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Enjoy The World’s Toughest Prison, Tren De Aragua Scumbags

Monday, March 17th, 2025

It’s always interesting when two different topics I’ve covered converge in an unexpected way.

The first is this piece on El Salvador’s super-tough gang prison, which I covered in this LinkSwarm.

Here’s the CNN segment covering that prison:

A few highlights of El Salvador’s CECOT prison:

  • 80 inmates per each cell, no mattresses, no sheets, a communal toilet, and a communal bathing basin.
  • A remote mountain location with multiple checkpoints before you even get to the prison itself.
  • Nine meters of concrete walls topped with electrified fence.
  • “The director tells me the inmates, once they’re inside one of the sectors, they never leave.”
  • 23.5 hours a day, they stay in the cell.
  • Inmates who get violent get put in solitary, with one tiny light hole in the ceiling.

    • As I noted in the LinkSwarm, these very effective control measures would, quite correctly, be considered cruel and unusual punishment if applied to American citizens.

    The second topic is the violent Tren de Aragua gang, which we’ve covered here, here, here, here, and here, among other places.

    So what’s combining these two stories? Trump’s crackdown on and deportation of criminal illegal aliens. Well, guess what prison Trump is deporting Tren de Aragua scumbags to?

    The Trump administration ignored a temporary court order to halt deportation flights of accused Venezuelan gang members — and is vowing to take it up with the highest court in the land.

    “This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win,” a senior White House official told Axios.

    During an emergency hearing on Saturday, US District Judge James Boasberg issued a 14-day restraining order to prevent the administration from evoking the 1789 Alien Enemies Act as justification for deporting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes without hearings.

    I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Boasberg was nominated to his current district court seat by Obama.

    “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States however that is accomplished,” Boasberg wrote, according to the Washington Post.

    However, a day later, the first flight carrying more than 250 Venezuelan gang members left the US bound for El Salvador, where they were escorted off the plane by heavily armed commandos and brought to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).

    The flights included 238 members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, as well as 23 members of MS-13, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, revealed Sunday morning.

    A second official told the outlet that the administration’s justification for ignoring Boasberg’s order was that the ruling didn’t apply because the flights were being flown over international waters, and that his edict came too late to turn the planes around.

    Snip.

    President Trump shared a dramatic video of the prisoner transport on Truth Social Sunday evening, showing shackled men being roughly led from the planes onto armored troop transport vehicles.

    “These are the monsters sent into our Country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats. How dare they! Thank you to El Salvador and, in particular, President Bukele, for your understanding of this horrible situation, which was allowed to happen to the United States because of incompetent Democrat leadership. We will not forget!”

    Naturally, Democrats are appalled that Trump is deporting their precious illegal alien criminals.

    Four Democratic senators on Monday called Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act for immigration enforcement an “unlawful and brazen power grab.”

    “All of us, including the courts, must continue to hold this administration accountable, and prevent the Trump administration from taking us down a dark and dangerous road,” Senators Dick Durbin, Alex Padilla, Cory Booker, and Peter Welch said in a statement.

    That’s some clever, out-of-the-box thinking by President Trump, getting gangbanging scumbags deported, deterring other criminals by making clear they’ll end up in much worse prisons than those in America, and getting Democrats to, yet again, jump on the wrong side of an 80-20% issue.

    Good job, Mr. President!

    * I don’t know if this is actually the world’s worst prison, but it’s the worst one I know about. There are probably prisons in China or Afghanistan that are worse…

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, video | 9 Comments »

    Meet The New Boss, Eh/Same As The Old Boss, Eh

    Monday, March 10th, 2025

    Up in the 51st state leftwing Canukistan, Justin Trudeau is stepping down after nine long years in power in favor of banker Mark Carney.

    Former central banker Mark Carney won the race to become leader of Canada’s ruling Liberal Party and will succeed Justin Trudeau as prime minister, official results showed on Sunday.

    Carney will take over at a tumultuous time in Canada, which is in the midst of a trade war with longtime ally the United States under President Donald Trump and must hold a general election soon.

    Carney, 59, took 86% of votes cast to beat former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in a contest in which just under 152,000 party members voted.

    “There’s someone who’s trying to weaken our economy,” Carney said of Trump, spurring loud boos at the party gathering. “He’s attacking Canadian workers, families, and businesses. We can’t let him succeed.”

