Drug War

Open Thread

Mark Noonan21 Comments

I love being a trendsetter! You might recall that back in 2018 I suggested that we need to return to the Battleship concept for the Navy. To nutshell what I said, we should be building a massive class of warships which are heavily armored, fast and packing a gigantic punch. This isn’t to replace the carrier, but to give us a balanced fleet. Right now, we’re pretty much nothing but carriers and destroyers on the surface and while this has a lot of important advantages, nothing dominates better than massive power…especially close in to enemy territory.

I envisioned back then a ship of probably 100,000 tons, about a thousand feet long, low profile, taking full advantage of the new alloys being developed for armor protection and packed with missiles and carrying with it significant guns (to eventually be replaced by railguns if we ever work them out). It would be heavily automated and so probably have a crew of no more than a couple hundred and nuclear powered. Well, turns out I’m not the only person thinking along these lines – so is Trump.

It seems that Trump is dissatisfied with our fleet. Is it something he knows or is it instinctive? I don’t know – but while I discount those who say the era of the Carrier is over I do believe it is time for one of those evolutions of sea power, the last of which ushered in the Carrier as the dominate Naval asset. Do keep in mind that while I call this a Battleship, it isn’t to perform the role intended for those old castles of steel – that is, lines of them coming into conflict, guns blazing until one side is destroyed. The new Battleship is a strategic asset – it is designed to survive whatever you can throw at them and still arrive off your coast…carrying in her train, as needed, an invading army you cannot stop. Carriers can defeat enemy air power. Submarines can destroy your trade. But only a battle fleet can compel your surrender. Five such ships off Shanghai ends whatever point China would be trying to make via war with us.

The government is still shut down. I guess. Nobody cares.

Mamdani says his aunt faced anti-Muslim backlash in NYC after 9/11. Given that Mamdani is a Commie we can assume this is a lie…but even if it isn’t, so what? Who the heck cares if your aunt got some nasty looks after 3,000 Americans were murdered? Mamdani didn’t mention them. Because he doesn’t care about them. To him, the true victims of 9/11 were Muslims…just as he holds the true victims of 10/7 were the Gazans. Its some real sick, twisted stuff in that man…and all those like him (which includes, it should be noted, quite a few upper class liberal white women).

Trump’s plan to kill drug mules on the high seas seems to be accelerating. The latest tactic the Cartel apologists are using is “these poor people are coerced into shipping drugs”…which is probably true to a certain extent. To bad, so sad. Not our problem. As with all bad things, they only happen via cooperation. Sure, you and your family might suffer if you stand up to the Cartels…but by not standing up to them, you’re just moving the suffering around…from you and your family to some poor slob and his family in the USA. And, of course, the mules – under threat or not – are being well paid to make the runs. And that is the real key here.

As I’ve noted before, we can’t defeat the Drug Lords – simply because once you get one, you just get the next…who is probably going to be better at it as he’ll learn from the mistakes of his predecessors (and, indeed, often a major Drug Lord only goes down after someone below betrays him to us so that we’ll remove him, allowing the new guy to take over). The whole thing about this illicit trade is that it is massive amounts of stuff to be moved. Very different from days when we might be talking a kilogram or two…they are shipping tons of the stuff. And the return trip is literal tons of money. This takes huge infrastructure…and apparently we’ve known all along about these shipments (routes, timing, ports, all of it). By hitting the mules we’re doing the worst possible thing to the Cartels – denying them their ability to earn money. The money which, among other things, buys the bully-boys necessary to keep everyone in line (you know: if you threaten to kill a man’s family if he doesn’t cooperate this rings rather hollow unless you have some menacing guys around to back up the threat – menacing guys don’t work for free). We’re strangling the Cartels…and that is why everyone involved is blowing a gasket over it (huge numbers of supposedly honest people are hip deep in the Cartel trade). As per usual, Trump is simply doing what could have been done all along…which shows that all of our problems are actually policy choices.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan28 Comments

Euthanasia is the 6th leading cause of death in Canada – and, as you and I knew would happen, people are being pressured to off themselves when they get seriously ill and/or old. As I’ve said for ages, the fundamental problem with nationalized health care is that there is no incentive to care for sick people. All that does is cost money and take time. For someone working in a nationalize health system, the whole incentive is to provide as little care as possible because you don’t get more money for providing more care…all you get for providing more care is more work. And the success of the “death with dignity” ghouls has played right into this…why spend the time and money taking care of the 80 year old with a chronic illness when you can guilt trip them into killing themselves?

