Cartels

Mexico and the World of Make Believe

Mark Noonan45 Comments

When Zachary Taylor marched his army into Mexico in 1846 along with finding Mexicans to fight, he also found Mexicans who wanted nothing to do with Mexico. That is, plenty of people in northern Mexico were desperate to be annexed to the USA – anything to get out of Mexico’s clutches. And even among the Mexicans who fought, it wasn’t particularly well. At Buena Vista, Taylor was outnumbered about four to one and he totally crushed the Mexican army – don’t get me wrong, Mexicans are as brave as any and there were some attacks pressed home with determination…but at the end of the day, the Mexican army at Buena Vista – fighting deep inside Mexican territory – was fought to a standstill and then had to be withdrawn because its commanders sensed that the men were about to desert en masse. In other words, it wasn’t a national army of patriots…but a conscript force of peasants who simply would not grit it out in defense of a country – and Ruling Class – they cared nothing about.

I believe this was because Mexico was a mistake. How did Mexico become independent? Well, Augustin de Iturbide – the commander of the Spanish army in Mexico – switched sides. It would be akin to us winning independence by putting Cornwallis in command of the Continental Army. In other words, pure farce. Why did Iturbide switch sides? Because he had been dismissed from command for cruelty and corruption. He got past that via influential friends but once reappointed to command, he looked for his first chance to betray Spain. After independence, he tried to set himself up as Emperor of Mexico but was swiftly overthrown and forced into exile. Returning a few years later, he was arrested by some of his opponents and shot after a bogus trial. But this doesn’t really get down to the nitty gritty – the fact that Mexico wasn’t fighting for independence in the manner the thirteen colonies had.

It wasn’t a matter that not everyone was on board (like here in the USA), but that people were fighting for completely different things…and it boiled down to various factions fighting for personal advantage. It was all just one very big mess and it was a ghastly tragi-comedy which persisted in Mexico until Diaz put down everyone and installed himself as President from 1876 to 1911. And in that period of stability he sort of crafted a story of Mexico and imposed it on the people – nothing like a couple generations of power to convince people that your justification for remaining in power is the actual story of your people. And then even that all fell apart and Mexico was consumed by ten years of civil war until the people who eventually created the PRI won control and set up a system to perpetuate themselves indefinitely in power under the guise of Democracy but with the elections fake and the outcomes predetermined. When the PRI started to fall apart in the late 1990’s there was a brief glimmer of hope that Mexico would finally get a government of consent…but then the rise of the Cartels in the early part of the 21st century nixed that.

And here we are – now there’s apparent Cartel war in Puerto Vallarta with the backdrop of a Mexican “government” which says it won’t use the army to fight the Cartels because that might violate human rights. In other words, the “government” of Mexico is no such thing – just a facade for the various Cartels who now battle it out to control territory and income…with the problem being the massive reduction in Cartel income following Trump’s closure of the border. My bet is that the Cartels, feeling the pinch, are now fighting over domestic income streams – and Puerto Vallarta with its huge influx of tourist dollars is a plum worth plucking…if you have the power to oust the current Cartel owners (don’t worry too much over stories that it was the Mexican military that zapped the Cartel boss…think of the Mexican military as yet another Cartel…it is certainly controlled by Cartels).

Why bring all this up? Well, outside the fact that we might have to intervene in Mexico for our own security needs, I think this needs to be said – and said again and again. That is: stop living in the world of make believe. We’ve maintained this pretense that Mexico has a legitimate government that we can deal with on the square. Never have we had such a thing. Now, this doesn’t mean we can’t be expedient about things, but let us have no illusions about it. We’re dealing with a clique, not a government – there is no legitimacy in it…it was engineered into power via shadowy forces and it will be replaced by the same sort of machinations.

So, too, it goes all around the world. Nigeria isn’t a country – its a colonial leftover encompassing at least five distinct peoples, most of whom hate each other with a passion. It is like jamming together France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Greece and calling it one country. The raids against Christians are carried out by Muslims…with the Muslims and Christians having distinct national identities, neither of which are “Nigerian”…but the fiction is kept alive – mostly by the Muslims – because the Christians hold the most valuable real estate (ie, that which has the oil). South Africa – not a country. Syria – not a country. Algeria – not a country (its borders and national identity are leftovers of French rule). And even some genuine countries – that is real peoples who’s borders roughly coincide with them – don’t have real governments; just like Mexico doesn’t. Iran – not a real government. Zimbabwe – not a real government. Sudan – not a real government. As for the EU – definitely getting deep into “not a real government” there…so much manipulation and fraud that we’re getting to the point where we can’t be certain any government there reflects the will of the people.

