Texas - Free Range International

June 3, 2025June 3, 2025

Desperate Times on the Southern Border

Last week, in an act that combined desperation and stupidity with ingenuity and hard work, a Narco group built a raft to float a pickup truck across the Rio Grande River near Brownsville. The raft was constructed of blue 55-gallon drums and plywood, and it got the truck safely across. Upon reaching our side of the river, the pickup sped off through an open gate in the border wall. The driver then noticed Border Patrol and State Police trucks waiting for him on the levee once he cleared the wall, so he turned around and drove right back into the river.

You have to give these dope smugglers an A for effort, but an F for planning

Several Mexican nationals then swam to the truck to recover some of the bundles of drugs; the rest floated downstream and were retrieved by the Border Patrol. The large bundles contained marijuana, which raises questions. Thanks to American ingenuity, weed in the form of delta eight and delta 10 THC is (for the time being) legal in Texas. Delta 9 is the high-inducing tetrahydrocannabinol found in legalized weed, but Deltas 8 and 10 will get the job done, especially in smokable concentrates, vapes, or ingested via gummies, drinks, or brownies.

Potent THC hemp derivatives blindsided Texas lawmakers, who claim they legalized hemp for industrial purposes, not psychoactive gummies, so this September, the multimillion-dollar industry built on hemp buds is scheduled for eradication. I’ve gone from supporting THC products as a safe alternative to alcohol to acknowledging that THC is an addictive drug that robs one’s vitality and drive while being difficult to quit. The only safe alternative to alcohol is not drinking alcohol. Still, I’m not sure closing the hemp weed loophole is the best idea because it will encourage Mexicans to build flimsy rafts and float pick-up trucks across the Rio Grande River. The Rio Grande is polluted enough, so adding trucks and whatever was in the blue plastic drums to the water is Eso no es bueno. For readers who do not live in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), I’m obliged to inform you that it is never correct to say “no bueno.”

Why did the weed smugglers go to all that trouble when the market for shitty Mexican weed is so depressed? Granted, the border appears unguarded because illegal crossings are now rare, but the Border Patrol isn’t stupid. They watch the open gates in the wall and have a Tethered Aerostat Radar Systems (TARS) and Ground-Based Operational Surveillance Systems (GBOSS), both of which can see a long way. The federales claim the TARS is used for detecting aircraft, but I watched a contractor using one at Combat Outpost Lonestar in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan to smoke check a few miscreants. He had observed three dudes planning an IED on the road leading to Tora Bora and summoned a soldier from the fire direction center, who dropped some 155mm artillery on them. The TARS system can see plenty on the ground, just like the smaller GBOSS.

Tethered Aerostat Radar System Site Lajas, Puerto Rico. Photographer: Donna Burton

Even when the border looks empty, there are plenty of eyes watching it, and they don’t miss much.

Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were a constant menace for me in Afghanistan, and they have now made an appearance in the RGV. Last February, a local rancher, Antonio Céspedes Saldierna, was killed by an IED on the Mexican side of the border near Brownsville. Mr. Saldierna, like many RGV ranchers, has property on both sides of the border and was traveling to his Mexican Hacienda when he hit the IED. His son, Ramiro Céspedes, an army vet who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was injured in the blast. An IED that kills the driver but not his son or wife, who were in the truck with him, isn’t much of an IED. I assume the Gulf Cartel has yet to tap into terrorist expertise from Afghanistan or Iraq. Mexico imports tons of calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which is easily converted into a powerful homemade explosive.

Ammonium nitrate IEDs with simple, easily fabricated pressure plates. These were recovered in Nimroz Province, Afghanistan. It is only a matter of time before these are deployed in Mexico and the United States.

In a recent interview on Chuck Holton’s Hot Zone podcast, Mexican Journalist Oscar Ramirez claimed that the Arellano-Félix Cartel in Tijuana has already imported Taliban from Afghanistan to train them on tunnel digging and IED construction. It’s just a matter of time before we start seeing the boom in Mexico and on this side of the border. It’s more effective than throwing children into the Rio Grande River (a routine occurrence during the FJB administration) to distract American law enforcement so they can complete their nefarious missions.

