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.
The Reynosa tiger has, unfortunately, been captured on our side of the Rio Grande. I thought that it had most likely been stolen by one of the cartels but I was wrong. Although it entered the river opposite the Junk Yard Bar in Granjeno it was driven west by the border walls (not hard to predict) and probably exited the border wall belt at the Bensten State Park. The cat then worked the scrub lands making a beeline for Star County where there are plenty of cattle and scores of wild Ocelots. It was trapped outside the hamlet of Los Longoria most likely by Texas Game Wardens. It will probably be returned to the Quinta La Fauna Zoo which, given Mexico’s international ranking of #3 for animal abuse is a crime against nature, but property rights, not animal rights, animates our legal system so I suspect there is little choice in the matter.
If the tiger had made it across expressway 83 he would have been home free in Star County
I have been asked by several of my former Marine Corps associates how I could support President Trump after his competency, executive skills, and temperament were called into question by the four-star Marine Corps and Army Generals who worked for him. The answer is as simple as it is infuriating, they dumped on Trump only because it was well inside the Overton Window of our failed intelligentsia and its rent-seeking nomenklatura. Those four-star conformists would have never, in a million years, done the same to Obama, Clinton, or Biden because that would jeopardize their access to the riches showered upon the upper echelons of our ruling class. It doesn’t matter that Obama’s surge with its announced end date was exactly the kind of White House incompetence that they railed against as junior field grade officers. It doesn’t matter that they despised Willy BJ when he was in the White House for his gross sexual assault on an unpaid intern. If you asked about the disparity in power between a sitting president and an unpaid intern, which is the modern definition of rape, their answer would be it’s time to move on.
The last time I saw two of those generals (Allen and Mattis) in person was in the CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, where I had been summoned to explain how The Pentagon’s Private Spy Ring worked. I worked for General Allen when he was a major and knew him well, I met General Mattis only once when on active duty and did not know him at all. The Pentagon had cut ties with us after the second New York Times front-page fake news article about the ring. So our founder, retired CIA legend Dewey Clarridge, started a password-protected website, put our intelligence there, and gave the password to selected journalists and members of the House. They saw, in real-time the cost of ignoring our intel when suicide bombers hit ISAF exactly where and when we said they would. They saw how quickly we found the kidnappers responsible for grabbing two sailors who had mistakenly driven into Wardak province and then witnessed the consequences of ignoring our offer to mediate when the surviving sailor was killed. His kidnappers panicked when ISAF flooded the province with soldiers. exactly what we predicted would happen.
In August of 2008, my cell (the Willi cell) sent this to Dewey Clarridge and told him Osama bin Ladin was living there. That’s how good we were at the intel game, making us an existential threat to the regime intelligence apparatus, who drove a stake into us via their useful idiots in the media.*
I thought that Generals Allan and Mattis would be thrilled at having an effective human intelligence operation up and running inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, but I thought wrong. Winning was not on their agenda, pleasing Obama was their priority, so the last thing they wanted was an effective HUMINT network gumming up the works as they focused on a hasty retreat mandated by a nitwit of a president. Criticism of Obama was outside the Overton Window of the movers and shakers in Washington, DC. The yellow generals would claim they were respecting the office, not the man, but that changed instantly when the Bad Orange Man was in office. Trump represented the same threat to the political class that our Eclipse Group presented to the CIA so the rules about deportment around a sitting president suddenly changed allowing the yellow generals to use their prestige to kneecap him.
Yet it turned out Donald J Trump had good instincts when exercising the office of the presidency. He called out our NATO allies for underfunding their defense while expecting us to fight for them. He made this country an energy exporter driving costs down with cheap oil and natural gas. He closed the border and instituted a stay-in-place policy that made a dent in the sexual exploration of children being trafficked across our southern border. And he salvaged the Supreme Court by installing a couple of almost conservative justices. The “chaotic, unfocused, undisciplined” Trump White House was a godsend compared to the disaster we have been living through ever since FJB waddled his corrupt ass into the Oval Office – and not a word from the four-star high-functioning conformists who were more than happy to trash Trump.
Biden and Harris intentionally abdicated their responsibility to secure our borders which is one of the basic functions of government. Now we have armed gangs from Tren de Aragua taking over buildings in Aurora and Chicago. Towns like Springfield Ohio are being colonized by thousands of feral Haitians who lack the ability or intentions of assimilation while establishing their enclaves from which they can raid the public parks for ducks and swans to eat. The incompetent city leaders of those unfortunate locals mimic their federal overlords by lying about these situations until too many social media posts pile up to ignore. The Regime media, as usual, labeled these reports as unverified rumors until evidence of their veracity became undeniable.