The world is not civilized any longer. I’ve seen posts on X from Canadians who went “elbows up” and decided to vacation in Mexico instead of the USA…to teach us Yanks a lesson. Hey, I used to love going to Mexico…but I haven’t been in about twenty years. Why not? Because when they start finding the bodies of dismembered people and nobody is arrested for it, I decide that place isn’t a good vacation destination. You’ve got to think about the people who go to Mexico – they’re betting their lives that the Cartels will keep them safe. To be sure, most of the time it is so…but if the Cartels decide its time for some death, then death is coming and there is no power in Mexico which can protect you from it. So, I’ll just have a taco here at home and keep Mexico as a fond memory of the past. I wouldn’t travel outside the USA these days if you paid me to do so – heck, even here at home barbarism is spreading, but at least here I’m on my own ground…I know the rules and can navigate my way through it. To be a foreigner? Heck no. Not even for a minute. There is no law out there – just power; and if power decides I gotta die, then dead I’ll be.

We need to take a long, hard look at things. These days, only a few foreign nations are in any way reliable – Japan, Argentina, El Salvador, Israel, UAE…maybe a half dozen others among the whole bunch. The rest of the world is a series of corrupt, cruel and increasingly incompetent factions fighting for control over dying societies. We are now faced with a battle to save ourselves – to Make America Great Again – and this will absorb the next twenty years. Our main foreign policy goal is to enforce as much peace as possible – mostly by a mix of force and persuasion. You know: sometimes kidnapping a foreign potentate who got on our nerves, other times offering them a deal which keeps them alive as long as they stop funding Hamas. But the purpose is to keep things as quiet as possible – as cheaply as possible – while we set our house in order and restore civilization here at home.

In light of this, what Trump will do with Mexico must be – and I believe it will be – in line with our needs. We don’t want a chaotic Mexico. But we can’t live with a Cartel Mexico, either. Something has to give…and it can’t be done with worries over offending Mexican national sensibilities which we can’t be sure even exist outside rent-a-mobs waving Mexican flags. So, too, our dealings with all nations comes into focus…and the Trump Doctrine emerges: we want peace. We will make a deal even if you’re just a mafia which took over a country. If you don’t take the deal…things will go badly for you.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Invoking the Home Rule Act, Trump has decided to take over law enforcement in Washington, DC. This will cause shrieks from the Democrats and probably a raft of lawsuits…but Trump is totally within his power to do this. Good to keep in mind that in DC, like in all major Blue cities, the reason crime is rampant stems from two things:

  1. The Leninist conviction that all crime is a result of social injustice (ie, the real criminals are those who sustain the system – that is, you and me).
  2. If you’re a Blue city mayor, DA or what have you, the last thing you want to do is arrest a lot of POC. They are who are doing most of the crime in the Blue cities, but there is no electoral upside here – and not just with POC voters, but with the upper class whites who tend to be the decisive vote in electing governments in Blue cities. Basically, you have to pretend the problem is anything but POC – and so you’ll come up with “alternatives to policing” and a host of other eyewash programs to pretend you’re doing something about it when you aren’t because you can’t.

But people don’t like that – they might not be able to totally articulate it, but nobody likes a lot of street crime. And not just out of concern for personal property and safety…nobody likes to see streets filled with litter and zombie-like drug addicts with criminals prowling around looking for the next victim. The people like to see clean, safe streets. Trump is going to try to give it to the people of DC.

Can’t emphasize enough how important it is that this work – because all of our crime-ridden cities are crime-ridden by choice. The leadership of the cities, like that in DC, made the political choice to allow crime to be rampant. If Trump can clean up DC then it’ll show that every city can be cleaned up…you just have to arrest the people committing crimes. It is like border security – Trump has shown that every President could have just done it. Closed it of. Stopped the flow. It just had be ordered done. It wasn’t – and for the same reason the government of DC doesn’t order the crime stopped…the political and social desires of those in charge are best served by business as usual.

