Famous son of the Rio Grande Valley, Joshua Trevino, the Chief Transformation Officer at the Texas Public Policy Institute, made a startling admission on the Hard Country podcast about Mexican Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum. Joshua admitted he was wrong about the la presidenta, who is not a placeholder for the Morena party but a talented executive. She has better managed Mexico’s relationship with the United States than any Mexican president. Joshua observed that the Mexican government cannot guarantee public safety or clean water, but it is an expert at dealing with the United States Government.
My non-expert opinion is that Claudia Sheinbaum is a Brujas Negras (Black Witch) Curandera. Sheinbaum is a non-religious Jew and a lifelong leftist who reads every policy paper she is handed and is preternaturally alert for every second of hours-long policy meetings. She’s a disciplined, sober female version of Bill Clinton without the sex addiction or lazy disinterest in detail. The true face of evil can be found in any human who enjoys multiple, hours-long, policy meetings. It’s not natural.
Last week, I thought the Brujas Negras had struck again when I saw Grubhub had declared McAllen the most overweight and obese city in America. How had the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) suddenly become populated by food blisters? I detected the hand of bad voodoo, only to remember that polite people here never mention obesity or its downstream effects. We’ve been the fattest city in America for years, but nothing is done about it, and nobody talks about it, so it’s easy to forget.
The RGV has been shrouded in a miasma of black magic fog, the fog of woe, that allows people to ignore the obvious. The average resident should stay the hell out of Starbucks, donut shops, and double-fried taco stands. But every day, a new Starbucks, donut shop, or taco stand opens to serve people a few years away from needing daily dialysis. The Catholic Church should be battling this obvious demonic assault on the faithful. But they’re focused on illegal migrant rights because that’s where the money is. . . Or was it before DOGE uncovered the billions of dollars flowing to the dioceses from USAID to facilitate human trafficking via dozens of ‘NGOs’.
Sister Norma Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, greets a group of some 25 asylum seekers at a bus station in Brownsville, Texas. No mention is ever made about the millions of dollars USAID has given her. That fact is lost in the RGV fog of woe (photo: John Moore / Getty )
This obesity epidemic in the Rio Grande Valley has disrupted the retirement plan I established in 1985, following my first reading of Lonesome Dove. After retiring, I wanted to be an old, tricky, tough bastard living on the Rio Grande River. But there are no cattle rustlers to fight, and I wasn’t sure my plan made sense until the Narco wars started and President Trump declared them terrorists. There was no doubt that all sorts of miscreants had invaded us. I saw it with my own lying eyes for four years running. Suddenly, my dream of replicating Gus and Captain Call seemed to be answered until I researched Narco sicarios.
What happened to the tough, self-reliant Mexican peasant? Where is the self-sacrificing ethos of the Mexican soldiers who overthrew the Spanish, defeated the French, and fought with courage against the Americans?
See what I mean? These two fat bastards couldn’t run 100 yards but still think they’re bad asses. Plus they have man boobs – a clear indicator of low testosterone.
I live close enough to the Rio Grande River to see the border wall lights at night. During the evening, I sit on my back porch, scanning the river bottoms, just like Augustus McCrae or Captain Call, but without a rifle or jug of whiskey, because I don’t want my neighbors to think I’m antisocial. This is Texas, where many people still carry a pistol, but who needs a gun to deal with pudgy nitwits? Having a charged AED at the ready, along with IV fluids, is more practical given the lack of desperados swimming the Rio Grande and the physical condition of the local population.
Who carries around an automated external defibrillator and IV kits? Sheepdogs – I know quite a few of them and we are all much happier to bring a cardiac arrest victim back to life than shooting a scumbag trying to take a life. The savings in legal fees alone make that a winning proposition. I still carry a concealed pistol in honor of Gus and Captain Call. Reality may have crushed my retirement plan, but a man can still dream.
Narcos are not a problem for the law-abiding citizens of the RGV. Many have vacation properties in the Valley and send their children to school here. Lots of Mexicans send their kids to school here, a constant source of aggravation for property tax-paying Winter Texans. This is another topic rarely discussed in polite company because it raises the ugly specter of racism, even though skin color has nothing to do with being Hispanic. Fluency in the Spanish language determines who is and is not Hispanic in the RGV.
The Narcos are a problem for local politicians, lawyers, and law enforcement. They have too much money, and finding a lawyer, politician, or police chief who would not sell their soul to the devil (or a Bruja Negra) for a few million dollars is as rare. The only defense against multi-million-dollar bribes is strong religious faith. A man alone cannot reject that level of illicit wealth; he needs a strong angel riding shotgun. I have St Michael, who I found guarding my six in Afghanistan. Hopefully vulnerable RGV titans have a similar guardian to with which to battle Santa Muerte.
The appearance of tranquil, law-abiding prosperity is another consequence of the invisible black magic fog that infects the RGV. Everything appears normal, which is abnormal given the corrosive effects of abundant Narco money. Lifting that fog falls in the realm of spiritual warfare, the province of curanderas, now that the Catholic Church has abandoned normal Americans.
Aztecs are all the rage in Mexico, given the popularity of Santa Muerte, a cross between the Grim Reaper and the Virgin of Guadeloupe, Mexico’s patron saint. But the Aztecs weren’t Mexican Amerindians; they were colonizers from the North. Their Náhuatl language is unrelated to Central Mexican Mesoamerican native languages but closely related to the Ute and Comanche languages. History has become a profound, dark mystery because it is actively subverted in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Understanding legitimate, verifiable history is a superpower that allows you to instantly cut through the bullshit inflicted on us by the elite managerial class.
Santa Muerte swag in Mexico City
If a culture that mocks tradition and devalues sacrifice fails to renew itself, what happens to a culture that calls for holy war against the catholic church while conducting human sacrifice? Mexican Narcos can’t grasp the concept of aspirational sacrifice because they are low-testosterone and low-IQ psychopaths. The Stoics tell us that rudeness, meanness, and cruelty are a mask for deep-seated weakness. You can add man boobs, the physical manifestation of low T, to that list.
Which brings up another crushing disappointment. Old retired guys can’t hang out in smoky bars dispensing the distilled wisdom of an aged International Man of Action. If they do, they risk looking like everyone else around here. Who wants to see another old fool with a beer gut thinking he’s a badass? Not looking like a dangerous man is no way to honor the memory of the best two fictional Texas Rangers in the Western canon, or the canon of Westerns. I’m not sure how to make that point. It is a vivid reminder not to base your aspirations on fictional characters created by the same author who wrote Brokeback Mountain.
Last Monday, Mexico acquiesced to President Trump over the South Texas Water War. President Sheinbaum promised to deliver between 324,000 and 420,000 acre-feet of water to the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) by October. The current Mexican drought, caused by Climate Change™ (unlike the hundreds of previous periods of drought), has been miraculously reversed by La Presidenta. Now there is plenty of water to go around. The RGV’s democrats freaked out because they know the capabilities of Brujas Negras and assumed she would send another Training Thunderstorm. Instantly, the forecast for scattered weekend thunderstorms suddenly morphed into a weekend of torrential rain.
I’ll decipher that RGV coded message for you: “The Bad Orange Man has pissed of La Presidenta Shiebaum and she’s going to conjure up another training thunderstorm flood to punish us.
Five weeks ago, the Rio Grande Valley was suddenly inundated with several feet of rain in three hours. The rain appeared out of nowhere; the sky was clear, and the forecast matched the sky. Suddenly, thunderstorms started forming and stacking themselves so quickly on radar that they looked like the smokestack of a moving train. I explained the supernatural component of this incident in this post. Brujas Negras (black witches) are taken seriously in Mexico and the RGV, lending credence to my theorizing about spiritual warfare.
When rounds one and two produced no rain, the gaslighting continued for the rest of the weekend.
You will be shocked when I tell you it did not rain in the RGV all weekend—not a drop. Don’t shut the stable door after the horse has bolted (one of the oldest recorded English proverbs) warns not to take precautions when the damage is already done. The flood damage was done five weeks ago. The president won the water war, and there is no reason to expect treachery from Mexico, but nobody fears treachery like treacherous.
The nanny state tricks citizens into believing it cares about them using performative gestures that accomplish nothing. Giving away three sandbags per family (six to local businesses) accomplishes what? Three sandbags won’t help when flood water crests three feet above your front door. If the floods are the work of Curanderas, why not paint your front door frame with lamb’s blood? There are many tools in the Valley of Miracles to use in a spiritual battle. We have the Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, where you can get holy water by the gallon 24/7. Fill a humidifier with it and create an invisible fog that will repel demons, vampires, and (theoretically) flood waters sent by Brujas Negras.
