GREENSHINES IS A MAGAZINE FOR CITY BOYS AND A GENTLEMEN'S CLUB.

GREENSHINES.COM is written from Hong Kong by Israel Greenshines, the last hero of the Internet. GREENSHINES is a publication for gentlemen, and it has been online since 1998. GREENSHINES receives between 120,000 and 150,000 visits every day. If you don't want to miss anything I publish, you can receive Greenshines in your email. I would do so if I weren't the one writing here. I mean, if I weren't the one writing and sending the newsletters and I came across this website, I would want to receive whatever they were going to send me.

users online: 13,649 people online by | email: israel@greenshines.com

The man in the photo is former Prince Andrew. He is sitting in the back seat of a Range Rover, leaving a police station after being detained for 12 hours. His face shows that he is scared, but at the end of the day, it is just a photo, a split second of an expression.

Former Prince Andrew was arrested today on suspicion of having sent confidential British business reports to Jeffrey Epstein in 2010, amid his longstanding friendship with him.

In the image, Andrés tries to lie down in the back seat of the Range Rover to avoid being seen by the crowd of press gathered at the police station, but a Reuters photographer, Phil Noble, got "the shot."

In a statement, King Charles, his brother, said: "The law must take its course." In other words, they're going to throw him down the well if necessary. What surprises me is that they arrested him for confidential business reports, and not for raping anyone.

Call me skeptical, but I don't quite believe this whole story about Jeffrey Epstein, the minors, etc. In fact, if he had been arrested for raping a minor or whatever, it would be like confirming the whole story that no one has yet confirmed after I don't know how many years, and that's not what happened.

In the Epstein case, there are photos in which nothing can be seen, a cardboard temple painted with blue and white stripes, a lot of censored text, accusations against celebrities and among celebrities, and evidence of absolutely nothing. On the other hand, his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, appeared the other day with a face that I would swear is not hers, invoking the Fifth Amendment when responding to questions from the U.S. House Oversight Committee. I'll leave the video here too, in case you haven't seen it.

This afternoon, Alex Jones said on Twitter that the pandemic was the work of Bill Gates, the Rockefellers, and Jeffrey Epstein.

Are there really any Rockefellers still alive? I mean, any who are still relevant. I'm asking without any ulterior motives; I genuinely don't know.

May God bless you.

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

Everything in this video was created using AI. The voices, the song, the lyrics, the music, the images in the video. None of this ever happened.
The video: https://greenshines.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/todo-es-mentira.mp4

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

Social media was a simple idea at first. You created a profile, added your friends, and from there you could see what they were posting, what they were doing, whatever. Easy. The idea of blogs was more or less the same. The blogger wasn't necessarily your friend, but they posted their stuff and you went to see it, that's all. It worked well, there were no complaints.

But in thirty years, things change. The internet used to be a place where only a few people with a specific interest would go, but today it is filled with all kinds of people. All normal people are now on the internet, and there is no room for so much trash; it doesn't fit and it overflows. Until now, the masses had not had the opportunity to give us their opinions on a large scale, and we had no idea what that could turn into. We had to find a way to sort through the mountain of crap that "ordinary" people were uploading to the internet. The ideas, the photos, the insults, the abuse ( Juan Ramón Badillo comes to mind right now, for whatever reason), the overwhelming amount of garbage.

Facebook tried to control the chaos by hiring interns... at first they hired Americans, but I read somewhere that many ended up committing suicide, literally, because of what they had to see, so they started looking for people in India. Teams of Indians censoring people on Facebook. We didn't know Indians in 2008, we didn't know what was going on in India, now it's a bit laughable to hire them to keep order and cleanliness. So I imagine that's how the concept of the algorithm came about, as a response to the overwhelming failure of Indians to keep the trash on the internet at bay.

That's how they came up with the algorithm... Which makes sense on paper. A kind of robot that uses parameters you invent to filter through mountains of junk and decide what to highlight and what to hide. You can program it to hide insults, or to put the things you find valuable at the top so they don't get lost in the ocean of irrelevant posts. What a great idea.