Our side of the border is like a ghost town, while Mexico is filling with ghosts. Last Tuesday, Ximena Guzmán, the personal secretary to the mayor of Mexico City, Clara Brugada, and José Muñoz, a municipal advisor, were shot and killed in the Moderna neighborhood of Mexico City. It has been five years since there was a high-profile assassination in Mexico City. That shootout was triggered when sicarios from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) ambushed the chief of police.

Murders on busy streets in broad daylight are depressingly common south of the border—photograph by Teun Voeten from his book Drug War in Mexico.

This hit indirectly targeted La Presidencia, Claudia Sheinbaum. It’s a safe bet that one of the Sinaloa cartels carried it out, targeting associates of allies of President Sheinbaum because they are afraid to target her directly. It is an undeniable fact (according to my Blanco Brujos neighbor, who knows things) that she’s a powerful Negros Brujos. I, too, am afraid of her after she flooded out the RGV in a 3-hour supernaturally powerful rainstorm.

The following day, protestors from Reynosa closed the international bridge connecting their city to Pharr, Texas. They were protesting the disappearance of five musicians from the Grupo Fugitivo band, who may or may not have been writing and performing narco corridos. Corridos are ballads that portray powerful Narcos as Robin Hood-like figures. Singing Narco corridos songs in Mexico is now illegal. Not singing Narco corridos in Mexico is deadly. A few days after the protests, the bodies of the five men were found outside Reynosa.

Luis R. Conriquez, a 28-year-old Sonoran singer with hundreds of millions of views on YouTube

I’ve been told the mark of a true gentleman is one who can play the accordion—and doesn’t. I’m not a fan of regional Mexican folk music, but those guys have it hard. President Trump, probably acting under a spell cast by Mexico’s chief Curandero, President Sheinbaum, won’t give corridor bands visas so they can’t rake in the big bucks playing venues in San Antonio, Houston, or Robstown. If they play their original ballads in Mexico, they’ll get arrested. If they don’t play them, they’ll be disappeared. It’s not like they can turn themselves into American law enforcement, confess to playing the accordion, and request asylum.

When Conriquez announced he would no longer sing Narco Corridos or *corridos belicos* (warlike ballads – a term he invented), his fans in Texcoco rioted, ran him and his band out of town, smashed their drum set and amplifiers, but didn’t trash his accordions. Can you believe that?

There are over 124,000 Mexicans listed as disappeared by Mexican authorities. Seven women go missing every day in Mexico. The usual fate for these poor souls is rape, torture, and a gruesome death. Protests and vigils by the family and friends of the missing are a near-daily occurrence, as is the discovery of mass graves, illegal crematoriums, or acid bath operations. There are thousands of heartbreaking stories about mothers dedicating their lives to organizations like Madres Buscadoras (searching mothers).

Cecilia Flores, a member of the “Searching Mothers of Sonora and Jalisco” group. Photo from *Israel Fuguemann* of NPR

The earliest known madre buscadora is Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, whose son Jesús Piedra Ibarra was forcibly disappeared in 1974. These women lead teams of volunteers on searches throughout Mexico for mass graves, and they stage protests at government offices or popular border crossings. They garner their share of sympathetic international press, but this has been going on for over 50 years and it is obvious the powerful elites of Mexico don’t give a damn about them or their missing children.

The last known photo of 18-year-old Debanhi Escobar, which went viral and was featured on the front page of many Mexican newspapers after she was kidnapped in April 2022.

The elites might give a damn now because Marco Rubio has quietly put them in a very uncomfortable position that will cost them the one thing they care about: money.

Our Department of State is revoking the US visas of Mexican politicians, police, and military officers linked to the Narco cartels and/or fuel theft rings. I have never seen our State Department working for the interests of the American people, or the Mexican people, for that matter. They have always pursued their own progressive globalist agenda, but now their agenda seems to be President Trump’s agenda, and President Trump is putting the American people first.