There was no panic among the faithful. We took President Shienbaum at her word and were proved right. The massive amounts of rain that were supposed to hit us were pushed south at the last minute by the freak formation of a cold front to our north. The water was dumped where needed, in Mexico, where it will be collected and used to meet Mexico’s 1944 water treaty obligation.
Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez held a press conference to issue a proclamación that the treaty water will bring only “short-term stability” to the community. Why would a county judge hold a press conference to minimize an accomplishment no American president has accomplished since 1944? It is not like the citizens of South Texas, who voted overwhelmingly for President Trump, are interested in commentary from elected democrats. I’d like to hear his honor explain the constitutional basis for his draconian COVID mandates. But that won’t happen because he doesn’t answer to the public, and the constitution has no provisions for stripping personal liberties in response to a virus that 99.9% of the population survives. During a real pandemic with a high infection fatality rate, the public health apparatus will be focused on the disposal of bodies. The public won’t need to be forced into doing a damn thing because the evidence of a real pandemic doesn’t require gaslighting to digest. The public health response will take organization, cooperation, and leadership to motivate citizens to form teams for unpleasant tasks like dealing with thousands of human remains.
We are not experiencing that kind of leadership from the democratically dominated judiciary. The video pasted below explains why:
District court judges keep releasing accused murderers back onto the streets of Texas, with 900 released so far.
Judge Hilary Unger of Harris County is one of these judges.
She released 8 criminals, via bond, who then went on to murder innocent Texans:pic.twitter.com/1jHQzROJ3N
Spiritual Warfare is a topic that is gaining traction in normie podcasting and social media. The Shawn Ryan Show has recently featured a series of guests from the Special Forces community, porn industry, and (the most unpopular segment of society) journalists who have been called to Christ in a variety of ways. These men have remarkable back stories; only one, former SEAL,Jared Hudson, is a lifelong practicing Christian, the rest were sinners just like you and me. Jared Hudson is an impressive man who founded The Shooting Institute (TSI), providing tactical training to law enforcement, military, and civilians, and Covenant Rescue Group (CRG), a nonprofit combating human trafficking and child exploitation. He offers free tactical training to police departments. In return, they use his CRG model to run a child exploitation sting targeting human traffickers. Their methodology has a 100% success rate, and you would think it was being used across the fruited plains, but you would be wrong. The sexual exploitation of children is not something police agencies prioritize.
Recognizing the face of good is essential to easily seeing the face of evil.
The CRG website correctly points out that Human Trafficking and child exploitation are among the darkest evils our world has ever known. Over 350,000 unescorted children crossed our border during the Biden administration and were handed over to “charities” like Catholic Charities or Southwest Key Programs and then disappeared. Nobody knows where they are or what happened to them except for men like Jared Hudson, who rescues those children with his police training program. The border remains closed, but evil never takes a holiday; below is the face of evil.
The face of evil. Gloria Lopez-Corona was arrested for attempting to smuggle a druged 5-year-old boy she did not know across the border.
Gloria Lopez-Corona, a Mexican national, had a child hidden under blankets in the back of her car when she attempted to cross the San Luis port of entry. ICE officers were unable to wake the child and noted the boy was years older than the birth certificate, which Corona produced when questioned. It did not take long for her story to crumble, and she admitted she had no idea who the boy was or where he was heading. She also had no problem drugging the kid or turning him over to pedophiles.
What kind of woman smuggles a drugged child across an international border? If she is not, by definition, a demon of the worst sort, then what is she? Why are the democrats and liberal judiciary encouraging this type of gross criminality? Here is another face of evil:
More evil – Patrick Scruggs, a former January 6th federal prosecutor, stabbed a man after a vehicle accident in Florida.
Watching the video of former J6 federal prosecutor Patrick Scruggs viciously assaulting a man after a car accident is heartbreaking for me. It shows a man demon possessed, which isn’t surprising given his former job. It is disheartening that nobody shot him about 15 times, which he richly deserved. He’s been arrested, but the chances of him being prosecuted with the level of severity he showed the people he prosecuted are not high. Nobody trusts judges in America to apply the rule of law to progressive members of the legal system. Maybe we will be surprised, but I doubt it.
The Dread Coward Roberts‘ Supreme Court could end democratic judicial madness this Wednesday. The Democratic Party’s District Court judges have been issuing sweeping orders enjoining the government’s attempts to deport illegal criminal immigrants before even hearing the administration’s side of the case. We have never seen anything like this in our history. What are the chances the dread coward will re-establish the rule of law by smacking down district judge overreach? Not high, but there is always a chance that good will trump evil; it’s time to pray that The Dread Cowards Roberts finds the courage to support the American people, not wealthy oligarchs running the Democratic party.
This fictional short story first appeared in the Wrath Burning Tree in 2023
It was a typical Thursday night at the Taj Tiki Bar, tucked away off the Jalalabad–Kabul road in the Bagrami hamlet just outside the Jalalabad city limits. The Taj Guesthouse Tiki Bar was established by a UN road-building crew from Australia in 2003 and was the only bar in Eastern Afghanistan. The Taj was a three-building world-class guesthouse featuring a custom swimming pool that the Aussies built, which we filled with sand-filtered, freezing-cold well water. This being Afghanistan, Afghans were not allowed in the Tiki bar, and because Western NGO women frequented the pool, it was surrounded by a 40-foot bamboo screen. Bikini-wearing women cavorting in a pool with men is haram in Afghanistan and best kept out of public view.
During the summer of 2008, the Tiki Bar was busier than ever on Thursday nights during happy hour. The UN had withdrawn a year earlier, so the Taj became home to the Synergy Strike Force, an MIT FabLab, and the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club. My USAID-funded Community Development Program (CDP) was also located there. Since Jalalabad and San Diego are sister cities, the Rotarians actively funded projects to refurbish schools, build dormitories at Nangarhar University, and purchase modern equipment for the Nangarhar University Teaching Hospital.
The Synergy Strike Force was a San Diego-based group of high-end tech experts who aimed to “save the willing” by accessing unlimited funding from DARPA to refine their crowd-sourcing software. To bring the internet to the people, the founder of the Synergy Strike Force, a dual MD/PhD named Bob, convinced the National Science Foundation to fund the deployment of an MIT Fabrication Laboratory to the Taj Guesthouse, which came with two Graduate students to set it up.
The Tiki Bar had become so busy that I brought my son Logan, who had just graduated from High School, over to run the bar, allowing me to focus on supply. Buying beer was no problem, but getting it past the National Directorate of Security (NDS) checkpoint in the Kabul Gorge could be a real problem. I had already lost two sets of body armor and five bottles of booze to them, but they headed home early every Thursday, clearing the run back from Camp Warehouse long before the sun set.
There was a giant clay fireplace across from the bar for cold-weather operations, and the patio area between the main house, bar, and pool deck was filled with the usual suspects. NGO workers from the American aid giants DAI and Chemonics, two women from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale, the attaché from the Pakistan consulate who had the hots for one of the German ladies, four agriculture specialists from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the ever lovely and vivacious Ms. Mimi from Agence Française de Développement. Mimi had a male colleague who insisted on wearing a Speedo bathing suit in the pool area, but we let it slide because Mimi was a most attractive and agreeable guest who often stayed the night and spent Friday poolside.
A Blackwater crew from the Border Police training academy was there as usual, as was the brigade Human Terrain Team from FOB Fenty. There were two Air Force officers from the Nangarhar Provincial Reconstruction Team, technically in a UA status. One of them, an intelligence officer, was dating my Aussie running mate, Rory, which, in my opinion, was a lot of risk for marginal gain. As a retired Marine Corps grunt on the other side of 50 I might have been jealous; I was never sure.
