Fossil

Empire

Najwan Abdul Wahab

Jan 14, 2026

Foreknowledge,

foreskin,

NEVER feeling,

OKAY again,

suffocating,

rogue regime,

barrel of a,

gun, gun, GUN!

More than 100 children have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire of early October. That is roughly one girl or boy killed every day. During a ceasefire. Life in Gaza remains suffocating. Survival is still conditional. Whilst the bombings and shooting have slowed during the ceasefire, they have not stopped.

What the world now calls “calm” would be considered a crisis anywhere else. Unfortunately, the ceasefire has had an unintended effect: Palestinian children in Gaza have disappeared from view.

Since the ceasefire UNICEF has recorded reports of at least 60 boys and 40 girls killed in the Gaza Strip. The 100 figure only reflects incidents where sufficient details have been available to record, so the actual number of Palestinian children killed is expected to be higher. Hundreds of children have been wounded.

I sat with one such victim a few days ago. Nine-year-old Abid Al Rahman was collecting wood with his friends in Khan Younis when an airstrike hit. Shrapnel ripped into his eye —that shard of explosive metal is still lodged there.”

At the same time, as strikes continue, severe restrictions remain on many essentials in Gaza – from some essential medical supplies to cooking gas, fuel to parts for lifesaving water and sanitation systems.

Unicef | Jan 13, 2026

HAVE A SEAT!

cheers

TOTAL!

infection!

inflection!

intention!

invention!

applause

TOTAL!

fabrication!

retreat,

defeat,

when YOU,

FAIL,

this BIG,

UNITED STATES,

of a$$holes,

the word,

SORRY,

will,

NEVER,

EVER,

be,

GOOD,

ENOUGH,

merry hell,

one moment,

go on..

have a lick,

dumb dick,

moment again

“Some of these charges that they’re trying to put on him are just so absurd, like the charge that he’s in possession of machine guns as the head of a state, right? Like, it just exposes the total absurdity of it. So, in announcing the operation, Trump made it pretty clear that his motivation, or one of the operative motivations from the point of view of the US government in engaging in this, was to recover US corporate claims to Venezuela’s oil.

I mean, this is pretty interesting, right? Despite all of the propaganda aimed at calling Maduro an authoritarian dictator in the Western press, the word democracy didn’t appear once in Trump’s remarks, and they were even dismissive in the press conference about the prospect of holding new elections. Now, this is a pretty big reversal from the Bush administration’s insistence on regime change in Iraq, which was dressed up in language about democracy, and that the resource conquest side of it was only this welcome side effect.

But the oil story is maybe not quite so straightforward, right? Venezuela is often described as having the largest oil reserves in the world. But as many commentators have pointed out, the crude oil in Venezuela is extremely dense, making it very costly to extract and refine.

Trump even said that he was willing to subsidize oil companies going in, he was willing to reimburse them, which would cost even more money. It’s about the message more than anything, that Venezuelan oil is American oil, even if it costs the United States more resources than is actually beneficial to them.

And I also think they’re thinking more in the medium and long term, right? Yes, immediately it might cost them something, but we’re talking about the country with the largest reserves of oil. We’re talking about a hundred year supply of oil.

So they’re thinking a hundred years down the future to know that, well, as long as we can continue to have control over these resources, then we’ll be able to experiment and affect the stability in other parts of the world.

And I think that’s really critical because you have to kind of read between the lines of what the Trump administration is messaging about this. Because what they’re saying is that there is a profit incentive, that there is a kind of logic by which Venezuela’s oil is going to pay for itself. And that’s the part that doesn’t make sense economically, right.

There’s not kind of immediate profit to draw from this. There’s not an immediate corporate incentive. But I like the way that you framed it because thinking about it in terms of like the geoeconomics, of it, of creating this kind of oil empire where US has dominance over production itself in the event of longer-term geopolitical conflict, then the kind of imperial logic of it starts to come to the surface because, yes, maybe bringing more production online keeps prices low.

Maybe that’s what they want. If they don’t want Russia, Iran, other oil producing states in the East to be able to leverage their control over oil prices by cutting production. Then, also, yes, in anticipating a potential conflict where oil in the East is cut off, having that hemispheric control over fossil production, like creating a fossil empire, makes sense as a medium to longer term strategy.”