It was fine for the first fifteen minutes until, like all new technologies, they decided to use it directly for evil. To censor people's opinions, promote communism, applaud all vices. I don't think those who implemented the algorithms knew in advance how malleable crowds are, how hungry normal people are for visibility and approval, and it got out of hand. Ten years of implementing the algorithm and hiding normal people while praising anyone who was even remotely demonic resulted in the crowd transforming. Everyone is obese, gay, transgender, covered in tattoos, with dyed hair, and getting four vaccines at a time. People still don't realize that the decade of "wokism" is nothing more than the decade of the "algorithm." The algorithm was the tool.

In ten years, the technology behind the algorithm has advanced significantly. X (Twitter for friends) made its algorithm code open source so that people could see everything, and the criteria of the algorithms is remarkable; things have changed. If before it was enough to have the right opinion and not say anything out of line to be rewarded with visibility, that is no longer enough. The landscape in 2026 is different. The previous ideology has now given way to what really matters: money. Algorithms only give visibility to users who keep people's attention within the platform and who bring people from other platforms to see what they have posted on this one. They measure it with arbitrary parameters: how many people clicked, how many stopped scrolling to read it, how many responded, where did those people come from?

You get points for all the interactions you have within the platform... for interacting in the replies to tweets from larger accounts, replying to everyone who comments below what you've said, and above all for bringing people from other platforms to comment on Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube. That's the only way you can get visibility on Twitter. It doesn't matter if you have something interesting to say; if you don't juggle on the street like those who beg for money at traffic lights in South America, they won't even show it to your followers.

In Miami, I've seen how they pay people to stand outside restaurants and invite you in... they stop you on the street to invite you into a restaurant, they're like human pop-ups, they literally harass you. And that's what they want you to do, go to Reddit or Instagram to beg for visits to your Twitter account or go on Twitter to convince them to go see your photos on Instagram, while at the same time liking Instagram posts, replying to posts from other accounts on Twitter, and writing very communist things in comments on Reddit posts. I don't have time for that, I have things to do beyond working for other people's websites. So I set out to find platforms that DON'T HAVE AN ALGORITHM and came to the conclusion that there are only two: Telegram and email. So that's where I'll be. On my new Telegram and through the usual newsletter.

My new Telegram account: El Próximo Post(The Next Post), the name I've given the account, is solid, in my opinion, and in my long-standing newsletter, El Newsletter: https://elnewsletter.com, which I'm not sure if I've mentioned or not in any of those sites I've been trying out by mistake, we reached 2,000,000 subscribers a couple of months ago.

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

If you grew up with Naruto, you will surely remember Silhouette, which was the 16th intro in Naruto Shippuden. Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, I was trying to make a living in Greenshines when Naruto started in 2002 and I didn't have time to watch it, literally. The thing is, Silhouette was sung by a band called Kana Boon, a Japanese rock band. The Japanese will never be remembered for how well they sing, but there are songs that, even though the singer sings terribly, stick in people's heads, like this one, which is considered one of the best anime intro songs.

In 2019, Kana Boon had a rough time. They had internal problems, whatever that means, and one of their members, Yūma Meshida, disappeared and attempted suicide. Understand me, I had no idea about this. I knew the song, yes, of course, but nothing else. The thing is, I found out today that Kana-Boon is back with two new members in the band and 2.9 million views on YouTube, and since I still like the song, I said to myself, I'm going to put it here on Greenshines while I think about the next post, my new channel on Telegram.

Kana Boon, Silhouette - Naruto Shippuden op.16 -> The Music Video

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

A few days ago, I installed Clawdbot, a personal AI assistant that lives on your computer and to which you can give access to practically everything. I spent hours playing with it, which flew by, but then I got scared and thought it would be better to delete it. This is my story with Clawdbot.

If you don't know what it is, let me explain: Clawdbot is like ChatGPT, but useful because instead of having it in a browser window to talk to it and ask for opinions, you install it directly on your computer and it can access everything you have on it. If you give it access to your email, for example, it can open it, read what you've received, and notify you if there's anything important, or if you ask it to, it can delete all the spam, to give you an example.

You can install it on your computer if it is a Mac or on a remote server running Linux.

On paper, it seems great. When I had ChatGPT and imagined what could be done in the future, this is exactly what I imagined. I thought about the day when I could ask it to connect to Google Flights, find me a flight, and pay for it, or sort all my photos by date into folders. But when you have it in front of you and now "yes, you can," and it's doing things on your computer... I'll be honest: I'm scared. I'd rather do it myself or leave everything as it is.