The SSF crew was spending their last night in the country before heading back to the USA for the annual Burning Man festival. They were in rare form, as were the Rotarians from the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club, who were joined by Rotarians from Perth, Australia. Perth is a sister city to both San Diego and Jalalabad, who knew? The MIT grad students sent to start up the FabLab were immediately nicknamed the twins. They were TS (SCI) cleared rocket engineers from the Center for Bits and Atoms. Both were from New Jersey, both had long, jet-black hair, and smiled so much it made me uncomfortable; one was Chinese American, and the other was Indian American. They were seated at the bar with The Skipper – an EOD trainer who remained outside the wire, living with his Afghan trainees in a compound near the Jalalabad Teaching Hospital. The Skipper was a retired Navy Senior Chief EOD specialist who bore a striking resemblance to Alan Hale from the 1960s-era TV Show Gilligan’s Island. He had laid out a bunch of triggering switches he had collected from disabled IEDs and was taking notes as the Twins examined each with magnifying glasses. The Twins had the uncanny ability to recognize countries of origin and fabrication anomalies in the circuit work.
One of the Twins test-firing an old Soviet PPsH submachinegun she built from a bunch of junked weapons
The Twins were trouble from the start because they proved indispensable. We expected computer geeks from MIT, not engineers who could fix or build anything without apparent effort. They rebuilt the Tiki Bar because they found the original construction to be faulty; they built shelving from wood scraps that were so impressive, they looked like museum pieces. They got bored one day and started working on the War Pig, our up armored Toyota Hi Lux, fabricating a turbo charger and, with the help of our house manager Mehrab and a local diesel mechanic, super charged the engine and lifted the suspension 3 inches so the new tires they “found” would fit the truck. Once done, they surmised the War Pig would run hot and fast on the hairpin mountain turns, which were a feature of the Kabul – Jalalabad highway, and they frequently jetted out of the front gate to drive like maniacs on the mountain roads when unsupervised.
The Skipper was a regular at the Tiki Bar every Thursday evening, drinking exactly two beers regardless of how long he stayed. The Skipper was superstitious; he insisted on driving himself, just as I did, but he was the slowest and most cautious driver I had ever seen in Afghanistan. He also never missed church on Sundays. After documenting the Twins’ comments on trigger switch construction and anomalies, he told the Twins he was heading into Khogyani district in the morning to blow some dud ordnance at the Border Police Training Academy. Friday, a weekend day in Islamic lands, should be quiet enough for them to tag along.
I agreed to join them to provide an extra hand if things went pear shaped so as dawn broke across the Nangarhar Valley on a scorching hot Friday I was poking along in The Skippers armored SUV with the twins. I was wearing body armor, with my 1911 pistol mounted in a chest holster, and I had my Bushmaster rifle with its 10.5-inch barrel and Noveske Vortex pig snout flash suppressor. We had discovered regular bird cage flash suppressors kicked too much gas and noise back into a vehicle, but the pig snout kicked it all out the end of the barrel, which resulted in a little additional muzzle flip but no gas blowing back in your eyes.
The Twins carried Glock 19s with two extra magazines in Kydex holsters, and they both sported WWII-era M3 .45-caliber Grease Guns. There were hundreds of old M3 submachine guns and 1911 pistols circulating in Afghanistan at the beginning of the War, and we had obtained more than our fair share somehow. The M3 was the only weapon that could be fired out of the muzzle port in the windshield of the War Pig. The poorly designed add-on armor from South Africa featured a V-shaped windshield with a firing port on the passenger’s side. But the angle of the bulletproof windscreen was so steep that the only weapon we could fire out of it was an M3 subgun held upside down with the bottom of the magazine facing the roof. The Twins liked them because it was easy to modulate the trigger and control them when firing on full auto.
We were poking along the hardball road leading into the foothills near Tora Bora when The Skipper stopped dead in his tracks. His Afghan EOD team driving behind him must have anticipated this because they stopped on a dime, too. “You smell that?” he asked as he opened his door, letting in an overpowering smell of cut hay and shredded leaves. His Afghans were out of their truck, looking up and down the road. The Skipper looked over at me and said, “IED”. That perked the Twins up as the Skipper explained that we should see a carpet of leaves covering the road ahead.
The road doglegged to the right, crossing a large culvert that channeled a fair-sized stream under the asphalt-paved road. The road was covered in a several-inch carpet of leaves, but I could detect no blast signature. We got out of the trucks and started looking around, trying to figure out what had happened, when an Afghan National Army (ANA) patrol pulled up with many villagers in the back of their pickups. The villagers told us there is a bomb in the culvert we’re standing on. The Afghan team leader asks what had just blown up, and an elder pointed downstream and said, ‘The man who put the bomb in the culvert.”
The Skipper was called out to arm caches like this often by locals who didn’t want their children handling old corroded Russian ordinance.
The Skipper retrieved one of those fisheye mirrors used for vehicle searches from the back of his truck, along with a powerful Surefire flashlight, and gave them to his EOD techs. One of the EOD techs lay on his belly and held the mirror in front of the drainage pipe while one of the other EOD men shined the flashlight into the culvert pipe. They spot the IED immediately – The Skipper and the Twins look and see it too; a pressure cooker on a vehicle jack stand jammed up against the top of the culvert pipe with a blasting cap inserted into a hole in the lid and wire running out of the drainage pipe heading downstream.
The Skipper called the IED into the American Army brigade headquarters at Forward Operating Base Fenty, and they instructed us to stay on scene and wait for the route clearance package to lead the EOD team out to recover the IED. The Skipper acknowledged them, but we knew waiting for the army was a non-starter. They would take at least 8 hours to roll out of the gate and another two to get to us; there was no way the ANA would keep a road closed that long. He looked at the Twins and said, “let’s blow this bitch up”. They broke into radiant smiles and immediately started organizing a work area on the tailgate of our truck.
The Skipper retrieved four bricks of C4 and handed them to the Twins, who taped them tightly while he unspooled some detonation cord. The Twins then wrapped the bricks tightly with the det cord and gave them to the Afghan EOD techs. Along with the ANA troops, they glued the charge to a piece of cardboard and then taped it to a five-gallon water jug some local kids had taken down the creek to top off.
The Twins conned The Skipper into giving up his blasting caps so they could prime the charge. The Afghan EOD men attached about 10 feet of shock tube to the charge and, using 550 cord, lowered the water jug over the mouth of the culvert. A few of the ANA troops and some local teenagers had stopped up the downstream end of the pipe that was now filling with water. The other ANA troops were with the EOD techs in the stream bed, making a big show of lining up the shot correctly. Once the shot was perfectly lined up, they threw a yellow smoke grenade into the pipe and scrambled up the stream bank.
When the smoke flowed out of the pipe, the senior Afghan EOD tech looked at the Skipper, who nodded his head while putting on a set of high-end hearing protectors. The Twins and I had foam earplugs, which we fished out of our pockets before sitting on the folding beach chairs the Skipper carries around for such occasions. With the smoke billowing out, the techs and ANA soldiers yelled ‘fire in the hole’ three times (in English) and the senior EOD man shot the charge.
The C4 went off with a giant WHOOMP; it’s a slow-burning explosive, so it doesn’t evaporate the water, but instead pushes it down the pipe at around 26,000 feet per second. The kinetic energy neutralizes the IED, and the water renders the explosive components inert. A giant gush of yellow-tinted water erupted out of the downstream end of the culvert pipe, arcing over the creek bed for about 100 feet before slamming into the trees like a wave. The water then exploded into the sky, slowly dissipating in a rainbow of colors suspended in the air for 45 seconds.
There were dozens of local people from nearby villages, and the stalled traffic, watching us, erupted in cheers, laughter, and shouts. Their kids were excitedly dancing, laughing, and clapping; local men came up to take pictures with the ANA troops and the EOD team. The Skipper looked over with a big broad smile and said to me “can you believe we get paid to do this shit”? I could not, nor could the Twins who were self-funded volunteers and not making a dime during their time in the Stan but still happy to be here with us.
The Skipper lost his dream gig in 2011 when the position was eliminated, and he moved onto the big box FOB on Bagram. His company felt it was no longer safe for him to free range outside the wire, and they were probably right. Someone in Nuristan had taken a shot at the Skipper that missed due to a low-order detonation caused by incompetent and poor waterproofing. So, despite his willingness to stay, it was time for him to go. For the three years he roamed around Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces, removing the boom from local towns and villages while making a lasting impression on the Afghans. They loved him and he, in return, posed for hundreds of pictures, while patiently fielding complaints about ISAF, the Afghan government, and various American administrations from local elders. The Skipper had balls the size of grapefruit, and he never hesitated to go into Indian Country with just his Afghan EOD crew when called.
