Posts Tagged ‘Sinaloa Drug Cartel’

LinkSwarm For August 3, 2024

Friday, August 2nd, 2024

More signs of the Biden Recession, the DOJ wants to put its thumb on the scale against Trump again, more Secret Service incompetence comes to light, more Kamala cringe, a bunch of lawsuit news, and a metric ton of Babylon Bee links. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

I keep thinking I’ll keep the LinkSwarms to shorter lengths, and the world continues not to cooperate.

  • Dispatches from the Biden Recession: “US Manufacturing Surveys Collapsed In July”

    The start of the third quarter saw a deterioration in business conditions at US manufacturers as new orders declined for the first time in three months, according to S&P Global.

    This makes sense as we have seen ‘hard’ US macro data serially disappoint for three months.

    • S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI falls to 49.6 in July, dropping into contraction for the first time since Dec 2023.
    • ISM Manufacturing PMI plunged to 46.8 (48.8 exp) – weakest since Nov 2023 (near post-COVID lockdown lows)
  • The FBI announces that they’re willing to resume their censorship of conservatives in an attempt to drag Karmala’s cackling husk over the finish line. Though the words they used were slightly different.

    The FBI is going to resume its coordination with social-media companies on content moderation ahead of the 2024 election, after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to free-speech advocates who argue the federal government’s close cooperation with Big Tech firms violates the First Amendment.

    According to a Department of Justice memo drafted earlier this month, the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”

    By “Foreign Malign Influence,” what they mean, of course, is “the possibility of a Trump victory.”

    The memo is featured in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the effectiveness of the department’s information-sharing system for monitoring foreign threats to U.S. elections. National Review has reached out to the FBI for comment on the memo.

    Horowitz recommended the DOJ increase its transparency around the policies it put in place to ensure information sharing does not trample on the First Amendment, and to ensure the coordination strategy evolves to keep up with ever-changing foreign threats. The report’s appendix says both of the recommendations have been taken up by the DOJ, and requests documentation of the FBI’s outreach to social-media companies over the coming months.

    The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and local offices will be tasked with building relationships with social-media companies in areas under the purview of various FBI field offices. As part of this outreach strategy, FBI officials are being instructed to make companies aware of the new standard operating procedure for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations online.

    I’m so old that I remember when the primary duty of the FBi was to solve crimes, not to aid the Democratic Party…

  • Speaking of public agencies trying to destroy Trump:

    Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.

    Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.

    It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.

  • Criminal negligence all the way down:

  • The FBI: The Trump shooter’s social media accounts show he was an anti-immigrant extremist. Actual social media company: You’re lying out your ass.
  • “The Bloodless Coup of Joe Biden Will Not Work Out Well for Democrats.”

    The Democratic Party ruling class’s bloodless coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, who also happens to be the nominal sitting president of the United States, is one of the most astonishing political developments of my lifetime. Joe Biden, though clearly physically and mentally impaired, has sought the presidency for quite literally longer than I have been alive. Biden had been defiant ever since the June 27 presidential debate debacle that he was not going anywhere, despite overwhelming pressure from party elites and sycophantic media lapdogs demanding he do precisely that. He has a Lady Macbeth-like wife who craves power, and he has a felonious son in desperate need of a presidential pardon.

    Yet the coup succeeded. Biden became the first incumbent president to not seek reelection after his first term since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Biden made the much-anticipated announcement—not with a solemn Oval Office address—three days later, and he didn’t even explain his decision. Rather, he issued a bedridden tweet from a personal, not even official, account. It’s the equivalent of divorcing your wife over text message. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the announcement came smack in the middle of a five-day period in which Biden was not publicly seen and during which he apparently experienced an unspecified medical emergency. Suspicious much?

    The Democrats’ decision to coup their own president is a curious one, on the political merits.

    Hold aside the galling hypocrisy of the purported party of “democracy” trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under an outlandish constitutional theory while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt, prosecute and incarcerate him on equally spurious grounds. Hold aside the self-proclaimed party of “democracy,” feigning ignorance over how its overheated rhetoric laid the seeds for their political opponent’s recent near-assassination and its continuing to depict that opponent as an existential threat to the American constitutional order. And hold aside that purportedly “democratic” party deposing its own presumptive elected nominee—a stark reversal from its presidential primary, when party poobahs worked hard to shut out all viable competition. Somewhere in Minnesota, Dean Phillips would like a word.

    Hold all that aside. Because even on its own terms, the coup of Biden for cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris is going to spectacularly backfire on the Democrats.

