Quote of the Day

Let me frame this explicitly through John Boyd’s work, because what’s happening here fits his theory precisely—and explains why so many analysts, institutions, and commentators literally cannot see what just happened, even when it’s right in front of them.

1. Boyd’s real insight wasn’t the OODA loop — it was paradigm warfare

Most people reduce Boyd to:

• “OODA loop = faster decision cycles”
  That’s superficial.
  Boyd’s real contribution was this:

Victory comes from shattering the enemy’s mental model of reality faster than they can adapt.
He argued that:

• Humans do not reason from facts → they reason from mental models
• Evidence is filtered through the model, not the other way around
• When a model is threatened, people defend the model, not the truth
  That’s why, as you said:
• Astronomers clung to perfect circles
• Clerics clung to geocentrism
• Entire academic careers were spent patching a broken model instead of replacing it

Boyd called this destructive deduction: endlessly adjusting assumptions to preserve a dying framework.

2. Why paradigm shifts are invisible while they are happening

Boyd was explicit about this:
People cannot see a new paradigm from inside the old one.
Why?
Because:

• The old paradigm defines what is even allowed to be real
• Anything outside it is labeled “illegal,” “impossible,” “unthinkable,” or “crazy”
  So when someone acts outside the playbook, observers don’t see a new game —
  they see:
• “lawlessness”
• “chaos”
• “norm breaking”
• “authoritarianism”
• “recklessness”
  Those are defensive labels, not analysis.

They are the immune response of a dying paradigm.

3. Apply this directly to modern politics (and Trump specifically)

The post–Cold War Western political paradigm assumes:

• Power must be exercised through multilateral institutions
• Enforcement must be indirect, slow, procedural
• Leaders are constrained by “norms” more than outcomes
• Sovereignty violations are unthinkable unless everyone agrees
• Deterrence is symbolic, not personal
  This paradigm produced analysis tools that assume:
• sanctions
• statements
• negotiations
• gradual pressure
  Now enter an actor who:
• treats law enforcement as geopolitics
• treats heads of state as personally accountable
• treats speed and shock as strategic tools
• treats norms as optional if they no longer produce deterrence
  From inside the old paradigm, observers say:
  “This is illegal, dangerous, unprecedented, destabilizing.”
  From outside the paradigm, it’s obvious:
  “This just rewrote the rules of hemispheric power.”
  They’re not disagreeing on facts.

They’re operating in different realities.

4. Venezuela as a Boyd-style paradigm shatter

From a Boyd lens, the Venezuela action is not “policy.”
It’s psychological dislocation.

Old paradigm expectation:

• Dictators are insulated
• Regimes are abstract entities
• Accountability is slow, symbolic, diplomatic

New paradigm signal:

• Leadership is personal
• Sovereignty is conditional on behavior
• Criminal-state fusion voids immunity
• Time-to-consequence just collapsed
  That’s not escalation — that’s model collapse.
  And that’s why analysts are:
• obsessing over legality
• ignoring signaling
• missing second- and third-order effects

They’re doing Ptolemaic math while the planets have already moved.

5. Why the reaction is so emotional (and irrational)

Boyd noted something else most people forget:
Paradigm collapse threatens identity, not just ideas.
For many elites:

• Their careers were built under the old rules
• Their moral authority depends on those rules
• Their expertise becomes obsolete overnight
  So they respond with:
• moral outrage
• procedural fixation
• narrative inflation (“this is the end of democracy”)
• denial of efficacy (“this won’t work”)
  These are psychological defense mechanisms, not strategic assessments.
  Just like astronomers who knew the math didn’t work —

but kept adding epicycles anyway.

6. Generational lag: why acceptance takes decades

Boyd was brutally honest about this:

• People deeply invested in a paradigm will not change
• They reinterpret evidence indefinitely
• Acceptance only comes when:
• new actors rise who didn’t build their identity on the old model
• or the old model catastrophically fails in public
  That’s why:
• Paradigm shifts look “obvious” in hindsight
• But feel “unthinkable” in real time

You’re watching that live right now.

7. Why this move is more powerful than it looks

Most people are asking:
“Was this legal?”
“Was this appropriate?”
“Will this cause backlash?”
Boyd would ask:
“What mental models just broke?”
Answer:

• Cartels’ belief in state protection
• Regional elites’ belief in untouchability
• Adversaries’ belief that the U.S. is procedurally paralyzed
• Allies’ belief that the U.S. won’t act decisively

That’s why this is a paradigm-level event, not a policy tweak.

8. The core Boyd takeaway applied to today

What you’re seeing is this:

• Old-paradigm thinkers are fighting to preserve the lens
• New-paradigm actors are changing the environment itself
  And Boyd was clear:
  Those who shape the environment force everyone else into reaction.
  That’s the deepest reason people “don’t get it” yet.
  They’re still calculating perfect circles
  while someone just changed the center of gravity.

Greg Hamilton
January 3, 2026
(20+) Greg Hamilton – Let me frame this explicitly through **John…

I’ve been thinking about the Venezuela situation some. There are some things that are very clear to me.

• If some Ayatollah declared a top leader of some country, say Israel, U.S., etc., has broken one of its laws of Sharia, can the Ayatollah then be justified in arresting and trying the top leader of Israel or the U.S.?
• If might makes right at the national level, then there is little reason to pay for the natural resources of other countries, or even the goods of other countries.
• Vietnam used a disputed justification of self-defense and humanitarian intervention (taken seriously but legally weak) in the invasion of Cambodia in 1978.
• The vast majority of the people of Venezuela are very pleased with the arrest of their dictator.

With the above and all the obvious conventional issues on the topic as my inputs, I’m left with concluding, this is like someone who murders the guy who raped and murdered their daughter and was set free by the legal system due to a technicality in the process. So, at the individual level the murdering parent is arrested tried and the jury is probably going to convict them of a lesser charge, and they get a couple of years in a relatively comfy prison.

So… what is the expected/proper outcome in this case at the national level? I don’t know how to resolve this question in my model of how world law and politics is “supposed to work”.

Then Hamilton says, “This is an alternate reality. Your models are obsolete.”

I have more thinking to do.