The Skipper, like every heavily armed humanitarian I knew, made it home safe and sound after staying in Afghanistan (on FOBs) until 2015. He never talked about his free-range past because none of the people he worked with believed his stories. That was a common occurrence among us, outside-the-wire contractors in Afghanistan. Only a few of us invested the time it took to learn the language and put our skin in the game. Like the Skipper, those who did were rewarded with a veil of protection by the local people. That may have been a minor accomplishment in the big scheme of things, but it was a worthy one that came with no small amount of pride. We were able to go places and do things that would have gotten us killed ten times over had we still been in uniform. And that little bit of special pride is borne in silence by us these days because nobody believes that we lived outside the wire with the Afghans, for years, and enjoyed every minute of it.
The United States spent 54 Billion dollars on economic development and reconstruction in Afghanistan. The reconstruction effort was a comprehensive, across-the-board failure characterized by shoddy workmanship from shady contractors invariably connected to powerful national or provincial government leaders. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was the lead agency in these efforts, and they are responsible for the failure of the reconstruction battle. You will be shocked, shocked, I tell you, to learn that nobody at USAID was ever held accountable. In fact, the concept of accountability is foreign to USAID. Accountability is organic to organizations with meritocratic competence hierarchies. But meritocratic advancements, like trigonometry, two-parent households, and high standardized test scores (according to the FJB era zeitgeist), were all signs of white racism and, therefore, never considered relevant at USAID.
I was the project manager for the first US Embassy Kabul security guard contract in 2005, which included the USAID compound across the street from the Embassy. The USAID staff lived and worked in a small, tightly packed compound that was connected to the embassy by a tunnel under Masood Road. They worked long hours in tight quarters, and they had unlimited access to inexpensive, top-shelf booze. Thursday evening is the start of the weekend in Islamic lands, and Kabul provided a heady brew of wartime danger in an exotic land far from home. I got an unusually intimate look at USAID officers operating in the wild. and was not impressed. They drank too much, which is saying something coming from a retired infantry Marine.
Wheat for sale in the Qala-e-Naw Bazaar in December 2006. I was inventorying wheat stocks for USAID, and every one of those 50lb bags said, “Gift from the People of Canada to the People of Iran.” No idea what USAID thought about that, as my report was received without comment. Qala-e-Maw is the Capital of Badghis Province.
I should be grateful to USAID for funding some of the greatest adventures of my life. The 2006 Winter Emergency Food Assessment of Western Afghanistan jumps immediately to mind, as does the refurbishment of the Nimroz Province irrigation systems from 2010 – 2012. But the truth is I was working with such nominal sums (5 – 15 million annually) that our USAID supervisor was an Afghan employee. He was a good man, high in trait conscientiousness and impeccable honesty, but he refused to leave Kabul to inspect our operations. He gave us everything we asked for (in additional funding) because we finished every project on time and on budget.
Critics of international aid observe that it takes money from the poor residents of rich countries and gives it to the wealthy residents of poor countries. That certainly happened in Afghanistan, but internal corruption doesn’t explain why the billions of aid dollars spent to build infrastructure and governmental capacity produced such limited results. The failure of aid programs in Afghanistan started with money flooding into the country faster than it could be absorbed and ended with the lack of oversight in project implementation.
Every large USAID implementation partner working in Afghanistan’s countryside followed the UN Minimum Occupational Safety Standards (UN MOSS). These mandated enhanced security measures included hardened compounds with RPG screens on top of massive exterior compound walls, a hardened safe room with radio communications to regional UN security offices, armored SUVs, and personal security details provided by approved international professional military companies PMCs.
Typical CADG cash for work project targeting the central canal in Kandahar City – not the most pleasant work, but it paid well
Brand new armored SUVs drew unwanted attention and were bullet magnets in most of the country. The PMCs providing protection details knew this and limited trips outside the compound walls accordingly. Nobody expected international project managers working in places like Kandahar, Lashkar Gah, or Jalalalabad to inspect any of their multiple projects. I was working for Central Asia Development Group (CADG), a Singapore-based company owned by an American couple. They had direct implementation contracts that allowed us the freedom to ignore UNMOSS rules and travel into any area we felt had adequate security.
We found that wearing a local dress driving beat-up Toyotas, living in nondescript local compounds, and minimizing the use of English when out and about gave us the ability to safely move around contested districts. CADG Provincial managers closely supervised all projects, most of which were simple cash-for-work public works projects. We were working in highly kinetic districts in Kandahar, Helmand, Paktia, Khost, Nimroz, and Uzgon Provinces, so we traveled armed.
Panjwayi Tim (on the left and cropped out on his request) rapping some of our Gaardez workers in Pashto. Notice how the Afghan men in this completely Taliban-dominated town reacted to us when we showed up to inspect projects or pay our workers. Panjwayi Tim was out of Kandahar, and also my boss in 2009 and always happy to help out on paydays (which were dangerous).
Our projects were manpower intensive, so paydays involved Retrieving between $70,000 to $100,000 in American dollars from a local bank, driving it to a company compound, and converting it into low-denomination Afghani. Transporting suitcases full of Afghani to the payday site, which was normally the city mayor’s compound. Then, holding a pay call for 5,000 Afghan laborers. Moving large sums of money around Jalalabad, Lashka Ghar, or Kandahar was inherently dangerous. Moving large amounts out into rural projects or deep into the Dasht-e Margo (Desert of Death, which was an intensely cool place to visit) was even more dangerous.
Our USAID manager in Kabul steadily increased our annual budgets and approved every project we submitted. I was moved down to Lashkar Gah in 2010 to be the Southwest Regional Manager for the USAID-funded Community Development Program. There was a USAID officer stationed with the British PRT there who immediately reprimanded me for carrying a pistol. He then explained to me how project approvals were now going to work because the British Aid Agency was in charge, and they had different protocols for project approval. The next day, I flew out to Camp Leatherneck to talk to the Marines. I was sent to the G9 and told him I had 20 million in USAID Community Development funds and planned to spend all of it in Nimroz Province, where the Brits and USAID had no say in what I did.
The only way to earn a seat at this table is consistent, competent performance over a span of years, not months. The idea of leaving a protected firm base to participate in culturally enriching events like the gladiator fights that dedicated this fine stadium my team and I built was inconceivable to USAID managers.
We didn’t really see gladiator fights but impressive Taekwondo demonstrations from the local youth clubs.
I was a big fan of the governor of Nimroz, Abdul Karim Brahui. Governor Brahui was a graduate of the Kabul military academy who founded and commanded the Jabha-e Nimruz (Nimroz Front) as part of the Mujahedeen Southern Alliance against both the Soviet army and the Taliban. He was a lead-from-the-front commander and the rare Afghan politician who concerned himself more with the people’s problems than accumulating additional power and wealth.
Explaining my understanding of how USAID works to the Governor of Nimroz Province
Governor Brahui was as close to an honest politician as one could be in Zaranj, given that the local economy revolved around plastic jerry cans. They were used to smuggle petrol or heroin across the border or to haul water from various sources for sale to one of the two municipal water treatment plants. Teenage boys selling petrol or diesel out of 5-gallon jerry cans dotted every major road in the city. The only way to generate income in Nimroz was to fix their massive, district-level irrigation systems.
We built a large main irrigation canal in Charborjak district that extended 56 kilometers and services every farming hamlet in the district. We were going to do 60 kilometers but ran into a minefield at the tail end of the canal and could not find a way around it.
The easiest and fastest project was the Chakhansor district because the Khashrod River, which fed the irrigation system, was dry for most of the year. Using 1,500 local laborers, we rehabilitated 300 kilometers of canals and rebuilt a 170-meter reinforced concrete check dam to capture the spring run-off. The Chakhansor irrigation system served 7,200 farms, and the first post-project wheat and melon harvests yielded outputs three times greater than pre-project averages. The Baloch of Nimroz no longer had to import melons from Kandahar, and if you knew how much Afghans love melons (which are excellent), you would understand the significance of that accomplishment, and we weren’t even getting started.
Opening ceremonies for the Charborjak irrigation system.
The Chakhansor district project was completed by Mullah John while I was still in Jalalabad. With the large fiscal year 2010 budget, we could do both Charborjak and Kang districts simultaneously, which would mitigate some of the heavy equipment costs. That year, we built 400 miles of irrigation canals, turning 25,000 acres of the Dasht-e Margo into highly productive farmland, allowing the Baloch to get in on the poppy boom. We hired over 18,000 workers to dig these canals in the middle of the desert where the temperature could hit 120° daily.
Opening the Kang district irrigation system.