The most common drug war trope from Mexico is that America’s thirst for drugs fuels the drug war. That is nonsense. What Americans have is lots of money to pay exorbitant rates for drugs. Countries like Mexico don’t have people with much disposable income but they still have plenty of junkies who pay fire sale prices for the same poison that is smuggled into el norte. photograph by Teun Voeten

He is also lending a hand to La Presidencia, Sheinbaum, by placing pressure on bad actors. Not having an American Visa is, for the wealthy elites of Mexico, a serious problem. Being on an American revoked visa list negatively impacts banking and investment, hurts business relationships, and international credibility. I am not implying that every rich Mexican national has amassed their wealth illegally; that would be rude. There must be a way to accumulate millions of dollars in Mexico legally. . . I guess, but check out the names that have been published in the press:

Marina del Pilar Ávila, Baja California governor
Américo Villarreal, Tamaulipas governor
Rubén Rocha Moya, Sinaloa governor
Alfonso Durazo, Sonora governor
Samuel García, Nuevo León governor
Layda Sansores, Campeche governor
Mario Delgado, federal Education Secretary
Ricardo Monreal and Adán Augusto López, Morena power players
Several mayors from Tamaulipas and Chihuahua
At least four high-ranking generals

According to the Gringo Gazette Alberto Granados, the mayor of Matamoros, had his visa revoked while attempting to cross into Brownsville. He denied it. But the story didn’t go away.

The Mexican elite can find other countries to bank their wealth, educate their children, and purchase vacation properties. But the modern, enjoyable, safe, and investment-friendly places like Dubai or Singapore are off-limits to them. Those countries, mui eso no es bueno, the drug business. If they’re on the State Department shit list I doubt many European tax havens would welcome them either.

Will putting the soft power screws to the monied elites change anything in Mexico? Who knows, but the cartels are losing tons of money and the head Negros Brujos is keeping the pressure on them. Mexican Marines have been raiding “mega drug labs” in Sinaloa for months now, seizing tons of methamphetamine. Fentanyl seizures are plummeting at the border, although it is unclear why. Illegal border crossings are down 94%, and it is very clear why. The big question is how long the cartels will continue to lose money before they start getting dangerously desperate and resort to powerful IEDs for leverage in Mexico and revenge in the USA.

May 14, 2025May 14, 2025

A Dark Spell Cast Upon the Rio Grande Valley

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.

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.

March 29, 2025March 29, 2025

The Water War Goes Supernatural

As I have covered in my last two posts, Mexico has consistently failed to meet its water treaty obligations since they were established in 1948. Several times a year, every year since 1948, politicians in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) speak out about this injustice to coax more federal relief dollars for our farmers and sugar mill operators. Check that our last sugar mill closed last year, a victim of South Texas drought and Mexican perfidy. This year it was State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa’s (D-McAllen) turn to bitch about the missing Mexican water, which he did last week. Then, out of the blue, the President of the United States stopped American water shipments to Tijuana, citing Mexican recalcitrance over fulfilling their obligations under the 1944 International Boundary and Water Commission as the reason.

At this point, Valley locals who travel to Mexico often to visit with family and friends began to worry. Mexico had just installed (elected isn’t the proper word) its first female President, Claudia Sheinbaum. In a male-dominated, masculine society like Mexico, when you see a woman ascend to the president’s office, it means the office is ceremonial and disconnected from power, or the woman has serious, powerful, hard-to-explain power behind her. This morning, as curanderas throughout the Rio Grande Valley cleaned up behind receding flood waters, they were all saying the same thing: “I told you this would happen”.

Curanderas are practitioners of herbal medicine, home remedies, and witchcraft. There are two types of Curanderas: Brujas Blancas (white witches) and Brujas Negras (black witches). The difference between white and black brujas is that one removes the spells and the other casts spells, but in practice, good curanderas can do both, causing as much peace or mischief as you can afford to pay for. It is easy to recognize the work of Mexican curanderas by timing and irony. Yesterday, the most powerful curandera in Mexico sent a little black magic to Chuy Hinojosa in the form of a biblical three-hour rainstorm that came out of nowhere to dump over 21 inches of rain on McAllen.