    “This won’t be business as usual,” Carney said. “We will have to do things that we haven’t imagined before, at speeds we didn’t think possible.”

    Trudeau announced in January that he would step down after more than nine years in power as his approval rating plummeted, forcing the ruling Liberal Party to run a quick contest to replace him.

    “Make no mistake, this is a nation-defining moment. Democracy is not a given. Freedom is not a given. Even Canada is not a given,” Trudeau said.

    Carney, a political novice, argued that he was best placed to revive the party and to oversee trade negotiations with Trump, who is threatening additional tariffs that could cripple Canada’s export-dependent economy.

    Trudeau has imposed C$30 billion of retaliatory tariffs on the United States in response to tariffs Trump levied on Canada.

    “My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect,” Carney said.

    Yeah, Trump is not exactly known for giving in to demands for “respect.” And given that the United States makes up some 77% of Canada’s world trade, while the Canada only makes up some 13% of America’s $9 trillion in global trade, the power dynamic between the two countries is hardly equal. Canada is much, much more exposed to economic hardship in a trade war than the United States is. I expect Carney’s and Canada’s resolve to work about as long and well as it did in the South Park “Canada on Strike” episode.

    Can we expect Carney to undo some of Trudeau’s most heinous policies?

    Don’t get your hopes up.

  • Mark Carney: “While America engages in the war on woke, Canadians value inclusiveness.” So Canada’s government will continue the same woke policies that helped drive Trudeau (and Canada) down.
  • Jordan Peterson: “The inevitable Grand Pooba of the currently wretched, but still dangerously powerful, Liberals, one Mark Carney, is one of the world’s prime advocates of the insane inanities of Net Zero.”
  • JP: “He is a man who has planned, in writing, not least in his bestselling book Values, the complete destruction of the fossil fuel industry. Bye-bye Alberta.”
  • JP: “If that’s not bad enough, and it is, he’s also simultaneously an advocate of the same postnational view of Canada defined by Trudeau Jr and his moralistic minions.”
  • JP: “What are we, according to such good thinkers? Nothing. Nothing, but if anything, the oppressive, patriarchal, white-supremacist, identityless, colonial settler state defined by the progressive ideologues in the think tanks and elite dining rooms in eastern Canada.”
  • Dave Rubin: “If you live in western Canada, particularly where oil and natural resources are important, this man is basically trying to destroy your livelihood.”

    • Don’t expect anything to change until Canadian federal elections later this year.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Social Justice Warriors, video | 9 Comments »

    2020 Liberal Wakes Up From Coma In 2025

    Sunday, March 9th, 2025

    J.P. Sears has another video up, imagining a liberal woman awakening from a coma after five years.

    “Is Trump in prison?”
    “No, he’s in the White House.”

    “Does Dr. Fauci have a Nobel Prize?”
    “No, but he does have a pardon for crimes against humanity.”

    It’s short, so watch the whole thing. Well, the whole thing up to the bikini ad at the end, anyway…

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    Posted in video | 1 Comment »

    Reminder: Mao Was A Complete Bastard

    Saturday, March 8th, 2025

    Very little of this will be new to long-time readers, but Paul Kengor at Prager U narrates this video to remind us, yet again, that Mao Zedong was a complete and utter bastard.