The WNBA is going to install “anti foreign object netting” around the basketball court…if you don’t know why, then just Google … heck, don’t know how to write that on a family website! Anyways, just look around social media for the latest WNBA memes and you’ll quickly see which foreign object the WNBA is trying to stop. This is becoming ground zero in the culture war. The WNBA was created as a payoff, in my view: feminist groups were given this league by the NBA in order to take the heat of NBA players who were…not always total gentlemen with the ladies. Basically it is the #MeToo fine the NBA is paying. A whole infrastructure was built up to make it seem like it was an organic sport…something that people wanted. But it was mostly just ignored…and then Caitlin Clark became a thing and the WNBA had their first organic star…whom the other players proceeded to treat like garbage. It has all been so clearly mere jealousy…people who simply aren’t as good as Clark fouling her for being good. People saw this and now the previously-ignored WNBA is the currently-despised WNBA.

The league loses on average $10 million a year – chump change for an NBA with $10 billion in annual revenue. The pragmatic facts of life are that even someone as good as Clark probably isn’t good enough to sit on an NBA bench. As playing spreads among young girls there will grow an ever stronger group of female players and we will probably see some ladies being just good enough to in theory play for the NBA. But the play will never be NBA level – it can’t be because of those inherent physical differences between men and women (you know, that we’re supposed to pretend don’t exist). How much are people going to pay for something that doesn’t even work out to a AAA for the NBA? Not much. Sure, if you just love basketball as a thing and like to see a game, you’ll go watch WNBA…if nothing else is available. And in this it is sort of like AAA ball…which does get some people in the stands but, let’s face it, not that much…and certainly not a MLB prices.

I don’t care about the league at all – not a basketball fan. But the attempt to force it into a major league has been silly from the start. And now that people are really looking at it for the first time, they don’t see what they like. So, anti-foreign object netting…

Trump has apparently given the order to have our military go after the Cartels. The Mexican government objects. On the other hand, there really is no Mexican government. Sure, the go through the motions but the bottom line is that the Cartels totally control Mexico. You’d probably be better off thinking that the government is another Cartel…and probably the junior partner. Mexico has always been hopelessly corrupt…the only difference is how much corruption is going on at any given time. Keep in mind that there wasn’t a popular uprising to bring an end to Spanish rule in Mexico…it was upper class people who just wanted their own country to play with and they took advantage of a Spain gravely weakened by the Napoleonic Wars. Since that time, it has been one sort of oppression after another to keep the contraption together (lost in the records is the fact that as Zachary Taylor’s army moved deeper into Mexico during the Mexican-American War province after province asked him to get them into the American Union). The PRI for decades held it together via a mix of bribery and mild political repression…and the sort of political leader they developed was a coward merely looking for the next payoff. These people had no chance against the Cartels. The Mexican people might want to fight the Cartels but the Mexican government won’t arm the people…because they know that as soon as the Cartels are knocked off, those guns would be turned against the government.

This is still going to be a very tricky business. Make no mistake about it! Mexican’s do have a very prickly pride especially when we gringos are involved. But it has to be done – we can’t have Cartels dominating our southern neighbor. They have to go.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan17 Comments

Polls is polls, of course; always grain of salt them. But this does reflect the reality of voter registration trends, which have almost all favored the GOP for years now. A few hiccups here and there but for the most part State after State – especially Battlegrounds and the light Blue States – are showing GOP voter registration increases. And even deep Blue like California are showing a GOP trend, though Democrat strength there is so dominant it’ll be years before it matters.

The Official Narrative remains that the GOP will certainly lose the House in 2026. Likely hold the Senate; though we’re already getting the “is Red State X about to turn Blue?” that we get all the time with some new Democrat hope being polished up for the MSM…and about to rake in untold millions for what will prove another futile campaign (though I wonder: with the cutoff of money to NGOs, maybe there won’t be $70 million for a useless Democrat Senate race in Texas next year? We’ll see; these things are done to get the GOP to spend money in Red States and thus have less resources for prospects…and you’ll note that the GOP still hasn’t figured out that its time to find some Great GOP Hope for deep Blue states, finance them out the wazoo and force Democrats to spend money). But the House is considered a goner for the GOP. And, normally, this would be so – the GOP majority is razor thin and just the normal mid-term snap back would propel Democrats to a majority. But voter registration trends and things like this recent poll are putting a fly in that ointment.