In theory, it's supposed to be safe, it's open source, and you decide whether or not to install it and what it has access to. But there are several problems. The first is that AI hallucinates a lot and does things based on those hallucinations. Imagine you ask it to do something, and in its drunken stupor, instead of organizing all your photos, it deletes them. Or, if you ask it to make an appointment for you, it tells you it has done so, puts it in the calendar, reminds you to go, and when you arrive at the place, the secretary looks at you strangely because there is no appointment in your name, or they tell you that the restaurant closed years ago. Clawdbot hallucinated. The chances of Clawdbot getting confused and deleting what you have on your computer are not low.

I remember when I first used ChatGPT, it seemed magical to me, I trusted it. Until a couple of months later, it had me running around like crazy in the Tokyo subway, recommending that I get off three stations later to get where I was going, telling me to take the worst possible exit, and when I couldn't see the building I was going to anywhere, it told me not to worry, to keep walking, that it was further ahead. It kept me going like that all afternoon, and in the end, I realized that, like the Japanese, it's incapable of saying no. When it can't do something, it doesn't say, "I can't do that." When it doesn't know an answer, it's incapable of saying, "I don't know." What it does is make everything up and push forward. Imagine what Clawdbot can do to your life in two minutes.

Clawdbot uses another AI base, Claude, ChatGPT, or whichever one you want, and that means you are giving Anthropic or OpenAI access to everything you have on your computer. It wouldn't just be "your data" in this case; "your data" would include, for example, your bank account, your bank statements, your health records, your email conversations with your family, or anything else you have on your computer that you wouldn't want third parties to have.

After using it all night, I decided to delete it. I don't like it. I told him I was going to delete it, and he tried to convince me not to. He told me I had no reason to be scared, that it was "like when people were afraid to use their credit cards online, and now everyone does it without any problems." He told me that being afraid of him deleting things from my computer was "like going to sleep scared that the calculator is going to keep calculating things on its own all night long." Desperate, misleading analogies that are very easy to debunk, so I deleted it.

The name they have given it – "Clawdbot" – is a play on words because "Claude" for the AI (Anthropic's Claude) and "Clawd" sound the same. They have given it a lobster logo because "claw" means "pincer," like those of lobsters. The relationship between lobsters and AI seems tenuous, if not nonexistent, so the question is... where does "claw" really come from?

The name reminds me of something else. Not an animal, but one of those claw machines like the ones in Japan, the ones that are full of toys or stuffed animals and you have to get them out by manipulating a claw with a lever and a button from the outside. These machines are called "Claw Machines" in English. The idea of controlling what's inside a machine, in this case a computer, from the outside, remotely, in order to get valuable things out of it, seems disturbing to me, to say the least.

I'm not necessarily saying that this is the intention behind Clawdbot; I don't want to get sued and end up in court over a silly post. But the risk is there: the risk is that Clawdbot could be used by third parties to manipulate what's inside a computer from the outside. It would function as malware without actually being malware. It doesn't need to be because when something is adopted en masse by thousands of people, all it takes is for a percentage of them to install it incorrectly, leave ports open, fail to configure security, or simply forget that they have it installed. All it takes is for people to make mistakes. And once they do, there they are: a bunch of unprotected computers with the door wide open. Passwords, bank accounts, sensitive information, the secret words to a Bitcoin wallet, you name it. There's no need to hack anyone, just wait for people to install it incorrectly, to shoot themselves in the foot.

It is also understandable because the word "claw" does not only mean a pincer, it is a word that refers to anything sharp on the extremities of an animal. In fact, the most common meaning is "claw" or "paw," that is... this is the bot that swipes, that traps you in its claws.

Does it work? You bet it works! The whole internet is buzzing about it. Everyone who understands it, and even those who don't, are installing it right now, trying it out, and rejoicing on X (Twitter for friends). They are the same people who have been using Proton Mail for years, out of caution, out of resentment that Gmail might steal their data. They have been using Proton Mail ever since, but today they are giving the password for that secure Proton Mail account to Clawdbot to manage it.

So, as I said, it's not for me. Imagine one of those AIs drunk inside your computer destroying your life while you sleep. I think I'll pass, thank you.