  • “Mao became a Marxist not out of idealism; his only ideal was Mao. The plight of the Chinese people meant nothing to him, not as a young man and not as a dictator. For Mao, other people existed to be used. Their lives didn’t matter at all.”
  • I’ll skip over the history of his rise to power and skip right to where the atrocities start.
  • “Half a billion people, a fifth of the world’s population, were thrust into one vast ideological laboratory in rural areas. Families were herded into collective farms. They no longer would work for themselves, they would work for the government.”
  • “This was as true for women as it was for men. In a perverse way, Mao believed in the equality of the sexes. If men could do backbreaking labor in the fields and factories, why couldn’t women?”
  • “There was no real equality in China for anyone, male or female, and no chance of improving one’s condition.”
  • “If you were assigned to a village, you had to stay in that village. If you were assigned to a city, you had to stay in that city. Whatever job the party gave you, that was your job. You couldn’t say ‘I would rather be a teacher than a farmer.’ Well, you could say it, but if you did you’d be shot.”
  • “There was also no equality between the proletariat and the elite. Mao lived in total luxury and hedonism. He had a dozen custom-built homes scattered throughout the country. Peasant girls were brought to him for his sexual satisfaction. Mao refused to bathe or brush his teeth and had chronic venial disease.”
  • “He ate whatever his heart desired, meat, vegetables and pastries, Meanwhile, peasants starved in mud huts.”
  • “Why couldn’t the peasants feed themselves like they had for centuries? [Mao] was exporting food all through this period. He believed China had to be a great military power, so he traded food for industrial hardware and armaments. The Soviets in Eastern Europe got the grain, Mao got the guns.”
  • “The peasants got nothing, and then they got less from 1958 to 1962. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao pushed the peasants even harder. Their suffering is impossible to describe. First they ate the dogs, then the rats, then the bark from the trees, then in some cases human flesh. According to a contemporary account, ‘the life we had to endure in those days was worse than the life of primitive societies. We lived like animals.'”
  • “Tens of millions died before Mao finally backed off.”
  • “In the mid 1960s, he instigated the so-called Cultural Revolution encouraging Chinese college students to denounce anyone not sufficiently revolutionary. This included their own parents and grandparents. And then, when he felt the college students had gone far enough, he turned on them. Thousands were sent to labor camps, and of course many were tortured and executed. It wasn’t a Mao Purge if that didn’t happen.”
  • “After being directly responsible for the murder of between 50 and 70 million of his own people after impoverishing the most populous country in the world, after killing anyone who opposed him, Mao died in his bed in September 1976.”

    • Indeed, Mao killed more people than any other leader in history, Hitler and Stalin included. And Kengor didn’t even touch on Mao’s bloody subjugation of Tibet, or his insane attempt to exterminate sparrows.

    A bit more on Mao’s genocide, along with that of other communist nations, plus a bit of bibliography on the subject, can be found here.

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    Posted in Communism, video | 6 Comments »

    Konstantin Kisin On Zelensky’s Cock-Up

    Tuesday, March 4th, 2025

    Triggernometry’s Konstantin Kisin, who goes to great pains to underline his own support for Ukraine resisting Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression, points out that it was Zelensky who screwed up big time in his White House meeting with Trump.