Stranded vehicles left on the frontage road in front of the McAllen Convention Center during a downpour on Thursday, March 26, 2025, in McAllen. (Joel Martinez | jmartinez@themonitor.com)

Chuy Hinojosa bitches to the press about not having enough water in the Valley, and suddenly, a scattered line of thunderstorms forecasted to sporadically drop an inch or two of rain somewhere in the Valley turned into a Training Thunderstorm. Training means that as individual thunderstorm cells form and move downwind, another cell forms upwind and moves directly over the path of the previous cell. These storm cells form so fast that when viewed on radar, the thunderstorm looks stationary or moving backward against the upper-level wind. On the radar, they look like a train; on the ground, it feels like you’re being hit by a train.

At this point, I am sure most of my gringo readers who reside far from the border are skeptical of the supernatural angle to this story. Let me provide more evidence that the train rain was the work of curanderas: Nobody can agree on what happened. According to RGV.com, McAllen received 4.96 inches of rain yesterday. The local Fox News station said McAllen was hit with 8 inches of rain. My SanAntonio.com claimed yesterday’s rain totals for McAllen were between 13-21 inches. Good Morning America claimed we got 14 inches of rain. Do you see the trend here? That’s how you know this wasn’t some innocent weather phenomenon. My neighbor on the corner, after saying, “I told you this would happen,” added that in 48 years, she had never seen this much rain or flooding.

The view from my front porch as the flood waters continued to rise. The rain stopped just before the water reached my top step

As usual, the poorest were hardest hit by this storm of spite, with many spending this morning recovering abandoned vehicles or cleaning out flooded homes. Many more are lined up outside various homes or apartments as the faithful consult their trusted curanderas about what the hell is going on with the weather. But I know what’s going on; I’ve seen this shit before in the Hindu Kush with the Mountain Pashtun and their Jinn. If I were an advisor for Senator Hinojosa, I’d tell him to stop bitching about the 1944 water treaty before we end up with 350 acre-feet of water being dumped on our heads.

March 4, 2025March 4, 2025

The Valley of Miracles

Los Fresnos, Texas, is a small farming hamlet astride State Highway 100, the route to South Padre Island. It is famous for annoying speed traps at either end of the town, where the speed limit on State Highway 100 drops from 65 to 35. Right in the middle of Los Fresnos is a large restaurant/Mexican Bakery called Abby’s Bakery. The owners Leonardo and Nora Báez, started selling homemade pan dulce out of their van on the side of a road in Los Fresnos. They sold their pan dulce from their roadside spot for 18 years before opening a large modern restaurant/bakery.

Last week, ICE raided Abby’s and hauled off every employee for being in the country illegally. They also arrested the Báez’s for harboring illegal workers on their property. The Federales discovered the entire staff lived in a tiny back room stuffed with bunk beds. Yet the owners are not facing charges for tax fraud like the owner of the Charleroi, Pennsylvania, staffing firm busted last week for putting illegal Haitians to work in food processing plants. Stranger still, nobody in the small tight-knit hamlet noticed that illegal migrants were running their favorite Mexican Bakery.

Man on the street interviews by a local TV station revealed local citizens greeted the news with shock and dismay. The citizens who could speak English were not concerned over the exploitation of Mexican workers; they were pissed that the Federales (a.k.a. ICE) were active in their town. I’m not sure what the Spanish speakers were saying but it was probably similar to the pull quote below:

“I’ve come to this bakery since I could drive just to find out that in your local community right around the corner they’re picking up people,” Los Fresnos resident Gordy Aguilar said.”

Do the citizens of Los Fresnos expect their service industry to be staffed by underpaid illegals? Are they not concerned about the social contract being violated by business owners dodging their payroll taxes? One would think the municipal authorities, who are just down the street next to the town rodeo grounds, would frown on this sort of thing, but they make a killing with the speed traps and may not really care.

At this point, the perceptive reader may wonder how a guy selling pan dulce from his van saves enough to open a bakery or restaurant. This raises questions about what kind of credit score a guy selling pan dulce on the side of the road could have. Or how does one raise the collateral to finance a bakery or restaurant from food truck sales? These are not the proper questions; there are hundreds of brand-new Mexican Bakeries just like Abby’s in the Rio Grande Valley, most owned by dudes who started out with a food truck. It’s an economic miracle that polite people ignore because we do not question miracles in the RGV.