    Already, Democrats and the corporate media have been working hard to “define” Harris for the American people. At times, this has included some rather dubious retconning, such as magically pretending she wasn’t the Biden administration’s appointed “border czar.” (She was.) But the even bigger problem for Democrats is that Harris is not an unknown commodity. On the contrary, she is a very well-known commodity—one who just happens to be about as popular with the American public as venereal disease.

    Harris’ current average approval rating is under 38%, and an NBC News poll last June found her to be the single least popular vice president in American history—only 32% of Americans had a positive view of her, putting her 17 points underwater. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was an absolute dud, self-imploding well before the first primary votes were cast. And as recently as a month or two ago, Democratic elites were openly discussing whether she could still be dropped as Biden’s 2024 running mate. Funny how quickly one can go from the weakest link to the great savior of “Our Democracy.”

    Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history. Do Democrats really think Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a national fracking ban will play well in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania or in the auto factories of Detroit? Will white working- and middle-class voters concerned about skyrocketing crime look favorably upon Harris’ enthusiastic support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, which racked up $2 billion worth of property damage?

  • Harris officially anointed Democrat nominee.
  • “Astronaut Mark Kelly, one of the favorites to be Kamala’s VP pick, literally owns a spy balloon company funded by a Chinese venture capitalist.”

    Tucson-based World View, cofounded by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2012, received venture capital from Tencent — among the largest tech companies in China — both in 2013 and 2016. Tencent, like most Chinese tech giants, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party….

    Spy balloons partially funded by ChiComm ties? Like, how is this considered a totally normal business for a Senator to be in?

  • Not sure how much you can trust Seymour Hersh, but he says that Obama is the one who finally pushed Slow Joe out, threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment on him. He also says Obama is pulling Kamala’s strings. So there’s that.
  • Trump notes that Kamala Harris only used to promote her Indian heritage. “I didn’t know she was black.”
  • Indeed, “Kamala Harris’s Indian Background Was Once a More Prominent Part of Her Curated Image.” You don’t say. (Hat tip: Instapundit.”
  • More on that theme:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • FBI raids home of New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s aide.

    Early in the morning, the FBI raided the home of Linda Sun, a former official for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration. Sun served as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff for a year. Before that, she was the deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs and chief diversity officer under disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The federal officers searched the $3.5 million home, which resides in the exclusive neighborhood of North Shore.

    That’s on top of a raid aimed at Winnie Greco, a top aide to New York Mayor Eric Adams.

  • Never forget that Kamala Harris is a radical.

    While the left is trying it’s hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat – quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years – her actual positions have always been radical.

    For starters, she’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance.

    Meanwhile, during 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”

    She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.

    And in multiple speeches and interviews, Harris insisted America needed racial ‘equity’ as well as ‘equality.’ In other words, she endorses ‘equality of outcomes’ over ‘equality of opportunity.’

    As The Federalist pointed out on Tuesday:

    • She Supported Bailing Out 2020 Rioters
      Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike benefitted in June 2020 when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested for their months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis. The vice president later lied about her involvement in the money-raising scheme.

    • She Put Other Countries’ Borders Before Her Own
      Harris traveled thousands of miles away from the U.S. border invasion she was tasked with handling to deliver “peace and security” to the borders of Ukraine, which “is a country.”

    • She Proudly Enabled the Jussie Smollett Race Hoax
      Harris called the staged hate crime an “attempted modern-day lynching.” She did not apologize even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.

    • She Sponsored Legislation That Would Codify Abortion Through All Nine Months
      As a senator, Harris was a proud co-sponsor of the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which sought to codify abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

    • She’s Openly Anti-Catholic
      As a senator in 2018, Harris smeared Brian Buescher, a nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, for his affiliation with the famous Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus and its historically pro-life views.
  • Flip, meet flop, as Kamala Harris tries to walk back all her radical positions.

    In 2019, Kamala Harris was rated the ‘most liberal’ Senator in a now-scrubbed rating from GovTrack. She’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, banning fracking and offshore drilling, defunding the police, providing US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and banning private health insurance.

    According to the NY Times, “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”

    “The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”

    To that end, McCormick’s campaign has produced one of the first TV ads to attack Harris on her longstanding positions.

    Yet, according to the Times, nevermind all that- Harris is now a reformed moderate – and has suddenly reversed course on virtually all of her most radical views.

    On Friday, the Harris campaign announced that she no longer wants to ban fracking – a ‘significant shift’ from where she stood four years ago. She’s also reversed course on funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and has walked back liberal fever dreams of a mandatory gun buyback.

    She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. -NYT

    Packing the Court? Nah…

    On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.