  • “When I watched the full 50-minute press conference, it became clear that President Trump had actually done his best to do a deal and that it was President Zelensky who scuppered it through an ill-advised spat with J.D. Vance.”
  • “As if this wasn’t enough, Zelensky then proceeded to mutter an insult under his breath, and interrupt and argue with President Trump himself, which led to the deal offer being withdrawn and Zelensky being sent to his room without his supper.”
  • Zelensky “led his country in heroic defense against a brutal and barbaric invasion. He saw innocent Ukrainian civilians being slaughtered, tortured and raped. He watched missiles and drones rain down on his towns and cities. He welcomed Ukrainian prisoners of war in their return from Russian prisons and torture camps, only to discover they were emaciated, bruised and broken.”
  • Zelensky has received so many accolades across the world that “his negotiating position appears somewhat disconnected from reality.”
  • “He argued that Russia must pay for the war on the basis that, in history, whoever starts the war pays. What he appears to be missing is that this isn’t remotely true. In history, whoever wins makes the losing side pay. While neither side has defeated the other, Ukraine can hardly claim victory.”
  • “For all these reasons, the reality vortex he entered in the Oval Office would have been a shock to Zelensky.”
  • “To the current occupants of the White House, their advisors and their base, president Zelensky, and forgive me for putting it this bluntly, is an untrustworthy leader of a corrupt country on the other side of the world who keeps asking for money America doesn’t have to fight a war they neither care about nor feel he can win.” I think the majority of Trump’s supporters want to see Ukraine win, but don’t want to provide a blank check to accomplish it and/or don’t think it’s possible.
  • “To them this is just another forever war like Iraq or Afghanistan.”
  • “President Zelensky walked into a room in which people who don’t particularly like him, don’t particularly trust him and don’t particularly care about his just and righteous cause were nevertheless prepared to continue giving him money, weapons, and political support in order to make this problem go away. All he had to do was look grateful. When you’re attempting to convert other people’s goodwill into hard currency, that’s the bare minimum, and for 40 minutes Zelensky just about managed.”
  • “The way he challenged Vance directly in front of the cameras was catastrophically stupid.”
  • “Sure, if you hate Trump and Vance and think they’re taking part in the YouTube debate, then Zelensky made a valid point. But this wasn’t a debate. They’re all supposed to be on the same side and the person who has the most to lose from them not feeling like they’re on the same side is Zelensky, or more importantly, his nation.”
  • “In Europe, Zelensky is used to winning people over to his cause by claiming that Ukraine is all that stands between them and Vladimir Putin. We can argue about whether such claims are true, but the important thing is that, in Europe, we are much more receptive to this message for both cultural and pragmatic reasons. We are on the same continent as Russia, and NATO’s eastern border is now in contact with Russia. This point of contact would have been significantly extended had Ukraine been overrun.”
  • “These arguments don’t wash in America, and what’s worse, Americans hate people painting a negative picture of their society’s future. This is why I believe President Trump interrupted Zelensky when he claimed that America won’t be protected from Putin by an ocean and shut him down.”
  • “None of this is to suggest that Vance or Trump behaved perfectly, but they aren’t the ones asking for more money, weapons and diplomatic support.”
  • “Zelensky’s job is to realize that he stopped being a human being when he became president of a country relying on foreign aid to survive. He doesn’t have the luxury of righteousness, and his country cannot afford to have him lose control of his senses as he did so.”
  • “Is this salvageable? I believe it is for the following reasons: First, Trump said as much. He sends Zelensky home to get him to realize that he needs to stop messing around, and made it clear that discussions can resume when Zelensky is ready for peace.”
  • “Secondly, the facts on the ground make some sort of settlement brokered by the US inevitable. Without foreign support, Ukraine’s brave defense would fold within weeks, and Europe, despite the cheerleading of its politicians, does not have the military, industrial capacity, or popular will to support Ukraine in this way by itself.”
  • “Zelensky needs Trump. Trump, on the other hand wants this war to end, and despite the glee of his base, would not want to go down in history as the president who abandoned Ukraine.” The majority of Trump’s base is not anti-Ukraine, they’re anti-paying for it. And those who confidently predict what Trump will or won’t think or do in a given situation frequently turn out to be wrong…
  • “All Zelensky has to do is apologize for his tactless behavior, and recognize that, like it or not, if you’re fighting a war with someone else’s weapons, they are going to have a say in how that war ends.”

    • Since that disasterous meeting, of course, Zelensky has been singing a different tune, and may end up following Kisin’s advice and giving Trump everything he asked for. Stay tuned…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, Uncategorized, video | 15 Comments »

    Why I’m Not Freaking Out About The Zelensky Meeting

    Sunday, March 2nd, 2025

    I’m a conservative who supports Donald Trump’s agenda, and also someone who opposes Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine and wants to see Ukraine win. But I’m not freaking out over Volodymyr Zelensky’s disasterous Oval Office meeting with Trump.

    It’s like media and political observers who have been watching Trump for close decade are still flabbergasted when Trump does Trump things in a Trump way. Trump works on persuasion and negotiation framing and pursues a tit-for-tat game theory strategy: Cooperate with him and he’ll cooperate with you, attack him and he’ll attack you. Given those parameters, Zelensky played things exactly wrong.

    The meeting between President Donald Trump, VP J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was nothing short of explosive, fantastic, and satisfying. So much so that America collectively need a smoke afterward.

    The Democrats, however, seem to think Trump just beheaded a statue of Apollo and now the gods will be wrathful.

    But besides watching an entitled brat of a world leader get raked over the coals by the guy from The Apprentice and a hillbilly millennial, Zelensky’s strategy was a head scratcher. Perhaps he was so used to American politicians who were willing to lay themselves down into puddles, so Zelensky wasn’t ready to talk to two dudes who don’t feel the need to perform for the media, which Vance seemed hyper-aware of, and pointed that out to Zelensky.

    Perhaps he thought America owed him one, and thus his smug attitude, but as Bonchie noted in his article, this wasn’t wise:

    Trump has never accepted the idea that Ukraine is doing the United States a favor by fighting Russia as a way of justifying unlimited aid. Perhaps Joe Biden found that argument persuasive, but Joe Biden is not in office anymore. Russia is not going to invade the United States or any NATO country (if for no other reason than a lack of capability), and using that as a type of blackmail for support was never going to play.