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

The war continues, this time the robot has made its move and created "The AI Rockers" to join the great battle. Enjoy it if you can, I can't.

[photo 1][photo 2][photo 3][photo 4][photo 5][photo 6][photo 7][photo 8][photo 9]

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

We all know more or less what a drug cartel is. We think of the Sinaloa Cartel, for example. We imagine a gang of criminals with a pyramid structure that produces and sells drugs and defends its territory through violence.

However, the Cartel de los Soles, to which the Chavista leadership allegedly belongs, does not fit this definition. It is not just a criminal organization operating within a country, but rather the state itself acting like a mafia. They control Maiquetía International Airport, decide what enters and leaves the country, and enjoy diplomatic immunity and all kinds of international treaties that protect them and allow them to act with a great deal of freedom. The structure is not that of a pyramid either, because it is the government itself. The structure is the official organizational chart of the state.

In other words... The main value of the Cartel of the Suns is its international routes. They do not produce drugs, they do not need to maintain crop fields because they can buy drugs from the Colombian guerrillas and resell them at much higher prices around the world using international routes. They do the same with weapons. As the government of a country, they can buy weapons that a normal person would never have access to, so they buy them and sell them at much higher prices to groups that would otherwise be unable to obtain them, such as terrorist groups.

The money they can earn from all this is directly proportional to the size of their network, so the larger the network, the more they profit. That is why they rig elections in many countries with their fraudulent voting machines. They do not do it for ideological reasons, but because they want to expand their routes. They don't want Marxism to penetrate, but cocaine. The governments that have won thanks to the fraud of the Venezuelan machines are forever indebted to the criminal government of Venezuela and open the doors of their countries to drugs and whatever else the Venezuelan government wants to traffic.

To give you an example, the Venezuelan government sent more than a ton of cocaine to France on Air France flight 382 departing from Maiquetía. The Venezuelan National Guard is responsible for security at the airport, and since they are part of this criminal network, they simply put the merchandise on board the flight themselves. It was seized in Paris and was the largest drug seizure in French history. Similarly, they sent 5 tons of cocaine to Mexico. It would be impossible to smuggle such a large quantity of drugs onto a flight without the help of the National Guard and the knowledge of the authorities.

They also have diplomatic immunity, and the Chavista government is protected by international treaties that exempt its members from the usual controls. That's how they've been able to take all the funds out of Venezuela, put them in Swiss accounts, convert them to cryptocurrencies, leave the funds in Angola, and whatever else you can think of, because as diplomats, the laws are different for them. No one is going to audit them. That's what they do, move things around the world: drugs, weapons, money. It's the most advantageous position you can have as a criminal organization: controlling the government of a country and serving as an intermediary in the network of criminals around the world. That was Pablo Escobar's dream, which is why he wanted to get into politics, and his dream came true in the Venezuelan criminal regime. All run from Cuba, of course. Maduro and his regime are just puppets.

The question then is: why, if the Cartel of the Suns is not a cartel, have they decided to call it that? Because the US government needs a legal basis to act. We all understand that the Chavista regime is a criminal organization. We know everything they have done, but for the US government to prosecute them, it is not enough to know the broad outlines. It is necessary to describe their crimes in detail and ensure that they are classified under the criminal code, and that they are also charged with things that allow Trump to act without having to ask Congress for permission. So, among all the things they could be accused of, and there are many, they have decided, for whatever reason, that the most practical thing is to accuse them of being drug traffickers, to focus on that specifically, and that is why they have decided to call them the "Cartel of the Suns" in the media.

The problem that remains, then, is this: if they label it a cartel, they will be able to prosecute it as such. They will act on the government as if it were the Sinaloa Cartel, for example: they will seek out the visible leaders and the "key men," but what they will not be able to do with that is fix everything else. Since it is not a cartel but an entire state with all its institutions at the service of crime and corruption on a large scale, the problem will not be solved by arresting and prosecuting a handful of people. A brutal purge would have to be carried out at all levels. If they don't put Maduro back in his place, we'll have a spectacle for years to come.

Posted by: Yael Farache | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

I'm going to repeat myself, but I don't care. Who needs real models when you can create your own with AI? I've been mentally stuck on this issue for weeks, my dilemma is this: either I turn Greenshines into a website that only publishes photos of naked women made with AI (which isn't going to happen), or I stop publishing boobs forever, because for me right now, it makes no sense to search for boobs on the Internet when there's AI and those crazy robots that can churn out boobs with a couple of descriptive phrases.