Fact check – there is no credible evidence (according to the legacy media) that your lying eyes are telling you the truth – Haitians eating local park waterfowl have been “debunked” despite police audio proving it’s true. There is a video of police arresting Haitian woman for eating her neighbors cat but that too is a figment of your imagination according to our gas lighting media.
The invasion of millions of illegals comes with a worsening competency crisis in every nook and cranny of the federal government. We watch in stunned silence as our tax monies are wasted, we can’t staff our military, we can’t recover stranded astronauts without the help of private contractors, we can no longer even build a temporary pier, and we are incapable of holding transparent, fair elections. The basic roles of government are being ignored leading to a deep and pervasive legitimacy crisis for the Regime. Challenging the consensus on which the Regime based it’s post World War II identity is a new line of attack on their legitimacy which explains why the Regime and their adjuncts on social media freaked out over the Tucker Carlson interview of Darryl Cooper.
The Shibboleths of the progressive left, feminism, egalitarianism, DEI, tabula rasa, and anti-white racism do not square with how things work in the world. Darryl Cooper and those who understand how reality operates are now free to fire broadsides into fake progressive media narratives without repercussions. Instead of being destroyed by the ensuing hysteria from the White House, Regime media, (and the Powerline blog), he is now the number one downloaded podcaster in every category on every podcast hosting site in the world. That would not have been the case five short years ago indicating a major shift to the right of the Overton Window.
Everyone wants to believe they would be this guy if they came of age in 1930’s Germany. Based on his work I think Daryl Cooper is the only person I know who could claim this title. The rest of us … not so much.
Alternative media podcasters should be able to argue that a morbidly obese alcoholic who worked from his bed all morning may not have been that great a man without automatically being labeled an anti-semite or holocaust denier. But being labeled by the left no longer matters. The regime media can engage in the fact-free sliming of opponents as right-wing extremists all they want but when every person not down with their agenda is labeled a “right-wing extremist,” the words have lost their meaning. This explains why the American media is no longer trusted or believed by any adult proficient at exercising their own reasoned choices.
* The full story of the Eclipse Group will be found in the new book Free Ranging Afghanistan scheduled for publication in the summer of 2025.
Yesterday an adult tiger escaped from the Quinta La Fauna zoo, which is outside of Reynosa and on the banks of the Rio Grande River. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OCED) ranks Mexico number three in the world for animal abuse so the poor cat may be in no condition to swim the Rio Grande River. If he does he would be heading for the quant hamlet of Ganjero home of the Junk Yard Bar.
The Junk Yard Bar could be in for an interesting weekend
Of course the tiger would have to navigate a series of border wall fences that would drive him a little west towards the Bentsen Rio Grande State Park. The Bentsen park is about to fill up with bird watchers for the bi-annual hawk migration but not to worry, the park is full of armed border patrol agents and Texas State Troopers who spend their days rounding up illegal human migrants but I’m not sure what they would do about a tiger. Shooting the poor beast would not go down well with the public on this side of the river and I don’t think local animal control officers have the ability to tranquilize an adult tiger. Time will tell if the majestic beast had the energy to cross the Rio Grande but the safe bet is he has drowned or was stolen by the cartels.
This is a stock photo from India where they would know exactly what to do with a cat this size
The picture above is from a British newspaper article about how climate change is going to wipe out the Bengal tigers but that dog doesn’t hunt anymore as a more and more of us figure out the climate change hysteria is total bullshit. How many predictions by the “experts” are going to fail to materialize before everyone figures it out?
Migrating hawks have fields full of eco crucifixes to navigate but nobody seems to care about dead raptors unless they are covered in oil
In my last post I pointed out that this years hurricane season would be “nishta” (Pashto for nothing) for the exact reason our climate “experts” predicted it would be severe. Note how there have been no more hurricanes since my bold prediction but I have to tell you – when you point out how dead ass wrong the experts are people just get pissed off. Nobody wants to hear that everything they hear on the TV is nonsense, I guess it stirs up too much cognitive dissonance but I got bad news there too. When the famous 1959 paper on cognitive dissonance by Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith was subjected to a Granularity-Related Inconsistency of Means (GRIM test) they found the numbers to be bogus. You cannot have a mean of 3.08 from 20 test subjects filling in 0- 10 scales, it’s impossible yet typical of papers that use small data sets to detect big changes. GRIM tests, and the recently developed Stat Check are the reason why NOAA will not release the raw data they use to generate climate hysteria. All the right people are getting rich off the climate scam so who needs the truth cluttering up peoples thinking?