    According to Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, Harris has ‘evolved’ into a Biden style centrist (if centrism is defined as letting 20+ million illegals into the country and cooking Americans with inflation).

    “There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” said Bennett. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”

    Sure Matt.

    The Times also hints that Harris is essentially an idiot who didn’t really understand her own positions while running for president in 2020.

    …during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.

    She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.

    She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year.

  • “Harris VP Short-Lister Comes Loaded with Baggage.”

    Minnesota governor Tim Walz is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor.

  • “Segregation now, segregation forever!” “White Dudes for Harris” was born cringe…
  • More on that cringe: “Only Democrats can gather in whites-only affinity groups with matching hats.”

  • Another poll oversamples Democrats by a lot…and Trump still wins 48-45.
  • “J. D. Vance is weird.” Yeah, the modern Democratic Party is the last set of people who should be accusing others of weirdness…
  • “Did the Israelis just take out two key leaders in Iran’s proxy armies? Just hours after announcing that a strike in Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, the Iranian state media announced that Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh had been “martyred” in Tehran. Haniyeh had just arrived there to meet the newly elected president.” Reports say he stayed in the same room in the same complex every time he visited, so Israel managed to sneak a bomb under his bed several months ago…
  • First F-16s sent to Ukraine.
  • Ukraine hits Olenya Air Base near Finland with drones some 1,800KM away from Ukraine. Tu-22M reported hit.
  • Ukraine also hit another Russian airbase…in Syria.
  • Ukrainian drones hit Russian oil depot in Polevaya, Kursk.
  • Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan threatens to send troops if Israel enters Lebanon to fight Hezbollah. You would think having some three regional wars happening on its periphery would be enough for Turkey…
  • “Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era. They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke. In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.” That’s what happens when you elect socialist asshats like Justin Trudeau.
  • “Dan Patrick Says Dade Phelan Intends to Kill School Choice Legislation Again. Patrick says Phelan refused to join him and Gov. Greg Abbott in a budget letter prioritizing school choice.” Leopard, meet spots.
  • But Texas House Republicans simply aren’t that into him any more.

    Like the electoral blowout feared by national Democrats with Biden at the top of the ticket, Phelan’s abysmal record of the Texas House under his mismanagement resulted in a political disaster; more incumbent Republicans lost their primary re-election campaigns than any time in modern history.

    Phelan himself is damaged goods, politically. He outspent his primary opponent by a 5-to-1 margin yet garnered a “win” of less than 700 votes in a race that saw a couple of thousand Democrats flip primaries, clearly to “help” him.

    Everyone in the House knows that their defeated colleagues earned challengers because Phelan made them vulnerable… and then left them to go down in defeat.

    But he is, for now, still the speaker… in name, anyway.

    Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was publicly done with Phelan more than a year ago after the speaker and his cronies sent a deeply flawed, legally problematic, and factually vacuous “impeachment” of Attorney General Ken Paxton to be sorted out by the Senate.

  • “DEA’s Most Wanted Sinaloa Drug Cartel Leader ‘El Mayo’ Arrested Near El Paso. Federal authorities arrested the notorious drug lord Ismael Zambada-Garcia, who is already under indictment for his role in leading a multi-billion dollar narcotics empire.”
  • The Democratic Party’s social justice agenda in action: “At least eleven transgender-identifying male felons are currently housed at a formerly women-only prison in Washington State. Many of them committed violent crimes against women and children before they entered the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), colloquially known as ‘Purdy.'”
  • “Organization Fighting Radical Gender Ideology in California Sues School District for Withholding Public Records.”
  • Female boxer quits after 46 seconds into a match against a biological man at the Olympics.
  • NRA’s New York trial “Ends With A Whimper And Not A Bang.” Severe negligence on the NRA’s part, but no special monitor.
  • Some interesting charts that break down how U.S. sports teams make money.
  • Speaking of which, the NFL’s $4.7 billion antitrust judgement was just overturned. “The jury’s damages verdict was otherwise unsupported by the evidence.”
  • “A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.” Keep hitting them in the pocketbook…
  • Chevron moves its headquarters from California to Houston. Wonder what took them so long…
  • Texas oil pipelines nearing capacity, could reach 94% or 95% of capacity next year.
  • Boar’s Head recalls $7 million pounds of meat over Listeria.
  • Ford lost $47,585 for every electric car sold in Q2. (Hat tip: TPPF.)
  • Comedian wins court case brought by Australian government over offensive joke.
  • Bungie games, of Destiny and Halo fame, just laid off a bunch of staff. Official line says 17% of the company, but elsewhere I’m hearing the true total is closer to 40%. Microsoft bought then spun out Bungie, and Sony bought them in 2022.
  • GreensPoint Mall, RIP.
  • Congratulations to Dwight for fifteen years of blogging.
  • The worst safety video ever. Actually, only the second worst, behind Staplefahrer Klaus…
  • “FBI Director Suggests Trump’s Ear Just Spontaneously Exploded.”
  • “Democrats Continue Long-Standing Tradition Of Large Whites-Only Gatherings.”
  • “Kamala Admits She Can’t Remember If She Was In Charge Of Border As She Was Pretty Drunk These Last 4 Years And Honestly It’s All A Bit Hazy.”
  • “Exhausted Journalist Finally Gets To Bed After Long Day Of Copying And Pasting Democrat Talking Points.”
  • “Behavioral Scientists Now Believe Feminists Are Always Angry Because They Don’t Have A Man To Tell Them To Calm Down.”
  • “Imane Khelif Wins First-Ever Gold Medal In Freestyle Domestic Violence.”
  • “Sodom And Gomorrah Set To Host 2028 Olympics.”
  • “The dog just wants to be a dog, and they are trying to turn it into a Social Justice Warrior.”