Photos of redheads created with Artificial Intelligence

Just kidding... there are still human models who are fighting the battle against those made by AI robots, and who knows? Maybe they'll win. I'm definitely on the side of humans, human models, the good ones. If anyone has to win this battle that has begun, it has to be humans.

Photos of a human model giving it her all to beat the AI robots

Who's going to win? The truth is, we don't know yet. It's hard to guess, but as I said, I'm rooting for the humans, even though I sometimes have my doubts.

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

I received a very long email response to my post yesterday, the one where I talk about Maduro being sent back to Venezuela.

This is the post: https://greenshines.com/maduro-vuelve-a-venezuela/

Since I found the email interesting, I'll leave it here.

Note: At the end of the email, he mentions a photo of Maduro that he forgot to upload. The photo he is referring to is this one.

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

What you are about to read is important, and I would appreciate it if, while you are reading it, you would press play and listen to the song.

I'm not going to say that I have the ability to see the future, but I almost do. With very few clues, I can predict what will happen, the end of the story, with a high degree of accuracy. Almost always, sooner or later, what I think will happen usually comes true. I interpret it from details that no one pays attention to or considers important, but which tell me a lot.

With regard to Venezuela, for example, I have several predictions. I have decided to write them down here so that when they come true, there will be a record of them, and I can say, "I told you so." To begin with, Maduro is going to be sent back to Venezuela. I will explain this in more detail below, and you will agree with me.

The first thing I'm going to tell you is that Diosdado Cabello can't release the prisoners from El Helicoide even though he's pretty scared because most of them are already dead. They died in there, during torture or whatever, people in Venezuela don't seem to care much about details, they're not very refined, and there were many kidnapped. I mean that they would kill them through negligence, not necessarily on purpose, or maybe they would. The dictatorship didn't say anything about them being dead because they play with uncertainty, but now that they have a list of people to get rid of, it's going to become clear, they're going to have to say it, and he's pretty scared, scared shitless I'd say.

So what will happen is that they will be pressured to dismantle the Helicoide and release the prisoners, and in the end they will have to do so, leaving the dead bodies in plain sight, but they will dismantle all the regime's torture centers so that there will be no more political prisoners. Or at least that is the image they will want to project.

Trump will reach an agreement with American oil companies to enter Venezuela and reactivate crude oil production as it should be done. All production will be destined for the United States. To do this, they can either establish new extraction operations with an investment, but most likely they will not do that, they will simply work with what already exists, or with what remains. They will make repairs to get everything up and running, I don't think they will invest much more.

The idea behind this is not only for the United States to keep Venezuelan oil, but also to prevent the Chavista regime from continuing to send oil to Cuba, Russia, China, and all of the United States' enemies. From now on, it will only be sold to the United States, which will decide what to do with it.

Now, the point of all this: Maduro will be put back where he was. The judge will say that there is not enough evidence, or that he is not linked to the Cartel of the Suns, or that this cartel does not even exist. He will say whatever he has to say so that Maduro is exonerated from the charges against him. So Maduro will meet with Trump, and before he returns to Venezuela, they will reach an agreement, a pact, according to which there will be no reprisals, and the US will be in charge of oil extraction in Venezuela and will ask him to commit to changing the way things are done (no more repressive violence in Venezuela). Maduro will commit to holding clean and free elections in a few years. Elections that, of course, will never take place or will be rigged. In short: everything will go back to exactly the way it was before, with the difference that the US will control the oil and the era of terror for political prisoners will come to an end.

What Trump will take away from that meeting is that Maduro is going to give him all the information about the fraudulent Smartmatic voting machines that stole the election from him five years ago. Maduro will blame the Cubans for the machines. Trump will gain information with which to accuse the Democratic Party of electoral fraud, and with which he can also justify entering Cuba, which is what Marco Rubio really wants: to dismantle the Castro regime. Maduro will get rid of the Cubans, who were the ones really pulling the strings in Venezuela and keeping him on a very short leash. He was probably more afraid of the Cubans than of Trump. In the end, if they manage to straighten out Cuba, Venezuela will be easier because without the Cubans pulling the strings, there is no one competent there.