Miracles happen constantly on the border, as they do in Mexico. For instance, Bird Flu spared Mexico, so I can buy a dozen eggs for less than a dollar just five miles from my house. If you Google bird flu Mexico you’ll see hundreds of articles from the WHO and legacy media organs claiming Mexico is in the middle of a bird flu epidemic. But they are not killing their chickens, which is keeping their egg prices down. Who are you going to believe? Your own lying eyes or the media?

We also have a powerful shrine to miracles in the RGV that was imported by the freakishly tall, dour Belgian monks of The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. They commissioned a copy from a talented Guadalajara artist of the Virgin Mary statue venerated at San Juan de los Lagos. They installed it in the Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle. San Juan is next to Pharr, three exits after McAllen on the I-2 Expressway. Now the faithful can visit the shrine to seek miracles for themselves and return home with gallons of holy water, which is provided free of charge at the shrine. Holy water is the one thing nobody has on hand when they need it, so the wise supplicant stores a gallon or two for emergencies.

On October 23, 1970, a local flight instructor crashed his single-engine plane onto the roof of the Basilica during Friday Mass. The fifty priests inside the Basilica evacuated in good order, taking all the children from the attached school with them to safety. The only fatality was the pilot, but the Basilica was destroyed in the ensuing flames. Yet the statue of Our Lady of Saint John of the Valle emerged from the wreckage untouched by the flames. That was a true miracle that may have been facilitated by a priest taking the statue with him when they evacuated, but that’s not the point. The faithful do not quibble over annoying details when it comes to miracles.

The Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle.

The RGV was ready when the next round of miracles arrived in the form of NAFTA and Federal Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) grants. NAFTA created thousands of well-paying managerial jobs for Americans commuting to Mexican maquiladoras (manufacturing plants) or working for RGV-based logistic and trucking companies. That brought good money into the Valley but the motherlode was in the HSI grants.

The United States Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Housing and Urban Development have HSI grant programs. The National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture also have HSI grant programs. The National Aeronautics & Space Administration, Department of Defense, National Endowment for the Humanities, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Transportation also have HSI grant programs. The amount of federal tax dollars that has poured into the RGV through HSI grants is impossible to estimate but easy to see in the form of brand-new schools, hospitals, municipal buildings, and everything local property taxes would cover if you lived in a Gringo community.

As federal tax dollars poured in to build infrastructure, local banks and credit unions financed an explosion of housing developments, apartment buildings, strip malls and automated car washes. The valley banks were founded partly to protect the cash of wealthy Mexicans who craved the dollar’s stability. Mexican capital continues to pour into these institutions, and Mexican investors are also happy to invest in American businesses and real estate. In the past, separating Narco money from legitimate investment pesos was almost impossible given the sophistication of Cartel money laundering schemes. But suddenly the ground has shifted.

Will the Trump administration continue to send Billions of tax dollars to the RGV via the Hydra-headed HSI system? I doubt it. Will unlimited amounts of Mexican investment money continue to flow into the valley? Not if the feds introduce DOGE-style, AI-assisted audits of local banks, hospitals, and construction companies. That level of scrutiny would turn up abnormalities indicating the involvement of cartel money. Our local cartel, the Cártel del Golfo (CDG, Gulf Cartel), has been active in the RGV since prohibition. They have invested billions with the aid of friendly RGV bankers, politicians, and law enforcement, despite the occasional arrest and prosecution of local bigwigs by the federal authorities.

But the amount of Cocaine seized by multiple agencies in the past week in the RGV indicates a new game is afoot. A McAllen woman was busted with 48 pounds of cocaine stuffed in her quarter panels at the Progresso Port of Entry on Monday. An illegal from Mexico living in Mission was found with 26 pounds of coke during a traffic stop the next day and a Brownsville senior citizen tried to get over the Los Indios bridge Mule style with 600k worth of white gold in his old truck. On Wednesday, the Border Patrol found 563 pounds of cocaine at the Sarita checkpoint in Kingsville. The next day a tour bus carrying a mariachi band across the Anzalduas Bridge to their gig in Houston was found to contain 200 pounds of cocaine in a modified gas tank.