    Actually, if Putin had succeeded in gobbling up Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (NATO countries all) would have become targets. The mauling Russia has received in Ukriane put that off the table, especially with Finland and Sweden now in NATO.

    And herein we find the trump card that Trump had on Zelensky… you know, besides the money the world’s most successful beggar came to get.

    Trump’s negotiation strategy vastly differs from many other American leaders, especially those on the Democrat side of the aisle. Despite Trump’s reputation as a rough-around-the-edges man whose political charm is far divorced from what people expect after watching The West Wing too much, he is a master negotiator.

    Even when it comes to our enemies, Trump is not going to negotiate from a position of bad faith. He sees everything as a businessman would. There are no friends or foes while at the table, just good deals and bad deals.

    I thought The Federalist CEO Sean Davis put this very well in a post he made on X:

    Trump doesn’t bad mouth anyone who comes to the negotiating table in good faith. Ever. It’s a near-cardinal rule of negotiations for him, and a major reason he’s been such a successful dealmaker.

    If you refuse to negotiate, he will trash you. If you lie or negotiate in bad faith, he will trash you. He has zero interest in allowing empty moralizing to get in the way of a deal that he wants.

    He has done this his entire career, in business and in politics, and it’s fascinating to me how many people who think of themselves as smart and savvy are incapable of seeing or understanding this dynamic.

    The key here isn’t just that Trump is holding the cards and that Zelensky needs him — not the other way around — it’s that Trump is negotiating from a fortified position of “America first.” Everything at the table is subject to that one point, and if anything drifts away from that, then Trump pushes back and pushes back until he’s all the way gone from the table.

    Zelensky acted like a petulant child who showed no respect to the country that had given him the money for his war while trying to secure more, and Trump saw no value, not in the war, and not in Zelensky’s disrespect. As such, there was no deal. Moreover, Zelensky attempted to pressure Trump into capitulation through our own media, which was a costly mistake. Trump is not beholden to the American media as other leaders are.

    Here’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio explaining how Zelensky screwed up in even blunter terms:

    Clearly Zelensky screwed up. Ukraine needs America a whole lot more than America needs Ukraine. Europe’s help has been valuable, but they can’t supply Ukraine with Patriot missiles, HIMARS, and a dozen other high tech items from America’s vast arsenal that have been absolutely essential for fighting Russia to a standstill.

    As incompetently as Russia has run this war, Ukraine has not made notable gains in taking back its occupied land since the Kharkiv Counteroffensive in 2022. Though Ukraine has considerably degraded Russia’s logistics, energy and industrial infrastructure, and the Kursk offensive has captured Russian land and tied up forces that can’t be used elsewhere, it hasn’t launched a real counterattack to recapture Ukrainian land since 2023. A stalemate that continues to destroy what’s left of Russia’s Soviet stockpiles is still helping NATO, but doesn’t do anything to advance Trump’s other foreign policy goals for America.

    Clearly the Trump Administration is unhappy with the stalemate of the war, and it is naive to think that the United States would be willing to underwrite the continuance of the war for tens of billions of dollars indefinitely. Just as clearly, Zelensky took the wrong approach and made several blunders dealing with Trump.

    I am optimistic that Zelensky and Ukraine can change their approach and come to an agreement with the Trump Administration. But that agreement will have to be on Trump’s terms, not Zelensky’s.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 18 Comments »

    Elon Musk Talks DOGE With Joe Rogan

    Saturday, March 1st, 2025

    Joe Rogan interviewed Elon Musk again, talking a lot about AI and his DOGE work. I haven’t remoptely seen all of it yet, but a lot of the DOGE stuff is interesting.