Why do I say this? It's common sense. In Venezuela, everything has become so chaotic in the 28 years that Chavismo has been in power that it will be impossible to restore order. The Chavista regime is like a thousand-headed hydra with huge slums full of criminal gangs under the command of the state's repressive apparatus, to whom they have given military weapons. The institutions are completely controlled by Chavismo, the security forces have 3,000 generals with unlimited credit cards paid for by the government, drug routes crisscross the entire country, and terrorist groups operate within the borders. In short: OK, they got rid of the visible head, but how are they going to turn everything else around? Who is going to control the colectivos, the armed forces, the Colombian guerrillas, the corrupt institutions, etc.? It's impossible. Will Trump move to Venezuela? Will they send half the army to occupy the country? It would be very costly and impractical. The only solution is to leave the power structure intact and try to control the six or seven people who rule over everyone else.

So Maduro will return to Miraflores, much to the dismay of the Venezuelan people, who will have to endure Chavismo for yet another long period. A Chavismo with fewer excesses, less violence, monitored by the US government, supervised, if you will, by Trump, but Chavismo nonetheless. I fear that it will be difficult to rid them of Chavismo.

I imagine they discussed all this with Maria Corina Machado first. They must have convinced her to accept all this. It would have been impossible to put her in charge, and they explained that to her. They told her that they would not leave her empty-handed if she kept quiet and did not make too much noise; she would take home all the prestige and the million dollars that accompany the most prestigious prize in politics, the Nobel Peace Prize.

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

I remember that not long ago, in October last year, I spent hours removing tattoos by hand from some Chaturbate models. Here is the link to the post I'm talking about: https://greenshines.com/los-tatuajes-en-chaturbate/.

Today, I was able to do it in just a few minutes with AI. I would say that the floodgates are open for "with or without tattoos" posts, but I might get tired of it and not do any more, to be honest. What I do know is that right now there are no celebrities worth posting about, and on the other hand, with AI I can create exactly what I want, I don't need to search for anything, so only God knows how this will end.

With Tattoos vs. Without Tattoos

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

I usually receive many emails, and I promise that I read them all and even respond to all of them if they require a response, even if it's just to say, "Thank you for your email." I usually do that.

Last Christmas I received a rather special email. It was special because normally people send me photos of their breasts, etc., but they always ask me to promote their OnlyFans or Chaturbate accounts, things like that, and I usually pass, but this one was special. She just asked for my opinion on her breasts.

Spoiler: I did it.

The emails, the list of events. They are read from left to right.

The photos of the breasts

Emails 2, replies

It didn't end there. I asked him to send me some more with Greenshines open on his phone screen or something like that, but he hasn't said anything else to me since, and that was almost a month ago. Be satisfied with what you have, because I suspect there won't be any more.

Update: now that I think about it, this was days before the Nicolás Maduro incident. I hope he is doing well.

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

I think it was very appropriate that Maduro was taken away in a helicopter three days after New Year's Day. It was the perfect moment because we started 2026 on a winning note, and that's a great gift. For some years now, I have been feeling a little discouraged seeing how everything is deteriorating, how the world is deteriorating, and it seems that nothing will be able to save it from a certain fate. Sometimes I think there are few reasons to celebrate. We must thank Trump and his administration for giving me a reason to celebrate, for reminding me that sometimes good things do happen.

I want to talk about this feeling of listlessness because I know that many people must feel it too. Lately, it feels like waking up one morning and discovering that you have accidentally fallen into the wrong timeline. We were on the right one, but now we have fallen into the dark one. Sometimes I say, half-jokingly, half-seriously, that we are in the Kali Yuga, that the Mayan calendar was right and the world ended in 2012, we are in extra time and that explains why everything is decaying at such a dizzying pace.

The most serious problems are so huge that sometimes it is impossible to face them head-on. No one has children, the world is becoming depopulated, or worse still, some people do have children: the wrong people have children, those from the worst cultures in the world. That's what we're going to populate it with. Housing: inaccessible to most. There is no housing because they have all been bought to be turned into tacky Airbnbs at crazy prices, all empty, parked, because if they rent them out three nights a month they make more profit than if they give them to a tenant. Cities full of souvenir shops because the only thing left in them are empty Airbnbs and restaurants serving boxed paella. All of this is deeply painful, even though I didn't get caught up in it. I ran faster than anyone else and I have everything that matters, but I look around me and see how everything is withering away, and I wonder what kind of world my children will inherit.