This dramatic leap in drug seizures could easily be the result of the increased use of military ISR platforms over Mexico. Ten years ago, I saw how cutting-edge technology could harvest specific targeting information from thin air. That technology has improved significantly and I doubt many people understand the depth of current capabilities. On the other hand, it could be Narcos diming out other Narcos to maneuver for advantage under changing circumstances.

To top off an extraordinary week, President Claudia Sheinbaum pulled off a Narco Mega Extradition, handing over 29 senior leaders from every major Cartel in Mexico to the Department of Justice. Included was Rafel Caro Quintero who will be tried for the 1985 murder of DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. Quintero is facing the death penalty, and before this week, Mexico had refused to extradite any Mexican for prosecution if they faced the death penalty. We are now firmly in uncharted territory.

President Trump won every county in the RGV, but the political and business elite in the Valley are die-hard Democrats. They have not worked through the seven stages of grief over their political irrelevance on the national stage. The local elites thrived on HSI grant money and narco bucks for decades retarding their ability to adapt to the challenges of an America-first future. Inshallah, the federales will come to the valley and start untangling the mess created by billions of narco bucks and poorly supervised (if not fraudulent) HSI grant monies. If they do, there is going to be hell to pay, and for once, the hard-working normies who elected President Trump will not be the ones footing the bill. And that, given what we have endured for the past eight years, would be a miracle.

January 31, 2025January 31, 2025

Charity is a Racket

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.

January 25, 2025January 25, 2025

Catholic Church and NFWA Hit Hard by Closed Border

The flow of illegal migrants using the CBP One app to claim asylum has ended in the Rio Grande Valley sector. There are still people crossing who want to avoid detection, like the Russian mercenary with $4,000 and a drone in his backpack who was caught in Roma two weeks ago. But the constant flow of illegals from around the world who used the CBP One app to claim asylum after jumping the border has ceased.

The day President Trump declared the border a national emergency, I took a tour of the usual Border Patrol collection points along the McAllen/Mission area of the Rio Grande River. No buses were picking up recently arrived illegals, the Border Patrol presence was light, and the border was quiet. Anzalduas Park, which is on the River, has closed again and is now being used to launch and recover the law enforcement boats supporting Operation Lone Star.

Anzalduas Park was closed before when the Catholic Charities RGV ran out of hotel rooms to rent for COVID-19-positive illegals. to “quarantine themselves before being flown or bussed into the country under the FJB catch and release policy. The thousands of illegals pouring across the border who were not positive were stashed under the Anzalduas Bridge, which connects McAllen to Reynosa, Mexico.

These are new, and I saw a few more stationed at crossroads near the border fence. This is at the junction of FM 494 and the dirt road leading to La Lomita Chapel

La Lomita Chapel is on the other side of the levee. The Border Patrol

The restored Capilla De La Lomita is a few hundred meters inland from Anzalduas Park and once served as an important way station on the old Brownsville to Roma trail. The La Lomita (little hill) chapel was built in 1865 by The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (Oblates) from the new Archdiocese in Galveston. The pioneer priests of the Oblates were Belgian missionaries who learned Spanish and used Capilla De La Lomita as a headquarters to service four other chapels and seventy-five ranches from Brownsville to Roma. The Oblates were a fixture in the Rio Grande Valley for over a century, but they are long gone, replaced by Catholic Charities RGV, which the Brownsville Archdiocese sponsors.

The Oblates were poor missionaries who dedicated their lives to serving the people of the Rio Grande Valley. Catholic Charities RGV may provide services to the poor in the Rio Grande Valley, but their focus is servicing the tens of thousands of illegals who have poured over the border during the last four years. Catholic Charities RGV is essentially a government contractor that has spent millions of taxpayer dollars on hotel rooms, bus and airplane tickets, meals, and clothing. The Catholic church has gone from sending missionaries to care for the poor to aiding and abetting the exploitation of the poor by supporting the human and sex trafficking of Mexican Narcos.

One of the reasons President Trump won every border county in Texas was his promise to lock down the border. Allowing millions of unvetted migrants into the country hurts the working class, and most of the Hispanic residents of the border are working class. Why the Catholic Church has prioritized big fat government contracts to house and transport illegal immigrants who will drive down wages and drive up crime among the people they are supposed to be serving is a mystery. However, my experience with government contracts is that the people who win and manage them in the NGO world are handsomely compensated.