  • Joe Rogan: “Everybody should be celebrating that we’ve found a way to cut out fraud and waste. If you pay taxes, and you don’t like that you have to pay so much in taxes, and then you find out that there’s significant fraud, and waste that’s been exposed you should be celebrating. It shouldn’t be ‘oh no, the wrong people found this fact and now it’s a bad thing.'”
  • Elon Musk: “Mutilating animals in demented studies, that are like the worst thing you could possibly imagine from a horror show.”
  • JR: “The beagle puppy one, where they they covered their head in a basket and put fleas on their head so they eat them alive.” Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.
  • EM: “The real threat here is to the bureaucracy…[they say] ‘Trump as a threat to our democracy’…but if you if you just replace ‘threat to democracy’ with ‘threat to bureaucracy,’ it makes total sense.”
  • EM: “DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy.”
  • EM: “Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they’re not, that the revolution might actually succeed, that we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy.”
  • EM: “We saw one person was getting $1.9 billion sent to their NGO which basically got formed about a year ago.”
  • EM: “The whole NGO thing is a nightmare, and it’s a misnomer. Because if you have a government-funded non-governmental organization, you’re simply a government-funded organization. It’s an oxymoron.”
  • EM: “Government-funded NGOs are a way to do things that would be illegal if they were the government, but are somehow made legal if it’s sent to a so-called nonprofit.”
  • EM: “People cash out these nonprofits. They become very wealthy through nonprofits. They pay themselves enormous sums through these nonprofits.”
  • EM: “It’s a gigantic scam. Like, one of the biggest, maybe the biggest, scam ever.”
  • EM: “I think there a total number of NGOs, probably millions. But in terms of large NGOs, tens of thousands. It’s actually kind of a hack to the system, where you know someone can get an NGO stood up for for a fairly small amount of money, like George Soros.”
  • EM: “[Soros] is really good at this. George is like a system hacker. Like he figured out how to hack the system. He’s a genius at arbitrage…he figured out that you could leverage a small amount of money to create a nonprofit, then lobby the politicians to send a ton of money to that nonprofit. So you can take what might be a $10 million donation to a nonprofit and leverage that into a billion dollar non-NGO.” So Soros isn’t destroying America with his money, he’s destroying America with our money.
  • EM: “And then [the] government continues to fund that every year, and it’ll have a nice sounding name like The Institute For Peace, or something like that.”
  • EM: “It’s a giant graft machine.”
  • JR: “It’s a giant propaganda machine, a giant regime change machine.”
  • EM: “Yes.”
  • EM: “We have continued fund things that appear to be legitimate.” And here’s where I part ways with Elon. “Doing good works in foreign countries” is not a constitutionally enumerated power or responsibility of the federal government, and thus should not be undertaken by the federal government.
  • Musk notes that we don’t want to donate to a lab that says they’re fighting Ebola only to find out they’re creating mutant strains of Ebola.
  • EM: “Interest payments on the national debt exceeds the defense department budget, which is truly astounding, which means so we’re paying over a trillion dollars of interest on the national debt.”
  • EM: “As bad as Twitter was, the federal government is much worse.”
  • EM: “The federal government is not break. It’s literally losing $2 trillion a year and it fails its own audits.”

    • Watch the whole thing.

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    Posted in Budget, video, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

    The Decline Of Johannesburg

    Saturday, February 22nd, 2025

    Of all the transitions to majority rule in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa’s was probably the most successful, with the Apartheid regime coming to a negotiated end rather than a violent bloodbath.

    But thirty years of African National Congress rule, either solo or in coalition, find South Africa undergoing a gradual collapse toward Sub-Saharan standards, as seen in this France 24 video on the decline of Johannesburg.

  • “Johannesburg, once the economic powerhouse of all of Africa. But over the last 20 years the city, has fallen into decay, the inner city streets are lined with trash, potholes, and degraded footpaths. And broken infrastructure has led to contaminated rivers and wasted drinking water.”
  • “Adele is part of a resident crisis committee. She says her complaints to the council about broken pipes often go unheard.” “Now we just have rivers of excrement and trash.”
  • These an upstream river trash catch facility that’s been broken for two years.
  • “Johannesburg restricted access to tap water for residents in November, but more than a third of available drinking water is wasted from broken infrastructure.”
  • “The African National Congress has been bleeding support in Johannesburg since 2016, leading to chaotic coalitions. Infighting and opportunism which has seen the city ruled by ten different mayors over the last five years. With each change of mayor, infrastructure contracts are often abandoned and administration staff are fired. On top of that, corruption has plagued the mayoral committee during the tender process.”
  • There’s some high-minded blather about separating the bidding process from politics. Good luck with that.
  • “The decay of Johannesburg goes beyond broken pipes and sink holes. In the city center, entire 15-story buildings are hijacked by criminal syndicates or squatters who refuse to pay for services or rent.” Gangs will just dump bodies in the building to let them rot in place.