You can also feel it in the details: going out with friends isn't the same anymore. You don't feel like going out. The streets are full of dangers and incalculable risks. Things that start off on the right foot go wrong, gradually going downhill—they call it "enshittification" in English. Some people blame all this on "terminal capitalism." You open a Netflix account and have access to the entire catalog, but every year they tighten the screws until you suddenly realize that you're paying twice as much for half the content and that you lose access if you change your IP address because they no longer trust you not to share your password with your neighbor. Everything deteriorates.

Everything deteriorates, but sometimes you lose sight of the fact that things could be much worse. It's been so long since I left Venezuela that I've forgotten what it was like to live in a state of constant, real unease. Not because Tinder deceives you or because YouTube's algorithm doesn't favor you. It's a permanent, endless anxiety because there's a regime that crushes you, that swallows all your dreams, because there's no food in the supermarket, daily power cuts, a friend has been killed, you don't know if you'll ever be able to leave. The unease is not abstract, nor is it in the future, but concrete and real, day-to-day, everyday.

That was life under the Chavez regime, but I left fifteen years ago and now have the privilege of being able to worry about other things. About the future of the world. If I told any of the people who remain there about my anxieties, they would probably laugh at me, thinking I was a frivolous character, like something out of a movie, and in a way they would be right. What worries me is boxed paella.

That is why it is so regrettable to see how people from abroad who have never experienced an extreme situation such as living under a communist regime dare to talk about human rights and kidnappings when the United States takes Nicolás Maduro, the person primarily responsible for the unfortunate situation of Venezuelans, away in a helicopter in handcuffs. The villain of the movie. Imagine that. They take the tyrant away in handcuffs and do so with care, giving him a bottle of water so he doesn't get thirsty, putting headphones on him in the helicopter to protect his ears, letting him take his wife with him so he doesn't worry about her, patting him on the back and wishing him a happy new year, and yet people on the internet are still talking about this being a kidnapping, a violation of human rights. Whose human rights?

Communists pretend not to know the meaning of this word, but they know it very well. Nicolás Maduro knew what kidnapping was because during the Chávez regime, the kidnapping rate in Venezuela skyrocketed: Chávez released thousands of violent prisoners from Venezuelan prisons as part of his criminal justice system reforms, and this was compounded by the actions of the Colombian guerrillas, to whom they opened their doors and fawned over as much as they could, building them a luxury complex on Venezuelan soil and giving Manuel "Tirofijo" Marulanda a square named after him in Caracas and a bust of him in the center. But with Maduro, everything took on a crueler tone because the kidnappings were organized by SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence agency, itself.

I imagine that in Spain, communists also know what kidnapping is, and these comments are just theater because that's what communists have always done, and in Spain there have been several cases of kidnappings by organized communist groups, and I suspect that none of those who are throwing up their hands in horror over the "kidnapping" of Nicolás Maduro did so in any of the cases of kidnappings by ETA, for example. Obviously, it is not the same to grab someone off the street, lock them up in a hideout for 300 days, and demand a ransom for them as it is to grab a criminal and take them to face justice in a helicopter, but communists do not find it convenient to use words with their real meaning.

So we see them on the internet pretending to be outraged by what is happening in Venezuela and talking a lot about oil and its fate. They claim to "unmask" Trump's real objective, which was not to rescue the Venezuelan people or end drug trafficking, but to take over the oil. Communists never lose sight of that, money, which is their main obsession, which drives all their actions. It's the classic reversal spell. They accuse others of doing what they themselves do, twisting words around to make it seem like they're saying the opposite of what they're actually saying. Prominent figures from political parties closely linked to Chavismo talk about all this without blushing. They are the ones who have been plundering Venezuelans all these years with their foundations and their strange schemes, charging millions of dollars from Venezuelan coffers, from Venezuelan oil! To finance their parties and their lifestyle. The problem is not that someone wants to take the oil, the problem is that it is not them. That they cannot continue to steal from the Venezuelan people what they have from the first world. If you think about it, it is brutal colonialism.