The key to completing these so quickly was we were replacing systems, not building new ones, and we hired as many of the engineers who had built the original weirs and dams as we could find. The only problem with this massive project was the USAID stipulation that no material originating from Iran could be used in the construction. Instead of using high-quality Iranian concrete at $5.00 per 50lb bag, we were supposed to import low-quality concrete from Pakistan, which the State Department insisted was our ally. We worked around that somehow, I don’t remember the details, and finished on time and on budget. But we had a problem: the Helmand River was low due to maintenance at the Kajaki Dam, so our new intake check dam dammed the damn river.
We arrive at the ceremony site – you can see dust trails from the escorts who have been working the flanks and are just now crossing the Helmand. Which is dry downstream. Because we built a check dam that is apparently checking the entire river at the moment.
Only after I inadvertently dammed the Helmand River did USAID and the Brits in Lashkar Gah find out I had built two regional irrigation systems, and they were furious. But I had been working for the Marines, and the Colonel running the G9 shop ran cover for me because that’s what Marines do. He also attacked USAID for not doing anything in Nimroz Province except cancel the one Women Empowerment Program that actually worked. The Baloch people dominated Nimroz Province, and they had different cultural expectations for their women who wore the Iranian Chador, not the Afghan Burqa
One of our Zaranj students in our USAID-sponsored rug weaving class. We ran several training programs for women that were ended by USAID, who wanted us to stop training women in order to “build capacity,” whatever that meant.
This takes arrogance and hubris to new levels, revealing exactly how reckless USAID officials were in producing propaganda that enraged local Afghans. Rather than spend a few thousand dollars setting up Afghan women to run their own beauty shops or rug-weaving companies, we spent millions on a handful of elite young women to participate in a meaningless feel-good competition that placed their families and everyone associated with the effort in mortal danger when we cut and ran.
I’m all about providing technical training to Afghan kids of both genders, but you have to do this from the ground up, not the top down. Jalalabad kids in the MIT-sponsored FabLab. August 2008
This little girl would have never received a minute of academic instruction if it were not for the MIT grad students who ran the FabLab. She damn sure would have never received the opportunity to be on a USAID-sponsored computer team, although she developed skills that could have got her a spot; her parents were dirt poor farmers, not connected Kabul elites.
USAID did a great job taking money from the poor residents of America and giving it to the wealthy residents of Afghanistan. They spent 20 years inside a little Kabul compound from which they never ventured and created an alternative reality for themselves where workshops on women’s rights and protections for the LGBTQ community made perfect sense. They endangered the lives of the elite children they showcased in international events like the robotic competitions while ignoring the needs of the rest of the children in Afghanistan. USAID will disappear from the international stage without a whimper; they will not be missed, and hopefully, most of them will find their way into 12-step programs. Fat, drunk, and stupid is not a recipe for the good life, and there are thousands of swamp creatures about to find that out.
The Catholic Relief Charities scam has finally gained the attention of the legacy media. Not for the billions of federal tax dollars they have been given but a video from Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee on how to avoid ICE detention. Lawyer Barb Graham made the video, and she opens with the following:
“All people living in the United States, including people who are undocumented, have certain rights under the United States Constitution,”
That is total bull-Schiff. Illegal aliens have no constitutional rights because they are not citizens of the United States. But that’s not the issue that the public has focused on; it’s the 2.9 Billion taxpayer dollars that FJB gave the charities sex-traffic women and children on behalf of Mexican drug cartels. But this tawdry situation was remedied this morning by the Secretary of Homeland Security, who cut all government funding to NGOs and religious charities that have been making bank on trafficking illegal migrants. The government is not known for the timely payment of invoices, and I doubt those currently being processed will be paid.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is heading out into the wilds of New York City, leading ICE raids. After this demonstration of competent leadership, she returned to DC and cut all the funding to the NGOs who have facilitated four years of open border madness. Photo from Reuters January 28, 2025
Catholic Charities is a tax-exempt charity, which means we can see its financials on Charity Navigator. Charity Navigator loves Catholic Charities, designating them a 100% four-star charity. But there is an obvious discrepancy in the financials. A 2021 ProPublica audit of Catholic Charities USA concluded:
The group’s local affiliates were taking in a total of nearly $2.9 billion annually from the government — representing about 62% of its $4.67 billion annual revenue.
Charity Navigator lists Catholic Charities USA’s 2021 revenue as 50 million. ProPublica contends it was 4.67 Billion. Clearly, shenanigans are happening at Charity Navigator, which is a shame; I once trusted that site. But who cares about Charity Navigator? I’d like to know how Catholic Charities accounts for the disbursement of 4.67 billion dollars. That is a mountain of money; there is a slim chance that Catholic Charities can account for it.
These are Catholic Charities financials on the Charity Navigator website.
These are the federal tax dollars given to Catholic Charities according to the website usaspending.gov
Catholic Charities USA President Kerry Robinson issued a statement yesterday saying:
“The millions of Americans who rely on this life-giving support will suffer due to the unprecedented effort to freeze federal aid supporting these programs,”
Even more bull-Schiff that reveals the profound disconnect between words and action in the “humanitarian” space. It is clear from the actions of Catholic Charities that they are not concerned with the plight of poor Americans. If they were, they would not be facilitating the influx of tens of millions of dirt-poor, unskilled migrants who are controlled, exploited and abused by the drug cartels who trafficked them across the border. These migrants will drive down wages, drive up crime and housing while straining public schools and other municipal resources. All of these follow on effects impact working class Americans, not the elites who head tax exempt charities or billion dollar NGO’s.
Catholic Charities RGV is closed in McAllen, and now that Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act has been invoked, every illegal the Border Patrol catches is bounced back across the border the same day.
So what motivates the “humanitarians” of Catholic Charities USA? It’s not caring for the poor . . . obviously. They may have a few under-resourced programs for the poverty-stricken in the Rio Grande Valley, but the FJB administration wasn’t paying them billions to spend on poor American citizens. That money was to facilitate a massive flow of unvetted aliens from 130 different countries who will draw massive resources away from the American citizens who needed it the most. Using dirt-poor migrants to enrich well-heeled, connected democrat cronies is not something the American taxpayer should tolerate, let alone fund.
Election Day was long and busy as I was the judge for the Cayetano Cavazos Elementary School polling station. This is a blue county, and I was appointed an election judge because I was one of the few Republicans who volunteered to work the polls. Shout out to the Vet the Vote organization, which is where I got the idea to volunteer. Regardless of political affiliation, the people working this election were professional, conscientious, and pleasant to be around. It was a fantastic experience.
Throughout election day, I was asked if I was a veteran, and when I confirmed I was a retired Marine, I was thanked for my service. That made me uncomfortable because our failure to win the Global War on Terrorism has left this country in much greater peril than it was in 2001. Not only did we do exactly what Osama bin Ladin predicted, which was to fight a long war we could never win, only to withdraw in humiliating disgrace. But we degraded our military capabilities and are now ruining the fighting spirit of the fighting men at the pointed end of the spear.
Our military is a broken, demoralized joke that cannot meet its recruiting or retention goals. When I enlisted in the Navy in 1978, the military was considered a hollow force, but that force was full of mean bastards who could fight. And we had the ships, combat aircraft, and officer corps required to take those rowdy misfits into a fight and crush any other adversary in the world. Now, we have a diverse force with women in the infantry and trans moralism making a mockery of the profession of arms. We no longer have the sea lift or aircraft to meet our peacetime obligations, let alone fight a peer-level war.
Battalion Landing Team 1/9 exercising in Australia during the summer of 1987. The Marine Corps can no longer insert and sustain a battalion in the field from Amphibious shipping. A task that was routine when I was on active duty. Photograph of 2ndLt Lynch and my radioman LCpl Kline courtesy of Marines magazine.
Our Navy has shrunk to the point it can no longer control the busiest shipping lane in the world. Instead of using the Red Sea, commercial ships are now re-routed around the horn of Africa, adding 3500 nautical miles to their transit, which takes 12 extra days and a million extra fuel dollars per trip. The Navy can only field 12 Amphibious ships worldwide because a former Marine Corps Commandant reduced the number of amphibious ships the Navy was required to maintain from 38 to 31. He did this to free up money for the Navy to build a new class of ships called Landing Ship Medium, which would support his Force Design 2030 plan. Those ships have not been designed, funded, or built and will never be because of this harsh rebuke from the Congressional Research Service over the ludicrous FD 2030 concept.
