason to hold off on the foil? Because when—if—the pattern becomes undeniable, we want to be the people who called it based on evidence, not gut rumbles. There's a world of difference between "I told you this looked like an oil grab and here's why the data now supports that" and "I knew it was an oil grab because these things are always oil grabs." One is analysis. The other is just exhaustion cosplaying insight.
So let's stay skeptical, keep our eyes on the crossing points between military, legal, and economic pressure, and resist the urge to narrate faster than the facts arrive. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme, and sometimes the rhyme scheme takes a verse and a chorus to reveal itself. Which means we're stuck doing the least glamorous work imaginable: paying attention while pretending we might still be surprised.
In the meantime, if Facebook tries to sell you a "Sic Semper Tyrannis" t-shirt, maybe just close the app. That's not analysis. That's self-care.
TL;DR: We're probably not wrong to be suspicious. But let's be the kind of suspicious that can still distinguish between pattern recognition and prophecy—even when it's really, really tempting not to.