    • When competent government and dedication to the rule of law gives way to a spoils system, decay inevitably follows, either in Johannesburg or in America’s deep blue inner cities…

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, video, Waste and Fraud | 4 Comments »

    “The British Army Is Now Too Small To Effectively Perform Its Tasks.”

    Thursday, February 20th, 2025

    In the midst of debate in America and Europe over European adequately funding their NATO defense obligations, historian and YouTuber Mark Felton has put up a couple of videos that question the United Kingdom’s commitment to fielding an adequate military.

    First up: The Navy with more Admirals than Warships

  • “New US president Donald Trump has made it very clear that America’s NATO allies must increase their defense spending to 5% of GDP in order to shoulder more of the burden of their own defense.”
  • “This is particularly pertinent in my country, Great Britain, which has seen defense spending decline massively over the past three decades, from 4.1% in 1990 to only 2.3% today, reflected in 30 plus years of shrinkage and reductions, but plenty of fresh conflicts to manage with less equipment, less investment and less personnel.”
  • “The Royal Navy is a brilliant example of the managed decline of Britain’s Armed Forces…presenting a hollowed out shadow of the force that, even in 1982, at the height of the Cold War, still managed, on its own, a brilliant Naval campaign in the Faulklands those days are well and truly over.”
  • “In 2025, the Royal Navy has 62 commissioned ships, but only 25 of those vessels are real warships designed to fight battles at sea. The rest are lightly armed patrol vessels, transport ships, and survey vessels and so on.”
  • “Breaking this figure of 25 warships down, the Royal Navy currently has two aircraft carriers, six guided missile destroyers, eight frigates and a grand total of just two classes of submarine totaling nine vessels.”
  • “But the Royal Navy also has 40 serving officers at the rank of Rear Admiral and above.”
  • “The personnel strength of the Royal Navy in 2025 is, including reserves, only 32,225 men and women. This means that there is an admiral for every 805 sailors.”
  • “Britain can no longer deploy large numbers of warships to sea, as we simply don’t have large numbers of warships. What we do have are a small number of warships, with quite a number of them currently in refit, mothball or lacking sufficient crew due to the dire state of Royal Navy recruitment.” Sounds similar to U.S. armed forces recruitment woes under Biden.
  • Only two destroyers are currently ready for active duty.
  • “How would our Royal Navy cope in the event of another Falklands crisis? For example, in 1982, the Falkland’s task force consisted of two aircraft carriers, eight destroyers, 16 frigates, and six submarines, plus many other Royal Navy vessels and auxiliaries, and still the Navy maintained its presence around the rest of the world.”
  • “[With] the current number of ships and their readiness, I think we’d struggle to put together a task force even half as big, and even then we’d have to send virtually every surface asset we have stripping vessels from all other tasks globally.”

    • Next up: The Army with more Horses than Tanks.

  • “2012. Number of main battle tanks: 334. Number of horses: 501. 2015. Number of MBTs: 227. Number of horses 494. 2024. Number of MBTs: 213. Number of horses: 497.”
  • “The number of main battle tanks in, this case the Challenger 2, has been steadily reduced over the past decade while the number of horses in the Army has remained constant at slightly under 500 animals.”
  • In 1991, Britain had 1,200 MBTs.
  • “In 2025 investigations by journalists and the Ministry of Defence’s own figures revealed that, despite the conflict in Ukraine, a very tank heavy war, Britain’s armored backbone is consistently decreasing year on year. We currently have 213 Challenger 2s, but only about 157 actually combat ready, or able to be activated within 30 days for combat deployment.”
  • Naturally the horses are used extensively in ceremonial duties, the details of which I’m skipping over.
  • “The British Army is the smallest it’s been for centuries, reduced by endless amalgamations and cuts numbering today only 78,500 personnel, plus just over 25,000 in the volunteer reserves.” That’s half the size of Japan’s armed forces.
  • “The British army is now too small to effectively perform its tasks.”
  • By the way, the U.S. army now has 176 horses…and 4,650 Abrams tanks.

    • Tune in next week, when Felton will no doubt note that the Royal Air Force has more tubas than aircraft…

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    Posted in Military, video | 5 Comments »

    Rogan, Weinstein On USAID Scandal

    Saturday, February 8th, 2025

    The amount of unbelievable partisan graft DOGE is uncovering at USAID and elsewhere is so staggering even Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are gobsmacked by its massive scope.