    • I’m still between jobs, so hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

    Cartel Gunbattle Just South Of U.S. Border

    Monday, January 1st, 2024

    It looks like there was a running gunbattle between the Mexican National Guard and the Sinaloa drug cartel in Sonoyta, Sonora, just south of Lukeville, Arizona on the U.S. border, on December 29. There’s a dearth of news stories on the event, so here are two video compilations (with a little overlap) of the fighting.

    I haven’t seen any news reports of this in American media, possibly because they think their primary goal is to avoid reporting anything on the border that the Biden Administration’s “pro illegal alien invasion” policies make them look bad with voters.

    Indeed, there was a gun battle at a different crossing point earlier this month.

    A federal law-enforcement source shared with FOX Business Network an internal officer safety alert dated December 13th that warns CBP agents to be vigilant after the Mexican military seized 10 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) at the border.

    The IEDs were found by Mexican authorities after Tucson border patrol observed gunshots at the U.S.-Mexico border and a Tucson supervisory border patrol agent arrested an armed person on the U.S. side who had a loaded AK-47 rifle, two loaded AK magazines, loose rounds and a handgun.

    Add “border danger” to “budget deficits” in the category of Things That Could Blow Up At Any Moment Our Chattering Classes Refuse To Talk About.

    P.S. Happy New Year, everyone!

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Media Watch, Military, video | 4 Comments »

    Joe Rogan Interviews Peter Zeihan (Part 2: China, Cartels and Drug Wars)

    Tuesday, January 10th, 2023

    Here’s Part 2 of my coverage of Joe Rogan’s interview with Peter Zeihan. (Part one is here.)

    First up, covering familiar ground for BattleSwarm readers, why China is screwed.

  • The rich world was a population column from [as opposed to a pyramid] 1945 to 1992, and with the end of the Cold War, the developing world became a column in 1992 until now. The problem is that this is all temporary, because birth rate keeps dropping. People keep living older and your column eventually inverts into an open pyramid upside down. And now you no longer have children, you no longer have a replacement generation at all, and there aren’t enough people in their 20s and 30s to buy everything, and there aren’t enough people in their 40s and 50s to pay for the retirees. So this decade was always going to be the decade that most of the advanced world moves into mass retirement, and the economic model collapses, and next decade was always going to be the decade that that happened to the developing world.

  • “The Chinese have jumped the ship and this is their last decade, too.”
  • “We now know that they’ve lied about their population statistics and they’re they over counted their population by over 100 million people, all of whom would have been born since the one child policy was adopted. So this is one of those places where they’ve got more people in their 60s and their 50s and their 40s and their 30s and their 20s.”
  • “Mao was concerned that as the country was modernizing, the birth rate wasn’t dropping fast enough, and that the young generation was literally going to eat the country alive. So they went through a breakneck urbanization program which destroyed the birth rate, at the same time they penalized anyone who wanted to have kids, and both of those at the same time have generated the demographic collapse we’re in now.”
  • The male to female sex ratio in China was bad before, and now it’s obviously worse.
  • “Without young people, we’ve seen their labor costs increase by a factor of 14 since the year 2000, so Mexican labor is now one-third the cost of Chinese labor. Their educational system focuses on memorization over skills, so despite a trillion dollars of investment in a bottomless supply of intellectual property theft, they really haven’t advanced technologically in the last 15 years. Mexican labor is probably about twice as skilled as Chinese labor now, even though it’s one-third the cost.”
  • “They’ve consolidated into an ethnic-based paranoid nationalistic cult of
    personality, and it’s very difficult for the XI Administration to even run it, because it’s not an administration anymore no one wants to bring Xi information on anything.”