The Democrats are staking out the 20 in the 80/20 issues. They are doing this because they are convinced that they are on the popular side. They honestly believe – because they tell themselves endlessly – that the American people don’t want mass deportations, want boys in girls sports and are furious that we’re no longer providing funding for NGO’s. They believe that the federal judges issuing ridiculous rulings against Trump are in line with the people’s will. That rioting against ICE is the spontaneous expression of the people.

Could it be like this? I guess anything is possible. But my sense of the matter is that the Democrats are being simply insane and the American people perceive this. Given this, even if things aren’t perfect in 2026 and even if there are some serious complaints about Trump or GOP policies, they’re going to stick with Trump and the GOP. That the 2026 midterms will be akin to the 1934 midterms…in that election, the first for FDR, there should have been a snap back in favor of the GOP. There wasn’t because the GOP spent two years reminding everyone why they hated them.

The View announced they are going on hiatus. Can’t emphasize enough how important this is. It is part of the Democrat information ecosystem…even though they don’t have massive viewership, they reinforce the Democrat Narrative. Much like Colbert does with his show. Without this continual reinforcement of Democrat bigotry it will become increasingly difficult to sustain it. Can’t forget how propaganda works: it isn’t just the lie, it is the endlessly and universally repeated lie. A lie so pervasive that even skeptical people start to think there’s something to it…after all, it was on the daytime talk show, the evening news and the late night show! How can it not be true? They wouldn’t all lie…would they? Make no mistake about it, the people who run the MSM are still almost all Democrats…but they also are getting pounded in ratings as more and more people switch off while lying is becoming costly…Trump’s Presidential library will be gold plated if things keep going as they are! At the end of the day, the purpose is to make money – and shows like Colbert’s and The View aren’t money makers – or if they do squeeze out a profit, it isn’t worth the risk that a host of the show will go off on some anti-Trump rant, lie and cost the company 20 million dollars.

Lindsey Graham is asking that a Special Counsel be appointed to look into the Trump-Russia scandal – and that’s gonna be a hard No from all sensible people. This is a last, desperate attempt to cover up what Obama, et al did. To bury it under an investigation that will take at least two years…plenty for time to sandbag the whole thing and come out at the end with some lying report saying that while there were improprieties, no laws were broken. Laws were obviously broken: the only question here is can we sufficiently prove who broke them to get indictments and convictions? Indicting Obama is pretty much pie in the sky – one in a million shot – but the last thing we want is someone who starts out not wanting to indict. We want Bondi – someone who wants to indict because that’s what the records indicate should happen. The high hurdle here is the protections Presidents have in carrying out the duties of their office…this doesn’t protect actual criminal behavior, but it makes for murky legal ground that defense attorneys and judges will be happy to latch on to in order to protect Obama and their class. What I’m saying here is that we need to find out if there is such indisputable evidence that we really can indict…a special counsel will not get us there. Ever. And even if we can’t get Obama, there are probably a couple hundred people we can get…and we need an investigation which will make people want to turn State’s evidence, not work out a statement that obscures things in exchange for immunity.

The latest social media sensation is the Door Kick Challenge: it involves youngsters going up to random doors and kicking them very hard. Police are urging parents to talk to their kids and let them know this is foolish and dangerous. Most people are treating it as described – just a youthful (if rather dumb) lark. It ain’t that, guys.

It is gang recruitment.

It’s a test: will you do as you’re told? Will you, quite especially, do as you’re told when it is wrong and dangerous? The gangs are finding out who in the neighborhood will do something violently stupid. This is the perfect ground to develop young gang members you can use for hits and intimidation.

And right now the gangs need new blood – they are losing quite a lot of their foot soldiers via deportations. Enforcement via people brought in illegally is going to become increasingly difficult – but the gangs still need their enforcers to make sure the money keeps coming in. What better than to have a 16 year old true blue American citizen do it? Can’t be deported. If arrested, tried as a juvenile in most jurisdictions. At all events, totally expendable. You get that young man a nice car and some cool clothes for doing it, he’ll do any thing you ask him to. I do believe the gangs are going to hit back, hard. There are billions of dollars at stake here. They need an army to intimidate us into giving up the fight. This is the recruitment of that army. They essentially did this in all the Latin American countries they dominate…for relative peanuts, get a mass of ignorant but strong youth to do your bidding no matter how horrific it is…but you never start with having them chop someone to pieces. It is always the smaller, easier step that comes first…as part of the winnowing process to find the hard core.