Dusty Gulch Gazette Special Dispatch

“The Art of the Iceworm Deal: From Venezuela to Orangeland”

By Roderick (Whiskers) McNibble - Rodent Correspondent-at-Large
January 7, 2026

Ah, dear readers - it’s me, Roderick “Whiskers” McNibble, scurrying back from the cheese cellar with the latest scoop on this icy saga. My whiskers have been twitching overtime, and not just because the Dusty Dingo Pub hasn’t cleaned behind the fireplace since 1994.

Yesterday -  mark it down -  the Big Orange Cheese himself doubled down harder than a walrus on thin ice.

Fresh from that Venezuelan escapade -  where U.S. forces swooped in like a bald eagle on a " defenseless "  fish and nabbed Maduro -  President Trump leapt aboard Air Force One and declared:

“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security!”

He even grumbled that Denmark isn’t pulling its weight, adding only “one more dog sled” to Arctic defense.

Money Still Makes the World Go Around - And Boy, Has It Gotten Wilder

When you control the currency everyone must use, you don’t need tanks on every border -  the money does the conquering for you.. Back in 2021, I argued that money doesn’t just grease the gears of civilisation - it controls them. Not just any money, either. Real money. The kind measured in ounces, not printed in truckloads.

I warned that the global system’s crown jewel was the petrodollar: the rule that oil could only be traded in US dollars. That arrangement kept America king of the hill, let Washington run giant deficits without collapsing, and ensured that the rest of the world would toe the line.

Mess with that system, and you get a lesson. Saddam Hussein tried to sell his oil in euros. Muammar Gaddafi floated a gold-backed dinar. Both ended up out of the picture - permanently.

I wrote back then that if the world ever moved back toward real value - gold instead of IOUs - the whole fiat charade would be exposed.

Well, here we are. And the cracks are turning into chasms.

From Floppy Disks to the Cyber Monster: How the Internet Changed Us

It all really began with my boys in the basement.

I didn’t know them, not properly. There was no glossy “About Us” page, no mission statement written by a marketing department, no stock photos of smiling executives with their arms folded. Just a small overseas outfit that felt as though a handful of clever young blokes had commandeered a few servers, plugged them in somewhere underground, and decided to see what they could build.

They answered emails. Actual emails. If something broke, someone fixed it. If you had a problem, you weren’t funnelled into a system...you spoke to a person. Even then, I sensed it mattered that there were names at the other end, not departments. That if something went wrong, responsibility lived somewhere human.

You weren’t funnelled into a system -  you spoke to a person.

At the time, it didn’t feel remarkable. It was simply how things were.

The internet itself felt like that too.

It is one of the great temptations of modern geopolitics: to stare at the latest crisis while a dozen others quietly simmer in the background.

Right now, Venezuela dominates headlines for many in the West  -  and I understand why.

Energy security, regional instability, great‑power manoeuvring and ideological fault lines all collide there. But while eyes are drawn westward, other flashpoints remain very much on the boil, and among the most dangerous of them is South Asia.

Kashmir did not cool simply because attention drifted.

A Flashpoint That Never Went Away

When this article was first written in late 2024, the argument was straightforward:

Kashmir is not merely a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, but a pressure point where history, religion, water security, nuclear deterrence and regional alliances converge.

That assessment has not weakened. It has hardened.

When America “Runs” a Country, the World Should Pay Attention

As 2026 stumbles out of the gate, we’re told not to panic. Nothing to see here. Just the United States announcing that American forces will temporarily run the country.

Temporarily, of course. That word has an impressive history.

The problem with pretending the world is rules-based is that eventually someone stops pretending. The U.S. seizure of Venezuela isn’t just a regional intervention -  it’s a declaration that the polite fictions of global diplomacy have expired. What follows won’t stay neatly contained in South America.

President Trump justified the move on narco-terrorism, election interference, and the need to secure Venezuela’s oil. Fair enough - if you accept that the world’s largest proven oil reserves just happen to sit beneath one of the most corrupt regimes on earth, and Washington suddenly developed a conscience.- China, unsurprisingly, is furious. Sovereignty, international law, all that jazz. Beijing is very big on sovereignty - particularly other people’s.

But if you think this is just about Venezuela, you’re missing the point entirely.

This isn’t a one-off. It’s a signal flare.

There are moments in history when telling the truth plainly becomes dangerous -  not because the truth has changed, but because power has decided it must be controlled.

We like to believe those moments belong to distant lands or darker eras, ruled by uniforms and jackboots. Yet they have a habit of returning dressed in softer language, justified by good intentions, and enforced not with rifles but regulations. When authorities begin deciding what may be said “for the common good,” truth does not vanish. It adapts. It learns to move quietly. It hides.

America learned this lesson during World War II, when one of its most decisive weapons was not forged from steel, but from language.

In 1942, as the war in the Pacific raged and Japanese codebreakers proved alarmingly adept, the United States turned to an unlikely solution: young Navajo Marines, speaking an ancient, complex language that outsiders neither understood nor respected.