  • The Biden Administration has adopted the Trump Administration’s trade policies on China.
  • “They now have tech barricades that prevent the Chinese from buying the equipment, the tools or the software that’s necessary to make semiconductors. In fact, [Biden] went so far as to say any Americans working in the sector have to either quit or give up their American citizenship. Every single one of them either quit or was transferred abroad within 24 hours.”
  • “They’re completely dependent on the U.S Navy to access international trade, they are the most vulnerable country in the world right now. And based on how things go with Russia, we’re looking at a significant amount of raw materials falling off the map, specifically food and energy, and the Chinese are the world’s largest importer of both of those things. So there’s no version of this where China comes through looking good.”
  • “Say what you will about the Russian economy (it’s corrupt, it’s inefficient, it’s not very high value-add), but it’s a massive producer and exporter of food and energy. You put the sanctions that are on the Russians on Beijing and you get a de-industrialization collapse and a famine that kills 500 million people in under a year.”
  • “Even if the Chinese were able to capture Taiwan without firing a shot, it doesn’t solve anything for them. They’re still food importers, they’re still dependent on the United States, they’re still energy importers. And even if they take every single one of those semiconductor fab facilities intact, they don’t know how to operate them, because they can’t operate their own, their own are among the worst in the world.”
  • “One of the fun things about Russia versus China right now is that the Russian information security is so poor that American intelligence is literally listening on everything, but in China we can hear into the office but there are no conversations happening.” I suggest taking both these revelations with a few grains of salt. Maybe Zeihan has great sources in the intelligence community, or maybe Zeihan’s great sources are lying.
  • Plus more on how Xi has killed or exiled any possible challenger to his power, and how they’re now having a massive Flu Manchu outbreak. “Their overall health is worse than ours, diabetes as a percentage of the population is higher, they don’t have a critical care system like we have, and their hospitals are really their only line of defense.”

    • Next: Why EVs are a disaster.

  • “All kinds of people think I’m full of shit!”
  • Rogan: “What is your perspective on EVS?” Zeihan: “They’re not nearly
    as good on carbon as people think. Most of the data that exists doesn’t take into the fact that most of this stuff is processed in China where it’s all coal doesn’t take [into account] the fact that most grids they run out are also majority fossil fuels. And that extends the break-even time for carbon from one year to either five or ten based on what model you’re talking. Cyber trucks are far worse than EVs, but the bigger problems we’re just not going to be able to make them much longer.”

  • To electrify everything “We need twice as much copper and four times as much chromium and four times as much nickel and ten times as much lithium, and so on. We have never, ever, in any decade in human history, doubled the amount of a mainline material production in ten years, ever, and we need all of this by 2030. No, it’s just not technically possible.”
  • Zeihan says California’s mandates for phasing out gasoline by 2035 aren’t quite as bad as they seem, as the bureaucracy has the ability to move the goal posts if they prove to be unfeasible. Pardon me if I’m not sold on the beneficent rationality of California’s hard left bureaucracy.
  • Speaking of things I’m skeptical of:

    There is a fascinating discussion happening in the environmental community right now, because they’re being confronted with reality. So California and Germany have very similar Green Tech policies, but the Germans have spent three times as much as California, but are only getting about a fifth as much power. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Germany, but the sun doesn’t shine in Germany. And now, with the Russians on the warpath and their clean-ish energy from natural gas going away, they’re going back to lignite coal in force. It was already their number one source of power. The idea that Germany’s green is ridiculous, because they rely on really, really dirty coal, now especially. But there’s now a conversation going on between the German environmentalists and the Californian environmentalists about why California, in relative terms of doing so well at this, while Germany is not. And the answer is simple geography, but that’s never been part of the conversation in the environmental community before. Now it is. They should have had this conversation 15-20 years ago, but they’re having it now. And as soon as they come to the conclusion, unwillingly but they’ll get there, that we have to choose where we put our copper and our lithium and our nickle, EVs are not going to make the cut.

    This assumes that California environmentalists are susceptible to the sweet voice of reason, and that modern environmentalism isn’t half religion and half scam. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” California’s Democratic power establishment has shown an amazing propensity to impose radical solutions that bring obvious and immediate harm to people that are not them. Why should they worry about forcing other people to buy pricey EVs when they already have theirs?

    • Next up: The drug war, both here and in Mexico.