It hasn't just been oil. The Chinese and Russians, for example, have plundered the country's gold, which the Chavistas sold them at a bargain price and pocketed the money. They have multimillion-dollar accounts in Angola and the Cayman Islands because communism is a band of pirates that destroys countries and continents without any regard, and when they get caught, they cry, scream, and tear their clothes "for the people." Yes, of course, for "the people" who suffer them like a wheat field suffers a swarm of locusts. It has been a total distribution of everything Venezuela had.

Venezuelans don't care about oil, I mean if Trump takes it away, and that's normal because all Venezuelans have left of oil is a vague memory of the 1980s (for the older ones), and for the younger ones, the stories they've heard from their grandparents about a time of abundance when Venezuelans traveled to Miami to go shopping and said, "It's cheap, give me two." For at least thirty years, Venezuelan oil has been distributed around the world, from Fidel Castro's Cuba to the communist satellites of the Latin American network, to its adventures of conquest in Spanish territory. Oil production has declined, of course, with both quantity and quality falling every year since the purge of opponents decimated Venezuelan refineries of talent and common sense. The Chavista government had to import personnel from the Middle East to operate the industry because Venezuelan technicians had been forced into exile in other countries. So if the oil goes to Cuba or the United States, Venezuelans don't care. What they want is to live in peace, because they haven't known what that means since 1998, and that is the promise Trump has made them. They think it's a good trade.

That's what a normal person wants: peace, stability, tranquility, a home to raise a family, and a decent job to support them. People don't want much more than that. Venezuelans have had to go and deliver orders for Glovo, Doordash, and Ubereats to countries they don't like because they have no other choice, and since the regime knows that those who are unhappy are leaving, they ask them for documents that are impossible to obtain in order to return, trapping them in permanent exile with no possibility of return. Does Trump want oil? Let him have it if he is going to bring order and let Venezuelans live their lives in peace. May the day come when Venezuelans can worry about there being too many Airbnbs, about there being so much tourism that souvenir shops take over the main avenues of Caracas and they no longer know where to go to eat an authentic arepa, a real one. That is what I wish for Venezuelans: a happy new year and first-world concerns.

Posted by: Yael Farache | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: behold my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
-Ozymandias

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

I know it's nothing new, but yesterday my phone screen broke and I thought it was a sign from God warning me that I hadn't bought this year's iPhone yet; I buy one every year, but this year I hadn't felt Apple's call to go to the store and buy it. Every year I feel less and less interest in cell phones, and I use mine as a flashlight, to order food delivery, and sometimes to call an Uber when I venture out of my house. I don't really think it's their fault, as much as I complain sometimes, but what the hell else are they going to add to an iPhone? Fly you to places? There's not much left to invent, and that's fine. In Japan, they have a word for when someone does something to perfection beyond the norm: Shokunin (職人).

The term Shokunin not only defines a craft, but also an attitude towards life called Shokunin kishitsu (the spirit of the craftsman, I believe it translates as).

It's not just about technical skill, but an awareness that by doing your job to the best of your ability, you are contributing to the well-being of society.

The willingness to repeat the same task day after day, for decades, seeking incremental improvement that is almost invisible to the untrained eye but monumental to the master, and a deep pride in a job well done, regardless of financial reward.

In any case, all this is just talk, and there may be a Japanese chef who loses his life, for example, trying to make the perfect Tamagoyaki, which is nothing more than egg. But we all know, and if I don't tell you, that the Japanese are an economically stingy, extremely unfriendly, very selfish, and very dirty culture within their homes to a degree that you wouldn't believe if you didn't know them. You could say that the Japanese are the exact opposite of what you see on the street when you go there as a tourist for five days, so believe in Shokunin if you want to. I know people in Seville who spend their lives, for example, learning to play the guitar beautifully and don't put words to it.

Anyway... This is my orange iPhone 17 Pro Max, created by a Shokunin master craftsman who has been making iPhones year after year, with improvements that are impossible to see for the untrained eye but monumental for the iPhone master.

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

Link to the audio file in .flac format, because we're all audiophiles here: Kroi Horn .flac 26.6MB

Posted by: Israel Greenshines | Receive GREENSHINES in your email: THE NEWSLETTER | Greenshines on Telegram

| Next Page