Daryl Cooper is the king of long form history podcasts
But I tire of the climate change hoax and want to move on to a guy who has the eye of the tiger and is currently under siege by the conservative media for expressing wrong think and that would be Daryl Cooper. Daryl is the king of long form history podcasts and was on Tucker Carlson last week talking about all sorts of things to include Winston Churchill and World War II. As a general rule I find morbidly obese middle age men who drink booze all day every day, lounge around in their pajamas most of the day, become enraged when disturbed while playing with toy soldiers, and have a propensity for designing and wearing silly military uniforms to be less than trustworthy. But I always gave Winston Churchill a pass on that because everybody else did, he’s a hero to many despite being weird as shit. Daryl isn’t giving Winston a pass and articulated several reason why and that has enraged my fellow conservatives causing me to start feuding with the Powerline bloggers and that is not a good place to be.
Powerline is written by razor sharp lawyers who I normally venerate except for 2016 when they developed a slight case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but they recovered and there was no harm done. And it’s not just them, Victor Davis Hansen weighed in without listening to the podcast as have several “media professionals” like Dominic Green at the Washington Examiner. According to Dominic
“Cooper blew it by admitting that he’d prepared for his interminable podcast series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by reading six books and then recited a medley of baseless suppositions, false generalizations, and open “secrets” about the origins of World War II”.
That bit of hatchet work is the exact opposite of what Daryl Cooper said which was:
“…well you know it’s funny actually because when I first started it I didn’t really know what went into making a podcast like that…so I started working on it after I’d read maybe like 6 books because the series only goes up to 1948. When I started to approach the end of that episode this is months and months and months later by now I’ve read 20 books or 30 books about that pre 1948 era. I started going over what I created for that first episode, and it was so embarrassingly terrible …. I got to the point I counted them all up one time … but I read over 80 whole books parts of another 100 at least and about 12-13 hundred academic papers and journals. I read everything I could find”.
This is why I insist the media is the enemy of the people. They are lazy, partisan, and for some reason they have declared jihad on Tucker Carlson. Which has forced me to jihad with the Powerline writers who haven’t been as glaringly incompetent as ole Dominic but they obviously have not done any research into Daryl Cooper which should embarrass them.
I think questioning to role and motivations of Winston Churchill is an interesting topic given his alcoholism, obesity and weird habits. But if you want to get an idea why Daryl Cooper has his sights on Churchill listen to his podcast #19 The Anti Humans about the treatment of the Romanians by Stalin after World War II. I dare you to try and listen to the whole thing because it is as dark and nasty and upsetting as anything I’ve ever heard in my life. And no, I did not, and could not, listen to the whole thing because it was that upsetting. Churchill gave us Uncle Joe Stalin as an equal partner and that murderous son of a bitch is exceeded Hitler (but not Mao) in his willingness to butcher millions in order to stay in power. Maybe Winston should be held to account for that, maybe not, but it is for historians like Cooper to ferret out using the kind of drive that saw him read hundreds of books just to make a decent podcast. Plus he has the balls to question conventional wisdom and that is a rare find in these days of conformity and COVID masks.
South Texas has been under a heat dome that is now moving out of the way as hurricane Beryl bears down us. In anticipation of heavy weather the sharks started attacking beach goers yesterday biting four people in under two hours of coastal mayhem. The weather may or may not be affecting the local shark population who normally hang out in coastal waters without biting people. As I write the Trump Train is rolling through formally deep blue McAllen, Texas and the 2024 South Padre Island Tumptilla is gathering off Port Isabel but they may a few boats light due to a sudden interest in shark fishing. There is no detectable organic support for Joe Biden anywhere in Texas or any other state judging from media reporting.
This lady was bit in the thigh which resulted in a beach rescue with immediate first aid to control the bleeding applied by fellow beachgoers. It is always good to see normal people filling the breach during an emergency.