Been watching the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico and it is quite good – minimal woke drivel (though there is some, of course) and a gripping story of how the Mexican drug cartels rose. Being familiar with a lot of the events I can easily tell when the story is adhering to fact and when it is altering it for dramatic and time purposes. As I’ve watched and went down memory lane on the War on Drugs, I find that I’m viewing it all through a bit of a different prism these days. The show, itself, does a very clever job of showing the flaws of the DEA and law enforcement in general while also highlighting just how cruel and wicked the drug lords are while still not making them entire monsters – leaving them just a shred of their humanity to make their (usually violent) ends pathetic. But it also got me thinking. One of the things presented in the first episode is a claim that half a million people have died in the drug war in Mexico. A shocking figure which at first glance is simply unbelievable.

But, then you think about it and check – between 2015 and 2021 211,000 people were murdered in Mexico. Officially. The real number is probably higher given the very large number of people who simply disappear. Nobody really knows how many of these people died as a result of the drug trade (who is going to really investigate that?): estimates range from just under half to more than two thirds. I think it the latter number – and in reality probably ninety percent are direct or indirect from the drug trade. Gun ownership is pretty much illegal in Mexico and that means only the police and the cartels have guns, after all. So, anyways, 211,000 in a seven year span is 30,000 per year. Call it half are drug and you get 15,000 (and probably a lot higher) and then you take that back to DEA Agent Camarena‘s murder (which is when we got serious about it) in 1985…and, yeah, low end you get half a million Mexicans dead in the drug war. Probably half of US murders are directly or indirectly related to the drug war, as well. Then you’ve got to add in Central and South America…and we’re probably into a couple million dead. Over cocaine. Just amazing. And its not like we’ve made a dent in it.

Nobody knows how big the global trade in drugs is, but its hundreds of billions of impossible to trace, tax-free, cash transactions (when you get away with it, of course!). And we’ve been told it can’t be stopped. I’m not buying that. I don’t think anyone wants it stopped. I mean, we know that the Mexican government via bribery and threats is pretty much owned by the cartels…but how much of ours is? How many Americans are on the payroll? Is this the real reason for resistance to border security? And its not like the US is a mere destination for cocaine – the price of cocaine doubles from New York City to Antwerp…and whoever is moving it from the Big Apple to Europe is taking their cut. And then you think of crack which is a way to make pricey cocaine available to people who are, lets face it, largely on welfare both in the USA and Europe; as if someone figured out how to get the taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction. As for laundering the money…you think China would refuse to launder drug lord money which provides a product which weakens their western adversaries? I believe it is time to rethink our views here – and understand that what is happening isn’t just something that happens. Some very powerful people are making sure it happens.

Interesting thing on education:

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver…

Good for Weaver to see the light and I wish all success – but think about Weaver’s initial reaction to it: hated it. And now he has to fight to get it back in. And who will he be fighting? The teachers. Guarantee you the parents are probably on board. But this is how our Ruling Class views things: through Marxist ideology on race and class. That is how far it has penetrated into our society – that people will fight to defend a system which leaves 80 percent of black kids illiterate on the theory that at least they aren’t literate under Capitalism and White Supremacy.

Spot on about Trump and his opponents:

Trump isn’t just a MacGuffin, but he is a symbol, and more. Sarah Palin was a similar symbol before him, but because she never was elected VP that sort of faded. Trump would have faded from their ire, too, if he had lost the 2016 election. His winning was the outrage. They could not believe it, and he MUST BE STOPPED from ever winning again. Not just him, though; any Republican who isn’t part of the genteel NeverTrumper club. Any Republican who might really be serious about stopping them and especially about draining the so-called swamp. It is a deadly serious game and they are determined to win.

Trump himself said it, and he was correct: “They’re not after me, they’re after you – I’m just in the way.”

We’re living in a world where those who have the juice are living ever better while for everyone else it just gets worse. This is not sustainable but the Ruling Class is determined to sustain it anyway. Trump placed their game at risk.