In the early 1960s, a poorly compensated Mexican American civil rights activist, Cesario Estrada Chávez, started the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Chavez used the NFWA to raise wages and improve working conditions for farm workers. Once Chávez successfully unionized farm workers who became an implacable foe of illegal immigration. In 1989, César Chávez & Dolores Huerta founded La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) to lobby for farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley. Farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley have always included Mexican-based harvesting crews, so I assume his view on wetbacks had moderated when he arrived in the RGV.

This is not a popular cause in the RGV. Inflicting drag queens on local children without their parent’s expressed consent would be suicidal. The number of parents who would support this is ridiculously low.

The second of Robert Conquest’s three laws of politics states: “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing. ‘ That law has always proved true in my experience, which explains why LUPE is now focused on open borders, all-ages drag shows, PRIDE celebrations, and anti-Trump protests.

In the RGV, when a girl turns 15, we put her in a ball gown and spend thousands of dollars on a Quinceanera for her. Who needs drag queens when your 15-year-old girls dress like this?

While I was driving around the border, Taylor Cramer from RGV Truth was covering a LUPE inauguration day protest in McAllen’s Archer Park. His pictures capture exactly why this group is so marginalized. They are clearly unable to understand why Donald Trump won every county on the Texas border. They, like the democratic senators trying to derail Trump’s cabinet picks, cannot read the room. They do not understand why their divisive rhetoric and anti-American propaganda do not resonate with normal Americans. To prove that point, LUPE is the first RGV-based organization I have heard of using “Latinx” in their advertising.

Not a large turnout in a town that President Trump carried in a landslide. These people are no longer relevant in Rio Grande Valley, which is exploding with jobs, young families, and the opportunity provided by solid jobs for the middle class.

Latinx is not a popular neologism with my Hispanic neighbors, who use proficiency with the Spanish language as a more reliable gauge of who is and is not “Hispanic.” If you have blond hair and blue eyes and speak perfect Castillian Spanish, you’re not just Hispanic but upper-caste Hispanic. If you are a third-generation Hispanic kid who doesn’t speak Spanish, you’re essentially a white dude. This is a drawn-out way of demonstrating that looks don’t matter in the Rio Grande Valley, and nobody here appreciates divisive terms like “Latinx.”

Giving away free condoms and lube is not how you win friends or influence people in the Rio Grande Valley. LUPE should have followed the example set by our Jewish neighbors and set up free food, a petting zoo, and kiddie rides in the park.

Our national nightmare has ended with the nationwide repudiation of the progressive woke agenda. Yet the progressive left is still aligned with the thoroughly discredited global elite who continue to loot the peace while increasing income inequality. LUPE receives funding from the Soros Open Society Foundation, which claims to promote democratic practices as well as equity and justice. But not justice for the farmers, ranchers, and families of the Rio Grande Valley. The Open Society wants justice for the illegals who trespass on our property, trash our fields, cut our fences, steal our pets, and threaten our children.

Operation Lonestar is popular in the RGV but not with George Soros’s Open Societies Institute, which now funds LUPE. The thought that people should “migrate freely” is insane and not supported by normie Americans. Photograph courtesy of RGV Truth

LUPE and Catholic Charities RGV have no problem aiding and abetting the sex trafficking of women and children. They know that nobody comes across the Rio Grande River without paying the cartels, and they know how the cartels collect from women and children. Donations from the local church congregations do not fund LUPE or Catholic Charities RGV; our tax dollars fund them, as do international open-border organizations. These malignant RGV-based organizations will contract and shift focus after President Trump locks down the border. Maybe they’ll start serving the residents of the RGV instead of the illegals, who have been their sole focus for the past four years.

November 12, 2024November 12, 2024

A Bittersweet Veterans Day

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.

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024

Orange Tigers, Yellow Generals and Daryl Cooper

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.

September 7, 2024September 7, 2024

Eye of the Tiger

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.

July 7, 2024July 7, 2024

FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: South Padre Island

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.