The progressive left cannot ignore the spectacle of our severely impaired President any longer nor can they handle the fact that their obvious propaganda and spiteful lawfare has made President Trump’s election inevitable. I’m guessing the academic/media disinformation duopoly will now start hammering away with man made climate change alarmism because they suspect President Trump is not a true believer. They also believe us normies learned nothing from SARS CoV-2 computer modeling because they learned nothing from that debacle. Climate models and COVID models share the distinction of being dead ass wrong because viruses and the earth’s climate are too complex to be modeled . Look below at the magic of scaling the NASA GISS data set to temperatures humans can detect to understand the depth of the climate deception.
But we have bigger problems here in tropical Texas, Hurricane Beryl is heading straight for us allowing the cable news stations to start explaining why hurricanes are now worse due to ‘Climate change™. ‘ Then we’ll get all sorts of expert opinion about why the storm missed because hurricanes have an annoying habit of not doing what the “experts” think they will do. And to add to our misery we have tar balls washing up on the beach at South Padre Island forcing beach strollers to watch their step in between scanning the waves for sharks.
Aggressive sharks aren’t the only problem on South Padre Island; Tar Balls are washing ashore!
The tar balls come from rents in the ocean floor that leak oil and have always infested our beaches. The Karankawas, a coastal indigenous tribe known for cannibalism and large physiques, used tar balls to seal baskets and make weapons. The Karankawas disappeared from history in 1858 when Mexican rancher Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, a.k.a the Red Robber of the Rio Grande crossed the river to wiped the last of the tribe out. The Karankawa had unfortunately backed Mexico during the Texan/Mexican War so the Texans rounded them up and shipped them to Tamaulipas so they could live with their buddies. But the Mexicans claimed they were marauders who plundered the countryside so they chased them to our side of the border before sending the Red Robber over to finish them off.
The one tribe the Spanish could never conquer were the Apache who were ejected from their ancestral tribal lands by the Comanches just before Anglo settlers arrived on the scene. These important historical facts, like the natural occurrence of tar balls, are almost unknown in today’s America where all past wrongs are always attributed to Anglo Americans.
A Trump Supporter counterprotesting among the astro turfed (most came in buses with professional signage) democrat crowd when President Trump came to McAllen to inspect the border in 2019. There was no evident organic support for FJB in 2020 and there is even less now but you see Trump flags everywhere when you drive the interstates.
Speaking of Anglo Americans did you know some of the ‘intelligence experts’ behind the Muh Russia and Hunter Biden laptop hoaxes have been hired Homeland Security to form an “Experts Group” for combating “misinformation” on the internet? In order to accommodate the misinformation experts the FBI expanded their “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists” (AGAAVE) classification to include political and/or social agendas creating the AGAAVE (other) category. Indicators of being in the AGAAVE Other category are prior military service, actively attending religious services, or being in any way connected to the Trump MAGA movement. That covers about half the electorate but what does it mean?
I’m not sure, we can assume some of the weekly Trump Trains and Tumptilla’s include undercover federal agents and/or paid informants. But the Feds don’t need to be physically present to surveil potential domestic terrorists because they can hoover up everything in your phone, social media, and home computers with the new and improved PULSE Tactical Information Warfare Platform. The Pulse system was recently purchased by defense contractorTwo Six Technologies from the developers, IST Research, who emerged out of a secret DARPA project housed at the Taj.
The PULSE platform made its unclassified debut on 60 Minutes in 2015 with an interview of one of Taj vets who was marketing a system to monitor the “dark web” to catch human traffickers. That’s a ridiculous idea now, human traffickers are trafficking women and children across our southern border daily and nobody seems too upset about it. But when you’re selling concepts to the government 60 minutes is a good place to start.
Dr Dave Warner, Baba Ken Kraushaar and I on the night they arrived at the Taj in Jalalabad in early November, 2007. Dr. Dave and Ken are the original Synergy Strike Force team who would combine the Defense Intelligence Agencies Afghanistan Atmospherics program with DARPAs More Eyes program to create the forerunner of the PULSE platform running it out of the Taj
Dr Dave out and about with his Afghan crew in Dur Baba district near the Khyber Pass
Two Six Technologies, then acquired the counter-disinformation company Thresher Ventures, for its main product the Media Manipulation Monitor (M3) which is based on the principle that advanced censorship regimes designed to control the flow of information convey a great deal about their governments and leaders. So does the flow of information for Trump Trains and Trumpilla’s which may explain the AGGAVE (other) category. When the government comes after you using lawfare the process is the punishment and not many Americans will be able to stand fast in the face of government intimidation.