  • Rogan starts by noting that marijuana legalization in California led to cartels planting massive amounts of weed in national forests, and suddenly guys who were game wardens are now wearing tactical gear and carrying machine guns.
  • “I think the mafia is a great example for why you shouldn’t look for the silver bullet [of drug legalization], because, yes, that in the 1920s during prohibition, was one of the big reasons it got going, but the mafia didn’t waste any time in diversifying and neither have the cartels.”
  • “They’ve gotten into cargo theft and kidnapping and avocados and limes and real estate and local government.”
  • “Now the attractiveness of gutting them of some of their primary income. Should we look at that? Of course! But it’s not so simple as removing one and it just all stops.”
  • “The challenge we’re seeing in Mexico right now is that the, uh, the air quotes “good” cartel the, one that saw drugs as a business, is being broken up. If you remember El Chapo—” Rogan: “That’s the good cartel?” Zeihan: “Sinaloa cartel, yeah. He thought of himself as a Korean conglomerate president. So it was like ‘We smuggle drugs. That’s our business. You don’t mess with things that mess with the business. You don’t trip the old lady, you don’t steal her purse, you don’t shoot at the cops. These are people who live where we operate, we want them to be on our side, so maybe even throw a party every once in a while. You focus on the business.'”
  • “The replacement cartel is Jalisco New Generation, They’re led by a former Mexican military officer who thinks that rather than don’t shit where you sleep so that the people on your side whenever you move into a town, you shoot it up. You do kick over the old lady, you do take her purse, you make the people scared of you, that’s the point of this. Drug running is a side gig.”
  • “We are here to be powerful, and drug running is just one of the ways we make that happen. And he has taken the fight to every cartel and the Mexican government, and they’re in the process of trying to break into the United States.”
  • “El Chapo and the Sinaloa became the largest drug trafficking organization in America under the Obama Administration. And one of the reasons our birth rate went down, so far so fast is they basically either co-opted or killed American gangs. So they killed the people who were doing the killing. Not a lot of Americans got killed after that.” I think he meant to say murder rate.
  • “All of the other cartels control the access points in the United States, but
    Jalisco New Generation now is challenging every single one of them trying to break through. And if they do, and they bring their business acumen, if you will north of the border, they’re going to start killing white chicks named Sheila in Phoenix and then we’re gonna have a very different conversation.”

  • “Sinaloa they co-opted the Hispanic gangs, especially the Mexican gangs, because there wasn’t a language barrier there, and they really targeted and gutted a lot of the African-American gangs. They took over drug smuggling and distribution from them to deny them income and then they just shot a lot of people…it was pretty much completed by the time we got to 2013.”
  • “Look at the violent crime rates in the United States, they’ve been trending down really significantly since about 2004 and the drop from 2004 to roughly 2014 was amazing. That’s largely Sinaloa.”
  • And now all the cartels are fighting and the murder rate in Mexico is skyrocketing.

    • He’s not a fan of legalizing cocaine:

    Also says that cartels are now laundering money via marijuana dispensaries using the federal reserve.

    And he’s not a fan of Crypto:

    Bonus: “Maxine Waters is not exactly the brightest person in congress.”

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    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 6 Comments »

    Terrorist Cartels And The War On Drugs

    Sunday, December 8th, 2019

    Last week President Donald Trump “announced his intentions to designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), just weeks after nine American were ambushed and gunned down less than 100 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border by cartel members.” Sarah McConnell at The Texan has details on legislation to enact that proposal:

    After the president said he was considering designating Mexican cartels as FTOs in February, Texas Rep. Chip Roy(TX-R-21) supported by other members of the Texas delegation introduced legislation intended to do just that.

    According to the Department of State, the FTO designation is granted by the Secretary of State in accordance with section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as a means of helping to fight terrorism by “curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business.”

    The Bureau of Counterterrorism within the State Department (CT) monitors foreign organizations known to be connected to terrorist activities, including engaging in, planning, and preparing attacks.

    In addition, the CT carries the responsibility of identifying potential targets for designation based on capability and intent to conduct terrorist activities.

    After the CT identifies a potential FTO designation and demonstrates that the foreign organization in question engages in or is capable of terrorist activity through a detailed record, the Secretary of State in partnership with the Attorney General and Secretary of the Treasury then decides whether or not to grant the designation.

    If the designation is granted, Congress is notified and given one week to review under the terms of the INA.

    The designation officially takes effect when published to the Federal Register provided Congress does not vote to block the designation within the allotted time frame.

    An entity legally fits the criteria for FTO designation under the terms of the INA if it:

  • Is a foreign organization,
  • Engages in terrorist activity as defined in the INA, or
  • Threatens the national security of the United States or U.S. nationals through terrorist activities.

    • In effect, the FTO designation authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to freeze all assets and block financial transactions conducted by the terrorist organization.