The Navy/Marine Corps team can no longer perform the missions they have been assigned for the past 85 years. Now that President Trump is returning, Congress suddenly has buyer’s remorse for agreeing to the radical reorganization it allowed under the commandants Berger and Smith. This article by a former mentor to officers of my generation, Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC (Ret), sums up the state of play well. I’m pasting his last two paragraphs below because they describe exactly how we ended up with a broken Marine Corps.
There are two types of incompetents, active and passive. Active incompetents don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they act on the zany ideas. Passive incompetents know that they don’t know what they are doing. They are dangerous because they tend to defer to the active incompetents.
Berger and Smith are active incompetents. Biden and Congress have been passive incompetents. Shame on them. If Congress acted today to repair the Navy and Marine Corps and return it back to 2018 capabilities, it would take at least a decade to recover. Our civilian leaders were sold snake oil, and the rubes bought it.
Those same rubes are now plotting to undermine President-elect Trump. These are the same people who had no problem abandoning Bagram airbase when FJB arbitrarily and recklessly cut the troop numbers in Afghanistan. Without Bagram, there was no way to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan in an orderly manner. Everyone (not inside the Pentagon) who knew anything about Afghanistan recognized that total abdication of service stewardship. The resulting fiasco in Kabul was as easy to predict as it was uncomfortable to watch.
General Furness and Mac hosting me for the 2011 Marine Corps Birthday at Camp Dwyer in the southern Helmand province
However, all is not lost because these two fighting generals, LtGen Dave Furness, USMC (Ret) and MajGen Dale Alford, USMC (Ret), who know how to train and lead Marines, may have been sidelined, but they are not forgotten. They are featured in this All Marine Radio podcast that dropped yesterday, and listening to them is a tonic for the souls of concerned military professionals. It is worth listening to if you (like me) are alarmed by the current state of our military and think the current crop of general officers are a collection of sycophantic yes-men. LtGen Furness tells me the other services still have talent hidden in their flag officer ranks, too, which is remarkable given the ongoing war on competence being waged by DoD diversity/equity mandarins.
I made the mistake of listening to this while lifting weights and damn near broke my back when LTGen Furness popped off with, “I’m just happy somebody gives a shit about what I have to say.” Listening to two of the best generals of my generation will instill some much-needed confidence in today’s broke-ass military.
Have a Happy Veterans Day, and let us hope the incoming Trump administration taps these two retired generals or others just like them to resuscitate our broken, demoralized military.
As I’ve grown older and wiser, I still haven’t wised up about joking with dated material. Last year, when physical therapists were torturing me after shoulder surgery, I would start to sing Roxanne, hoping they would stop the torture for some red light therapy. The PT techs had no idea what I was talking about. They had never heard of The Police or their hit song, Roxanne. They ignored my suggestions about using Red Light Therapy, preferring a more active, painful physical approach. For that, I’m grateful. My shoulder has healed nicely, and I’m back in the gym almost daily because I don’t have anything better to do.
Except during the election season because I volunteered to be an Election Judge. Here Comes the Judge is America’s first Meme and was a staple of the old Rowman and Martins Laugh-In show, which was popular in the late 60’s. It’s the first thing I thought of when a Hidalgo County Election Supervisor I call Neo, called me to ask if I’d like to be a judge instead of a poll worker. Neo isn’t the supervisor’s real name, but he only communicates to me through texts, which for some reason seem Matrix-like.
Democrats have the media, academia, the billionaires, the Yellow Generals, and the Deep State. We have the memes
I volunteered for election duty, hoping it would instill some long-lost confidence in our civic governance. I am terrified that the Democrats will steal this election, which, given the disaster of the Biden-Harris years, seems impossible. I live in the Rio Grande Valley, which has long been a Democratic stronghold but is now firmly Trump territory, given his massive appeal to working and middle-class Hispanic men. So, I was interested in seeing how the votes would be tabulated and if there was a chance for voter fraud or other shenanigans.
One of the many things to be thankful for is not seeing this kind of BS ever again. Propaganda is designed to demoralize, and nothing demoralizes me more than seeing a nitwit LARPing on the taxpayer’s dime.
We don’t have dominion voting machines in the valley; we use Verity Duo voting machines with touchscreen voting that produce paper ballots. Those ballots are then scanned into a separate Duo machine that is not connected to the internet or the voting machines and then end up in a locked ballot box that can only be opened at the county election office. The system seems as fraud-proof as one could make it because the paper ballots are the only thing that counts, and if the hand count varies from the scanner count, then all hell breaks loose at the county election headquarters.
The Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley overwhelmingly support the Catholic Church and are not amused by Dem anti-catholic propaganda. This idiot woman cost Harris votes.
The only organized election fraud in the Rio Grande Valley comes from Politiqueras. These are teams of vote harvesters funded by Democrats that prey on the older Hispanic population in regional colonias, nursing homes, or adult daycare centers. This year, the Texas Office of the Attorney General’s Election Integrity Division is actively hunting these ballot harvesters, so I do not believe they can inject enough bogus ballots into the system to make any difference.
The Hunter Biden laptop disinformation campaign by our so-called intelligence agencies was clearly election interference, and those responsible should be held to account. But they won’t because you know why.
In Texas, there is no electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place, including clothing supporting a specific candidate or political party. I have yet to see a voter show up with a MAGA hat, and I doubt that it will be a problem if one does. Nobody mistakes me for a Harris supporter, and I’m so damn cheerful I doubt anyone will argue with me when I ask that the hat be removed while they vote. The only issue I have had is with college-aged women who want to document everything they do with their cell phones. The dad in me wants to plead with them to wear more clothes because they tend to be grossly overweight. But I simply ask they refrain from taking photographs in the voting area and they pout but put the phones away. There are no policemen assigned to our polling location, and there is no need for them. The voting public in the RGV is friendly, happy, and content with the integrity of the county voting system.
In order to be a serious country with a functioning military and state department, this kind of bullshit has to stop.
I’ve been checking in voters, and it has been a delightful experience. Voters step up to my table and present their driver’s license. I enter the first four letters of the last name, the first three of their first name, and their date of birth. Their name and address appear 98% of the time, indicating they are registered to vote. A label printer attached to my laptop prints off their name and address, and I paste that into my voters’ log, ask them to verify everything is correct, and sign. A second label contains a bar code that the Verity Duo scan machine reads, which then spits out a six-digit code for use at the ballot machines. The voter enters that code and votes, and when finished, the machine spits out a printed ballot with the voter’s name and information and the votes they have cast.
I remain concerned about voter irregularities throwing the election to the worst Presidential candidate I have ever seen. I am also worried that the deep state will not step aside and accept the will of the American people when they vote President Trump back into office. But I am glad I volunteered to work this election because it restored my faith in my fellow citizens and local government. I doubt I’ll ever have the same degree of confidence in the federal government, but four years of Trump and JD Vance would be a good start.
Once again, highly classified American intelligence documents have been published on the Internet. This was not a massive leak by some low-level enlisted soldier or disgruntled contractor but a focused leak of two intelligence products regarding Israel’s current preparations to strike Iran. The documents are revealing for several reasons. The first is that they reveal our intelligence community’s sources and methods, which is bad. Second, Israel no longer trusts the Biden-Harris administration and isn’t telling them anything about its current or future operations, which is good.
An excellent summary of the situation can be found on John Schindler’s Top Secret Umbra substack. It is worth reading to understand how serious the leak is and who inside the Biden-Harris most likely leaked the material. The most likely culprit, a POS named Rob Malley, couldn’t be the leaker as his security clearance was revoked in 2003 for spying for Iran. During that investigation, he was caught lying to the FBI, so guess what happened to him? Not one damn thing because Rob Malley was the architect of Obama’s 2015 Iran deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Laws in Obama-Biden-Harris America only apply to the little people or associates of President Trump.
President Trump demonstrated geostrategic common sense by placing the interests of the American people over the “legacy” of Obama when he canceled the JCPOA. President Biden demonstrated partisanship over common sense and complete disinterest in the safety and security of America by trying to resurrect the JCPOA but ended up with a spy scandal centered on Malley instead.
Note the difference between the treatment of General Michael Flynn, who was tricked into a supposed lie by nefarious FBI shenanigans, and Rob Malley, who was and is a straight-up traitor. The rule of law in America today is non-existent if you’re a Democrat. If you’re a patriot who served this country with distinction for 35 years in uniform and a Trump supporter, you will be prosecuted and financially ruined for the most trivial offenses.