Which brings us full circle back climate change because our Homeland Security ‘experts”are using their toys to wargame (in collaboration with social media companies) how to handle the droughts and power outages that will be caused by climate change. Those games involve censoring alternative views, manipulating the news, and (of course) lockdowns because the chaos of a changing climate is inevitable – unless we follow the example of Finland and Sweden and go back to nuclear power. But an energy independent America is not part of the big government progressive establishments playbook, only the bad Orange Man and the AGGAVE (others) think its a great idea.
I don’t think the elites media manipulation playbook will work for much longer but if you think they are going to re-think their determination to thwart the half of the electorate now deemed deplorables you have not been paying attention. The Biden regime will not go quietly into the night after an electoral landslide sends Trump back to DC. There is serious trouble brewing out their in the land of the free and one can only hope the will of the people is respected in this election and FJB sent back home wherever that is.
This morning I saw an X from Tucker Carlson about an interview with my good friend Michael Yon. The first sentence stated “America is being invaded and destroyed with the help of our leaders”. That sounded ominous and with Michael being a friend I went to the Tucker website to watch the interview. Only I couldn’t because I’m not a member so I coughed up nine bucks to watch the Yon interview. It occurred to me that what Michael is warning against – an invasion of mostly Hispanic foreigners that will change our towns and communities forever, already happened in the Rio Grande Valley where I settled almost ten years back. Thus a boots on the ground report from the tropical portion of the southern border with Mexico where the whites comprise around 5% of the population.
The Rio Grande Valley
The Rio Grande Valley (RGV) borders Mexico and consists of Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy counties. The official statistics claim the valley is over 91% Hispanic which isn’t accurate because that count includes thousands of Winter Texans who only reside here from October through May. Our population distribution represents the future according to the great replacement theory. I don’t believe anyone outside the media, academia, or dysfunctional federal agencies believe this ridiculous theory and I offer as proof this NPR article which claims it has gone mainstream with the Whites whites. Over 25% of the 1.3 million Hispanic Texans in the RGV are immigrants, but not the kind of immigrants found in NPR programing because many of these immigrants, like the majority of Hispanic voters in the RGV, are Trump supporters.
Your typical Trump RGV supporter turning out to welcome the President to McAllen back in 2019.
President Trump won the RGV in 2020 election and his popularity with Hispanic voters continues to increase with each passing month of FJB incompetence at the border. But nobody who lives here categorizes people by bureaucratically created terms like “Hispanic” for many practical reasons. Take the young man in the photograph above, he looks Hispanic but he’s not, he’s Native American, and doesn’t speak Spanish. Most of the second and third generation Hispanic kids in the RGV also don’t speak Spanish, but there are plenty of Gringo’s around the valley who are fluent Spanish speakers. Add the inconvenient fact that humans (regardless of racial classification) segregate by class in America, not race, and you’ll understand why every strata of the social hierarchy here is dominated by Hispanics. And the degree to which one is or is not Hispanic has nothing to do with skin color; it’s determined by fluency with the Spanish language.
My buddy Cody Elmore is so white that after six months in the Helmand Province he looked like he spent the winter in Minnesota. But Cody is the son of diplomats who went to school in Europe and speaks perfect Castilian Spanish so when out and about in RGV he’s so Hispanic that real Hispanic’s buy him drinks when they hear him speak Spanish. Competency with upper caste European Spanish is admired in Tex Mex social circles.
What’s it like living in the future America where the whites are a distinct minority? It’s fantastic, like living in the America of my childhood but with rare tropical bird species, and Ocelots. This is due to the high level of civic trust found in communities that share the same values, beliefs, and culture. Granted the culture here is more Mex than Tex, but who cares when you live in a town with dozens of large parks that fill on Easter Sunday with extended families picnicking, their kids hunting for colorful cascarones (painted eggshells full of confetti) while the adults fire up the pit and grill stuff. Easter celebrations extend through the entire day as the kids’ band together and have cascarones wars while the adults relax in the only portion of America considered tropical.