    That’s great and all, but I doubt Mexican drug cartels keep the majority of their funds in the United States. Some, yes, but I bet the bulk are in Mexico, Caribbean tax havens and Switzerland. In addition to those giant piles of cash they keep around for washing cars, buying drugs, exchanging hostages and buying politicians.

    (That photo of a giant pile of cash was taken from accused Chinese-Mexican Sinaloa Cartel druglord Zhenli Ye Gon, was seized in 2007, and has $207 million in U.S. currency alone. It’s been circulating a while, and recent pieces that claim it was seized from someone else or is worth more (I’ve seen $22 billion) are untrustworthy.)

    Additionally, the designation restricts the ability of foreign organizations and their affiliates to travel to the United States and makes it illegal to provide resources to the terrorist organization.

    The designation also has foreign policy implications, as it stigmatizes terrorist organizations, brings awareness to other nations of the dangers of said terrorist organizations, and helps to curb terrorism financing internationally by encouraging other countries to also consider designating organizations as such.

    This will help some, but drug organizations tend to be fairly nimble about moving their money around, and have so much of it that it’s easy to bribe officials up and down the line to make look the other way, an advantage most Islamic terrorist organizations don’t have.

    After announcing his intentions to designate Mexican cartels as FTOs last week, President Trump has been met with resistance from Mexican government officials despite the president’s offers to provide added border security measures and other forms of assistance to the country.

    Citing concerns over U.S. intervention in the country, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcel Ebrard issued a statement following President Trump’s announcement saying, “Mexico will never admit any action that means the violation of its national sovereignty. We will act firmly. The position has already been transmitted to the US as well as our resolution to deal with transnational organized crime. Mutual respect is the basis of cooperation.”

    Mexican President Andrew Manuel Lopez Obrador has also declined aid and other forms of assistance offered by President Trump.

    It’s hard to get more hands-on with Mexican drug cartels when the Mexican government wants you to stay hands-off.

    Can such declarations win the War on Drugs?

    No.

    Human desire for illegal drugs is so strong that even the death penalty hasn’t prevented a thriving illegal drug trade in China, and there was even one in the Soviet Union. A further problem is that large swathes of Mexico’s government is believed by many to be in the pay of various drug cartels. Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman claimed that he had paid a $100 million bribe to then-Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto, and Guzman also claimed to have bribed a onetime campaign associate of current president Lopez Obrador. And those are just allegations from one trial of one cartel head. Mexico itself has proescuted many more officials for cartel bribery charges. “Would you prefer to take a million dollars from us, or to see your entire family tortured to death in front of you?” is a powerfully persuasive argument to many Mexicans.

    Is there any way to win the war on drugs? As a science fiction writer, I could spin up a scenario where our military and/or mercenaries (think letters of marque and reprisal) simultaneously decapitate all the major cartels by taking out their leaders and lieutenants, while simultaneously seizing control of all the known coca fields, and maybe clandestinely blowing up an illegal Chinese fentanyl factory or ten, and simultaneously legalizing drugs, and offering zero-cost drug fixes in safe surroundings for registered addicts and whisking a certain number off to giant treatment/rehabilitation/internment facilities off in Montana or Idaho or someplace where gangs wouldn’t immediately bribe someone to start dealing to the suddenly isolated addicts, and massive job programs for registered/ex-addicts to clean up America’s cities at below minimum wages while they complete treatment programs while also retraining for better jobs to integrate them back into the community. I can see that cutting illegal drug use by 80% of more while draining all the profit from the cartels, all at a cost of only, oh, about four or five political and/or constitutional impossibilities. It might not work, but it probably wouldn’t fail any worse than the system we have now, especially in the places where Democratic Party mayors already let drug addicts openly shoot up in the street.

    I would also like a pony.

    Short of that, or some technological fix (one injection and the nanoassemblers in a junkie’s bloodstream to produce a heroin rush whenever desired for the rest of his life), or even less probable Social Darwanist solutions (such as John W. Campbell’s proposal to put free barrels of heroin on every street corner; by the evening everyone who couldn’t handle it would be dead and the rest of us could get on with our lives), I don’t see any government policy short of full legalization of all illegal drugs making any significant difference in the problem.

    But as much as I support drug legalization, I suspect I’ll get two ponies before that happens.

    Would declaring the cartels terrorist organizations make a big difference? If it actually lets us take out the cartels, then briefly, and marginally, until new cartels form to fill the vacuum. During that time, Mexico might indeed improve to become a less violent place, possibly only temporarily, or the new cartels might be more circumspect in their violence, or more willing to peacefully carve up business. If, however, it results in a permeant American military presence fighting the cartels, then it would probably make things worse.