  • Joe Rogan: “I don’t think I really grasped it until Elon’s six wizards, he brought in some young wizards to go in there and go over the books, and they are just finding crazy shit.”
  • Rogan listened to a leftwing podcast, and “they weren’t even talking about all of this corruption and all this obvious buying of influence. Instead, they were talking about aid overseas and how people are going to starve and—”
  • Bret Weinstein: “It’s mindboggling. I’m just I’m upset at the general pattern of a failure to recognize how right those of us who hypothesized that there was a racket that had overtaken our entire governance structure. We turned out to be absolutely right about this and no one’s going to mention it.”
  • JR: “It’s very strange that the media is ignoring it especially the leftwing media. It’s just too big of a win for the right, and so they’re just ignoring it.”
  • BW: “This was a mechanism used to funnel money to all sorts of things that we didn’t vote on that don’t make sense in light of our constitutional structure….I obviously have concerns like everybody else about where this train takes us, but seeing that structure broken up is it’s a huge relief.”
  • JR: “They gave $27 million to the George Soros prosecutor fund. So our own government is funding this left-wing lunatic who is hiring the most insane prosecutors, who are letting people out of jail who commit violent crimes.”
  • BW: “And that’s that’s exactly how this racket worked, is that the ability to tax the American public and then effectively get us to pay for being propagandized, for being surveilled, that’s the game.”
  • BW: “I don’t think any reasonable person could be unhappy that we are exiting that era.”
  • JR: “I’m going to read off some of the things that this guy Kenna Coda the Great on Twitter uh listed. This is off the Jesse Waters show: $20 million for Iraqi Sesame Street, $2 million for Moroccan pottery classes, $1 million to tell Vietnam to stop burning trash, $27 million to give gift bags to illegals. $27 million. $330 million to help Afghanis grow crops. Wonder what those crops are.”
  • JR: “$200 million on an unused Afghani dam, $250 million on an unused Afghani road. This is wild. I mean some of this stuff is really, really crazy.”
  • BW: “And you know USAID is of course riddled through whatever international madness it is that caused us to open our Southern border and facilitate an invasion through the Darian Gap.”
  • BW: “It almost feels like it can’t be real, like it can’t have been this close to the surface, and yet here are.”
  • JR: “I think the number that I’ve read was $600 million every two months to ship been illegals.”
  • BW: “Basically we had a shadow apparatus functioning, and it involves all kinds of things. It involves payoffs to people who didn’t deserve them. It involves contracting to, uh, entities. that were necessary to get the work done.”
  • JR: “We were always wondering like why is our debt so high, why is the national debt so high. Like, why is our deficit so insane? Well, this is.”
  • JR: “$40 billion for electric car ports eight ports have been built.”
  • BW: “I think it was apparent that whatever had taken over our system wasn’t interested in the well-being of average people, that it was interested in the power of the state to take people’s resources and redistribute them, and that really is what’s been going on for most of our adult lives.”
  • JR: “And it’s also important to note that this progressive, left-leaning, radical left arm of the government, of the country, was manufactured. Yes, it’s all manufactured, it’s all manufactured and supported. It’s not organic.”
  • BW: “The cover story that what we were up to was righting past wrongs was so pernicious and pervasive, that it was hard to get our footing to challenge it. But it it shouldn’t really be surprising that that movement wasn’t organic. Of course, it was induced. It was a cover story for theft, and and we’re going to be waking up to the magnitude of that theft for quite some time. I think this is going to take years.”
  • JR: “When you get to the bottom of all this, it’s going to be insane, because they haven’t even got to the Medicaid yet, they haven’t even got to the medical stuff. There’s so much they haven’t even tapped into, where they think the real motherload of fraud is.”
  • Rogan mentions that Elizabeth Warren swore up and down that she never got money from pharmaceutical companies or PACs, and community notes proved she received millions. “She’s a fucking liar.”
  • BW: “I don’t think the Democrats understand that it’s over, and that there was a vast infrastructure that made their feeble arguments viable. And that infrastructure is now collapsing. People are far more aware, and their lives aren’t going to function anymore.”
  • JR: “It was really about control and money. It had nothing to do with helping people, making people better.”
  • Rogan notes that there were more than 55,000 NGOs used to launder payouts to Democratic Party causes.

    • The whole podcast is here.

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    Posted in Budget, video, Waste and Fraud | 2 Comments »

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