Unfortunately, adult relaxation in the RGV invariably involves drinking cerveza’s which contributes to the region’s designation (by WalletHub.com) as the fattest city in the nation. I think the local tortillas contribute more because they come doubled up and deep fried in with queso cheese in-between them making local taco’s addictive as crack. But beer drinking is endemic to local culture so watching families arrive at a Quinceañera, the women dressed in fantastically elaborate ball gowns, the men in coat and tie each dragging a cooler of full of beer is totally normal. There is no Bowling Alone style collapse inside the local communities here because Hispanic people are serious about their religion and their extended families, even the ones with sneaky Gringo’s in the family tree. There are no Roof Dogs in the Rio Grande Valley despite their prevalence in Mexico, because America ain’t Mexico, and the RGV is populated by Americans.
Roof dogs are no bueno .
What kind of Americans you ask? The RGV is to Texas what the Helmand province was to Afghanistan; it’s Marineistan – full of Marines and Marine Corps history. Weslaco native Corporal Harlan Block, one of the six Marines to raise the flag on Iwo Jima is buried at the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen. Marine Corps Sergeant Alfredo Gonzalez, a native Edinburg won the Medal of Honor at Hue City during the Vietnam war. There are murals of Marines who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan painted on the underground electrical junction boxes around Edinburg and I’ve heard there is more of them in Brownsville. The Valley is home to one of the best historians who ever lived; T. R. Fehrenbach who was an Army officer, but his best selling book, This Kind of War, was about the awesomeness of the United States Marine Corps in Korean War. The Army get’s no love in the Valley for some reason and I have no idea why.
There are more of these tributes to dead Marines in the RGV than there should be from the 20 year long war against terror. Why are there only tributes to Marines? Because the RGV is Marinestan
A picture of Sgt. Gonzales’s mother accepting his Medal of Honor from the South Texas Museum in Edinburg, Texas. I am almost certain the last Marine on the left is GySgt John Canley who also won the Medal of Honor during the battle of Hue.
The Tucker Carlson interview with Michael Yon focused on the international NGO’s who facilitate the massive migrant movements through Central America into the United States. The lead agency organizing and paying for this illegal migration is the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) who have a posh office in Panama inside former Southern Command headquarters building in Fort Clayton. From Clayton IOM coordinates with the federal government contractors like Catholic Relief Charities and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to care, feed and move migrants to and through the US border. These contractors self-identify as NGO’s but any organization funded by the government that moves thousands of people across the border and then disperses them throughout the United States every month needs military-contractor grade accounting departments and former Feds in upper management. That is how the game is played.
In October of 1981 sculptor Dr. Felix W. de Weldon donated this full sized working model of the Iwo Jima Monument to the Marine Military Academy. Prior to that it was disassembled and stored in his garage in Newport, R.I. where my friends and I would try to get a glimpse of it because the garage was close to a main road and accessible to sneaky teenagers.
Did you know Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is a Jewish immigrant from Cuba? His parents fled Havana after the revolution and that background made him perfect for the board of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) prior to his government appointment. Michael Yon uncovered the HIAS connection when he noted that the HIAS Panama offices were next to the IOM HQ building in the Darien Gap. Which might explain why Mayorkas flew into the Darien Gap back in 2022 to meet with both the IOM and HIAS about funding improvements of what Yon describes as “the China Camp”. A camp with superior accommodations where Chinese migrants are housed but segregated from the other migrants. Why is our Secretary of Homeland Security funding illegal migration? Why is he dumping millions of no-bid federal contracting dollars on a “NGO” he once managed? What is the end game here?
Who know’s? But I know the southern border, which is supposed to be under the control of our Homeland Security Department, is instead controlled by narcotraficantes. The reason narcotraficantes control the entire southern border is they own the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador who prefers to be called AMLO because he just a humble public servant who, despite the conspicuous accumulation of massive personal wealth, is a man of the people.
The Riverside Dreamer still does a booming business hauling tourists for one or two hours tours of the Rio Grande River. The operator told me she has been giving boat tours for 20 years and never had a problem.
Last fall a ProPublica investigative reporter named Tim Golden published a long detailed story about the DEA’s effort to hold Senior AMLO accountable for taking millions of dollars from the Sinaloa drug cartel in 2010 in return for the names and addresses of his own State Police. But in 2010 Obama was in office and Obama made decisions based on what was best for Obama not for the citizens of the United States or Mexico. Holding Mexican officials responsible for their many and manifest crimes was not part of the Obama hagiography so the millions spent by the DEA investigation went right down the sewer next to the Marine Corps excellent study on the dreadful consequences of putting females in the infantry.
The RGV, known as Tropical Texas, is home to several exotic tropical bird species and home to the last remaining Ocelots in America. Photo from NatGeo.