    As a persuasion play for the current cartels to knock off the violence and take a lower profile, then it might indeed have some value.

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy | No Comments »

    Sinaloa Cartel Wins Battle Against Mexican Government

    Saturday, October 26th, 2019

    In case you missed the news earlier this week, the Mexican government fought a running gun battle against the Sinaloan drug cartel drug cartel last week and lost.

    In the Sinaloan city of Culiacan, the cartel gunmen were everywhere. They openly drove in trucks with mounted machine guns, blockaded streets flashing their Kalashnikovs and burned trucks unleashing plumes of smoke like it was a scene in Syria. They took control of the strategic points in the metro area, shut down the airport, roads, and government buildings and exchanged fire with security forces for hours, leaving at least eight people dead. In contrast, everyone else had to act like ghosts, hiding behind locked doors, not daring to step outside.

    And in this unusual battle, the Sinaloa Cartel won. Their uprising was in response to soldiers storming a house on Thursday and arresting Ovidio Guzman, the 28-year old son of convicted kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. In February, the U.S. Justice Department announced it had indicted Ovidio Guzman on trafficking cocaine, marijuana and meth. But after hours of cartel chaos, Mexico’s federal government gave soldiers the go ahead to release him. It capitulated.

    I’ve covered Mexico’s drug violence for 18 years, written two books about the subject, and seen many extraordinary episodes. In Sinaloa, the cradle of drug traffickers, I’ve repeatedly been on the crime beat chasing bullet-ridden corpses and into the mountains to Guzman’s opium-growing village. But Thursday was different. It wasn’t gangster action; it was a mass insurrection.

    “There was panic, terror, the city was under siege,” says Vladimir Ramirez, a political scientist in Culiacan, who like many has continued curfew into Friday. “People slept wherever they were at. Businesses are closed, nobody wants to go out.”

    This change has not come overnight. It is the result of a bloody trend of cartels developing insurgent tactics over many years. The use of burning vehicles to block roads was taken from militant protesters; cartels use it to stop the movement of troops and put pressure on the government. The cartels have armed up with stolen military weapons and an endless stream of rifles from the United States. Between 2007 and 2018, more than 150,000 firearms seized in Mexico were traced to U.S. gun shops and factories.And cartels from the Texas border to Guadalajara have learned to protect their leaders with rings of gunmen who can cause trouble to stop their capture.

    Here are some videos of the firefight:

    One of the most striking things about those videos is that it appears that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of Mexican police and troops, and it wasn’t enough.

    Many believe that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is on the payroll of one or more of the cartels. Probably because Mexico’s previous president was, as was Edgar Veytia, attorney general in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit.

    Former Mexican president Vicente Fox thinks drug legalization is the best way to fight the cartels. “Mexico’s Senate is expected to vote in favor of a bill to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in the coming days, in a bid to choke off a black market dominated by violent gangs.”

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    Posted in Crime, video | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for June 2, 2011

    Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

    Taking some time to get back into the post-Memorial Day swing, so here are a few links of interest:

  • California passes new Let’s-Drive-As-Much-Business-to-Texas-As-Possible law. Thanks, California Democrats!
  • Another interesting Michael Totten piece, this one on Jewish settlers in Hebron.
  • Just in case it wasn’t already blindingly obvious, the economy still sucks.
  • Holly Hansen covers Rick Perry’s conference call.
  • Stratfor on the ambush of a heavily armed convoy of drug cartel gunmen by another cartel. “In an environment where drug cartels can mass dozens of gunmen and arm them with powerful weapons like machine guns, .50-caliber sniper rifles, grenades and RPGs, there is no such thing as a force that is too big to be ambushed.” It also suggests that Mexican drug gunmen make incompetent soldiers.
  • Speaking of the drug war, something that produces a mass grave of 226 people has to be classified as a serious war…or a serious atrocity.
  • A freedom ranking of states. Texas comes in fifth. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • How “smart growth” policies helped contribute to the housing bubble. (Hat tip: Powerline.)
  • I haven’t been following Weinergate because so many others have, but I wanted to point out Ace of Spades shocking, inconceivable theory:

    We are all agreed that someone had an interest in sending a picture of Rep. Weiner’s erection to a coed. Even Rep. Weiner agrees on this much—he’s basically told us yeah, that’s my junk. And he’s proud of that. Would I sound very boring if I were to suggest that the person with the means, opportunity, and motive to send Rep. Weiner’s dicpic to the coed was none other than Rep. Weiner himself?

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    Posted in Crime, Economics, Foreign Policy, Texas | No Comments »