General Flynn was instrumental in setting up the Eclipse Group, a private spy network providing desperately needed human intelligence (HUMINT) in Afghanistan. The Eclipse Group was created by a former CIA legend, Dewey Clarridge, who knew the CIA could not deliver HUMINT for several reasons, including institutional risk aversion. You can see that for yourself by watching the CIA get taken to the cleaners in a bogus HUMINT operation on the NETFLIX series Spy Ops. My post explaining that ludicrous operation (the segment is titled Taliban Spies) is here.
Eclipse started operations after my recruiter, Willi 1, and I (Willi 4) met with some senior CENTCOM staffers in Dubai in July 2009. Not long after we started, Kabul’s CIA station chief sent cables to Langley, complaining vociferously about our activities. Nobody in the Pentagon or CENTCOM gave a shit what the CIA had to say about us because they sucked and weren’t providing anything useful to the military. The CIA then turned to their favorite New York Times reporters Matt Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins, who wrote several articles full of half-truths, outright lies, and innuendo. The articles referred to my friend Willi 1 and me (my source code was Willi 4) as “commercial Jason Bourne’s,” which we found amusing.
After driving the Khyber Pass from Jalalabad, the Commercial Jason Bournes Chilling in Peshawar, Pakistan.
But this post isn’t about that I want to explain what a legitimate HUMINT operation looks like by lifting some material from my unpublished book Free Ranging Afghanistan. On the morning of September 26, 2010, I received a panicked call from the senior Afghan official who ran my spy ring in Regional Command East, comprised of Nuristan, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Laghman provinces. He told me he was on his way to my guesthouse with bad news about the kidnapping of an aid worker. He had been told one of the women working for DAI, a large American aid implementor, had been kidnapped on the Asadabad to Jalalabad highway. That was incorrect as I knew DAI personnel would never be allowed to drive that highway and, being a USAID implementor, would have had an armed ex-pat personal security detail. But I knew exactly who would be on the road without an armed escort, and that was one of the girls working for the Idea New program, and there was only one of those: Linda Norgrave.
In 2010 I was working as a heavily armed humanitarian for the Central Asia Development Group (CADG), doing massive irrigation and cash-for-work projects in the cities of Jalalabad, Asadabad, and Gardez. CADG was a “direct implementation” outfit, which meant we did not have ex-pat security teams, B6 armored SUVs, or UN Minimum Occupational Security Standard (UNMOSS) rated living compounds. Idea New was also a direct implementation outfit that was associated with DAI, and they lived and worked out of the DAI Jalalabad compound.
I was at my guesthouse, The Taj, which contained a Tiki Bar that we opened every Thursday evening for the international community (mostly aid workers) that was then thriving in Jalalabad. Like every other international working in Nangarhar province, the British ex-pats working for Idea New came over with the DAI crew every Thursday evening for happy hour. One night, my Aussie wingman Ski and I listened to their program manager explain their modus operandi, explicitly mentioning his belief that being armed was ridiculous, but we said nothing. He went on to challenge us on the wisdom of an armed westerner trying to fight his way out of a Taliban ambush, and we still said nothing. We never thought we could fight off a Taliban ambush on our own, but Linda was not taken in an ambush. She was kidnapped by Taliban associates on a main road, something that would never happen to us. Gun-wielding Westerners introduced a lot of friction into a kidnapping equation, which was the point of being armed.
I immediately emailed Willi 1 and Dewey to explain that Linda Norgrove was a British national working for the American USAID contractor DAI on the Idea New program. Idea New duplicated our (CADG) technique of low-profile unarmored cars, singleton international program managers, wearing local dress, attempting to blend in with the locals as much as possible, etc…, but they were not armed. Dewey called me on Skype which he (incorrectly) thought the NSA couldn’t hack to ask what we had, which wasn’t much. He told me to stand by to support one of Willi 3’s assets, which was inbound and might need comms, guns, or money.
As was typical for Willi 3’s network, his guy found the kidnappers by the 29th of September and passed on their names, some fuzzy cell phone pictures, their chain of command, and a working theory for the kidnapping. The crew that had grabbed Linda had been identified in my order of battle reporting a month prior when they arrived from Pakistan, and that report was added to our targeting package. Willi’s access agent linked up with us, and he was exhausted. We let him sleep for a day, fed and refitted him with serious walking around money before he returned to Kunar.
Dewey passed our reporting onto both MI6 and the American DIA; the Brits read everything we wrote, and the Americans ignored everything we sent. President Obama talked the British Prime Minister into allowing the American military to take over the case because the Regional Command (RC East) was 100% American. On the 30th of September, the American military took over the kidnapping case. On the 1st of October, I received a call from the RC East Human Terrain Team asking me to come in to “talk with a friend.”
“About fucking time,” was my curt response.
Thirty minutes later, I was introduced to a DIA agent in the Human Terrain Team office. He looked like every other DIA agent I had met: bearded, in his mid-30s, slim, fit, and wary. I was taken to a separate office so we could talk alone, and the first question he asked was if I knew Linda Norgrove. I was stunned and looked at him hard to see if he was jerking my chain. I then asked a question I hated asking: “Do you know who I am”? He did not; he claimed to have never heard of the Eclipse Group, Dewey Clarridge, or the Pentagon private spy ring. It appeared he was telling the truth, not that I cared, so I asked what they had so far, and he said the grid where her car was found. I didn’t believe that for a second but didn’t care because I came bearing gifts.
Instead of trying to explain the mountain of information we had on the kidnapping – primarily via Willie 3’s excellent network, we walked down to the Human Terrain Team office, where my friend Kerry Patton lent us his desktop computer. I pulled up our AfPakrp.org website and scrolled to report #825, which was a summation of reports 820, 823, and 824, and cross-referenced report 621a, which was when the Taliban kidnap team leader, Mawlvi Baseer, first popped up on my network. Dewey had resorted to putting our products on a password-protected internet site after the New York Times hit pieces successfully ended our original contract. With the loss of the contract, we lost our man in Kabul, who had been placed there specifically to feed our intel products into the ISAF intelligence flow.
Ski and I jocked up for a trip into Kunar Province. Do we look like dudes you can kidnap during the day?
The DIA agent was stunned; Kerry said, “I told you, man, you should have listened to us sooner; these guys are the shit.” I told him to call me if he had any additional questions, knowing he had a lot to digest and would want to hustle over to the CIA building on the other side of the airfield. He asked me if there was anything he could do for me, so I requested a case of German sparkling mineral water. I had heard through the grapevine that the CIA had flown in hundreds of cases..
On October 3rd, I asked for another meeting to inform my DIA contact our guy was at the outer cordon in the upper Dewagal Valley and about to slip into the village of Dineshga, where he thought Mawlvi Baseer was keeping Linda. I gave him our agent’s Thuraya sat phone number and the three cell numbers he had recently reported for the head kidnapper, Baseer. On the 6th of October, our spy was back outside the cordon, having located Linda. The DIA called me in because they had intercepted his sat phone calls and now knew where Linda was. When I arrived at FOB Fenty, the DIA agent was almost giddy with excitement and gave me a case of German sparkling mineral water from the CIA stash.
He asked if we could send our access agent back inside Dineshga to identify Linda’s exact location. Willi 3 had anticipated this and already agreed to send his man back. I asked how the SEALs would ID our guy as friend, not foe, and was told I’d be briefed on exactly how to do that when the time came. I knew that was bullshit, as did Willi 3. Our man went back, made an innocuous sat phone call from just outside the building housing Linda, and then rapidly exited the scene. A few hours later, the SEALS launched and raided the compound we had identified as containing Linda. In the ensuing melee, one of the SEALs accidentally killed her with a fragmentation grenade when he mistook her for an armed combatant.
At that time, I had been living in Afghanistan for four years. Willi 3 had lived there off and on for over thirty years. Human Intelligence operators working in a country like Afghanistan needed to have years of time on deck before they could become remotely proficient at gathering legitimate intelligence. Without that deep knowledge and relationships forged over years and years, any attempt at creating a spy ring would result in getting taken to the cleaners by willy Afghans, as demonstrated by the ridiculous Netflix show, or taken out back and shot in the head.
With four years of continuous service in the country, I qualified as a trusted liaison with ISAF and to outfit and harbor an access agent. I could have never found Linda with my assets, which were considerable back when the Pentagon paid us regularly. Willi 3 was the only Eclipse operative I knew (and I knew only four of the dozens in Eclipse) who had the ability to conduct human intelligence operations at that level. He was fluent in Dari and Pashto and had spent enough time developing the relationships required to run legitimate HUMINT spy rings.