The New York Times published a long form piece based in part on Tim Golden’s work which caused Senior AMLO so much consternation he doxxed the NYT reporter by giving out her name and cell phone number at a press conference. Mexico is the worlds leader in many unsavory categories including murdered journalists so one would suspect the New York Times and FJB’s administration would protest this blatant intimidate of an American reporter, but they have said nothing. Instead AMLO has demanded 20 BillionDollars from FJB to open talks about the border he does not control.
It’s not just people sneaking into the RGV from Mexico but Ocelots too. Last week one was killed by a car up in Jim Hogg county which was bad, but the DNA test showed the cat to be Mexican which was good. The RGV Ocelot population will need many more Mexican Ocelots sneaking across the border to bring much needed genetic diversity to their American cousins. Photo from San Antonio.com
Mexican drug cartels are not a benign presence in the RGV given their history of corrupting local law enforcement. Every county in the RGV has had sheriff’s arrested for taking narcotraficantes money. The sad case of Hidalgo County Sheriff Guadalupe “Lupe” Treviño from ten years back is typical. He was arrested and convicted for money laundering which is a growth industry with Mexican Cartels. What is amazing isn’t the number of local law enforcement officers arrested for being in bed with traffickers, it’s number who aren’t being arrested given the ridiculous amounts of money involved in narco bribes. The avergage Rio Grande Valley police officer appears to be honest, conscientious, and professional. They tend to be fluent Spanish speakers who can instantly recognize Venezuelans, Colombians, Guatemalans, etc. . . and give them the extra scrutiny they deserve without worrying about profiling beefs from federal prosecutors.
Great Kiskadee’s are one of a many tropical birds found exclusively in the Rio Grande Valley (and points south). Birding is big business in the valley. Photo from my backyard where this male Kissadee chases off all Kissadee competitors while terrorizing the House Sparrows.
Yet the corrupting influence of the enormous hordes of cash money Cartels deploy cannot be ignored. It is inconceivable that they have not penetrated local law enforcement agencies with the millions of dollars they have to spend. There is too much money involved for corruption not to impact local governments which makes eliminating the power and influence of Mexican drug cartels a time sensitive issue that is being ignored by the FJB administration. Federal politicians can ignore the spreading cancer of narcotraficante war lordism corrupting Texas border communities but we can’t which is why Donald Trump is going to win here in a landslide.
We rarely see the illegals who are processed daily and then dropped off at the McAllen bus station by the Border Patrol. The Catholic Relief Charities has a building across from the bus station where they feed, and house the migrants before sending them on their way with free bus tickets, or airline tickets out of state. In fact, the invasion of illegal immigrants benefits the RGV economically due to the resulting deployment of troops, flight crews and federal agencies, keeping our hotels occupied and restaurants full of well paid feds on per diem who tip well.
The migrants don’t stay here because the Cartels don’t want them here trashing the place up because they invest and vacation here. I see well dressed, fit, friendly Mexican men driving late model sports cars with Tamaulipas license plates all the time in McAllen. It is impossible for a non cartel connected Mexican to own and drive a late model European sports car on the highways of Tamaulipas and not get it stolen by one of the cartels. Everybody knows that is the reality of contemporary Mexico but we’re not rude about it down here because everybody is armed and an armed society is a polite society. Yet I yearn for the day when I see Mexicans driving late model cars with Tamaulipas plates in McAllen and not immediately suspect them to be well dressed, violent narco thugs.
This 35 year old Friendship Fountain between McAllen and our Mexican sister cities Irapuato and Guanajato is falling apart – the perfect metaphor for the condition of our southern border with Mexico.
Nothing good can come from allowing Mexican cartels to control the flow of both illicit drugs and illegal migrants across our border. And nothing good can come from allowing millions of people with limited English or practical skills to flood the country where they have no agency and easily trapped in situations that are worse than slavery.
Any American who actually understands the concept of human rights would demand the immediate closure of our border to cripple the massive human trafficking operation corrupting our communities with mountains of cash. The laws of unintended consequences are brutal reminders to the anointed that reality still rules on planet earth. Nobody wants a prosperous, functional and safe Mexico more than Texans, but that will not happen unless America forces some hard choices on the criminal political class ruling Mexico. When the President of the United States starts treating AMLO like FJB treats Israeli President Netanyahu, we’ll know the border crisis is about to end.