Our intelligence agencies are incapable of duplicating the Eclipse Group because they refuse to put in the time on the ground or accept the risk that comes with living and working with the Afghans. The night we lost Linda, I was stopped and detained by Unit 02 – the CIA-sponsored Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Team for Nangarhar Province. But that’s a story another time – if you want to hear it, hit me up in the comments section.
The modern federal bureaucracy goes by many names: The Swamp, The Blob, the Permanent Managerial Class, or The Deep State. These pejorative terms describe a federal government exercising tremendous power without any responsibility or accountability. A citizen cannot debate federal “experts” because they resort to the Argumentum ad Verecundiam Fallacy. The argument for authority retort means federal bureaucrats do not have to use logic or reason when dismissing inconvenient facts because they are the authorities. Concerned citizens have no standing with them because they hold no significance to them; their power stems from the state, and their allegiance lies with the state.
Federal bureaucrats unquestionably accept open borders, massive wealth redistribution, radical gender politics, and an unthinking acceptance of the climate-change agenda. If you think any portion of the federal government is going to get more competent or more adept at problem-solving, you are smoking crack. Two recent news items illustrate why, despite reading The Daily Stoic every morning and knowing that anger and contempt are destructive to the soul, I can no longer read the news with equanimity. My early morning attempts at meditation are futile as my heart yearns to start slitting throats and terrorizing the faceless, unaccountable soft men who are creating hard times for every American not connected to the rent-seeking Permanent Managerial Class.
Elon Musk has been telling the funniest stories about his dealings with the National Marine Fisheries Service. That federal agency was suddenly concerned that Elon’s rockets might hit sharks and hurt them, so they demanded a study. SpaceX scientists complied because they had to conduct probability studies that the Feds didn’t understand, but the executive summary assured them that the sharks would be fine. They then asked about the Whales; the results were the same. They then directed Elon to kidnap some seals and test what happens if you put headphones on them and blast rocket noises. An experiment that constitutes animal cruelty, which some states prosecute as a felony.
This story of strangulation by over-regulation from @elonmusk about the government requiring @SpaceX to asses whether their rockets could potentially hit SHARKS and WHALES is side-splittingly hilarious. ? pic.twitter.com/E06XIJm7zy
Why the sudden concern about the effect of rocket launches on the coastal seals at Vandenberg Space Force Base? That base has been launching rockets since 1941. It routinely launches rockets so large that you can see them from Las Vegas, which I witnessed myself in 2000 during a nighttime training event at the old Frontsight Firearms Training Center. So why does Elon need to torture seals when the base’s business is launching rockets? You know why. Elon must be punished for supporting the Bad Orange Man and revealing the worthless, bloated (but diverse!) NASA is incompetent and fiscally irresponsible.
Where is the concern for all the dead whales that have been washing up on the eastern seaboard since 2016? A quick check of Gaslight Central (a.k.a. Google) reveals hundreds of articles about the mass die-off of whales, many of them from the New York Times, that tell us “experts” from the National Marine Fisheries Service have no idea, not one clue, about why this is happening. They do, however, note a healthy percentage of dead whales showed signs of ship strikes. Logic would dictate that ships didn’t suddenly start striking whales in 2016; one would suspect that ship strikes have always been a concern. But using logic and reason when dealing with our federal overlords is now a sign of racism. Don’t believe me? Read this bit of anti-white propaganda from the Wall Street Journal “Western Logic is Merely White-Privilege Oppression.
So why the unprecedented die-off? It can’t possibly be the loud, high-decibel sonar emitted by wind industry vessels or the wind industry’s increased boat traffic, which appears to correlate directly with specific whale deaths. How do we know that can’t possibly be the case? CNN and The New York Times say so; they’re the authorities. They also “inform us” that President Trump believes the wind industry is responsible, which they use instead of logic or reason to dismiss the argument out of hand. They think “we the people” are stupid. I think “we the people” are tired of the gaslighting bullshit that passes as informed opinion in The Deep State. It’s time for them to face the consequences of their blatant partisanship and consistent incompetence, and the only way that will happen is by Trump getting a fraud-proof majority at the polls.
I join the freedom-loving peoples of the world in congratulating the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for eliminating the genocidal bastard Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar was the head of Hamas and claimed that when the time came, he would stand and fight, dying as a martyr. When the time came, he was running away with a fake ID and a pocket of donor dollars, hoping to go to the ground in Rafa. You remember Rafa, the town the spinless cowards running the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Egypt told the Israelis to avoid. Cackling Kamala even warned Israel about Rafa, saying, “She had studied the maps,” whatever that meant.
Yahya Shin-was after playing a game of FAFO with a competent military.
Israel is modeling the consequences of valuing competence over diversity in national leadership, intelligence organizations, and a hard-fighting army. They are not constrained by ridiculous rules of engagement from on high. Compare and contrast what we have watched the IDF do over the past year to how we handled fighting terrorists embedded inside Afghan communities. This conversation between Shawn Ryan and Nick “The Reaper” Irving is most informative on that exact topic. You should watch all five hours of this podcast to understand the quality of the human capital wasted by our feckless national leaders and their yellow generals.
West Point and the Naval Academy will roll into the weekend with undefeated football teams. If you look at those teams, you will notice they resemble Israeli combat formations in that they are all male. Our military leadership insists that there are no differences between men and women in mental capacity or physical strength despite several millennia of human experiences and our own lying eyes.
Men and women are born with dramatically different capabilities, which can be seen every time a woman’s national soccer team is beaten by an under-15 boys’ squad. It’s not polite to mention that fact, which most of us find merely amusing. But when women are inserted into ground combat units, the delusions of our elites are no longer funny. One of the many reasons our military faces a recruiting and retention crisis is this callous disregard for the lives of enlisted men who are saddled with females in combat zones.
The boys who thumped the women’s team were Texans which might explain it maybe. . .
Let me tell you about women in combat. On a warm summer day, I witnessed a Marine Corps patrol walking through the Nawa Bazaar in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. I could see the point man was furious, as were the men behind him, and stopped to watch. Then I saw why; the men were carrying the weapons and body armor of their female “Lioness” Marines. The women were stumbling in a gap-mouthed stupor, hanging onto the body armor of the man in front of them. The locals crowding the bazaar were laughing and openly mocking the Marines. It was such a sad spectacle that I couldn’t take a picture of it; I was too embarrassed
What’s the current perception of the Marine Corps Lioness program? A quick Google search reveals dozens of articles about the trailblazing female Marines or the Special Ops: Lionesses TV show. That TV show stars Zoe Saldaña, who is 45, Nicole Kidman, who is 56, and Morgan Freeman, who is still kicking at 86. Can you imagine people that old on the battlefield? It’s a joke, insulting to our intelligence, but it’s a reality for too many of the idiots comprising our elite managerial class.
So, how is the recent deployment of paratroopers into the Middle East going? Unlike my deployment to Beirut in 1983, the current mission is not the subject of informed debate in the regime media. We have no idea where these troops are or what they are doing. Everything the Pentagon does now is top secret. Whatever these troops are doing, it does not impact the conflict that allegedly caused their deployment. One more display of gross incompetence at the national command level.
The Marine Corps Lioness program paid dividends only because our generals were incapable of the tactical adaptation of warning residents in targeted areas to get out before we came in. No military in history has done more to prevent civilian collateral damage than the Israelis. But once warned by them, the civilians who stay risk becoming collateral damage because the Israelis prioritized winning battles and preserving their troops over rules of engagement designed to appease their political masters.
Congressional cowards reacting to protestors who are not from Antifa or Black Lives Matter or unhinged women shrieking at conservative Supreme Court nominees.
The IDF is delivering a master class on intelligence operations and conducting ground combat operations. There are no women at the pointy end of their spear, just as there are no women from Ukraine or Russia slugging it out in the trenches of Ukraine.
There shouldn’t have been any American women at the pointy end of our spear during the 20 years we spent replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. But our senior generals aren’t as competent as Isleali generals, so they came up with workarounds that made female congresspeople swoon while leaving our best warriors like Nick Irving alone, exposed, and unable to call in the fire support they needed to survive. A military organization that places winning collegiate football games over the lives of its soldiers and Marines is not worthy of our support or admiration. They have earned nothing but our contempt.
