Posts Tagged ‘Mexico’

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Cuellar Aides Flip

Tuesday, May 14th, 2024

Remember the bribery and money-laundering indictment of Texas Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar (TX-28)? Two of his aides just flipped.

Two former consultants to U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar have agreed to plead guilty to assisting the lawmaker in laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Mexican bank.

Colin Strother, the South Texas Democrat’s former campaign manager, and Florencio “Lencho” Rendon struck separate deals with the U.S. Department of Justice in March, where they agreed to cooperate with the investigation.

The first of the two to come clean was Strother, who signed his agreement on March 6. Nine days later, Rendon entered into his deal with federal prosecutors.

In Rendon’s agreement, the operation’s origins are stated to have begun in 2015, when Rendon met with Banco Azteca executives at Cuellar’s behest to discuss supposed regulatory issues facing the bank.

After the meetings, Rendon allegedly signed a contract paying him upwards of $15,000 monthly to provide consulting for an unnamed “U.S.-based media and television company” connected to Banco Azteca.

Strother’s deal details that Cuellar then allegedly commissioned Rendon to meet Strother, where Rendon offered Strother $11,000 a month to participate in a clandestine project that Strother eventually determined to be “a sham.”

Rendon’s agreement notes that he kept $4,000 for his consulting firm, while he expected Strother to keep $1,000 for himself and forward the remaining $10,000 to Imelda Cuellar’s company.

Rendon paid Strother $261,000 total from March 2016 to June 2019. Over $236,000 of those funds were allegedly funneled to Cuellar’s wife, Imelda Cuellar.

Prosecutors believe the transactions were part of an effort by Cuellar to hide the money from required U.S. financial disclosures.

Rendon and Strother have agreed to testify before a grand jury or any other judicial proceeding as part of their plea deals. Both still face up to 20 years in prison and onerous fines for conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Having your bagman flip on you is never a good sign for beating a rap, so I’d say it’s already highly likely Cueller will be going from the House to the big house, especially since a third aide has flipped.

A third person with ties to U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar’s bribery case has pleaded guilty, according to a recently unsealed plea agreement, after the South Texas Democrat was accused of accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.

Irada Akhoundova pleaded guilty to unlawfully acting as an agent of the Azerbaijani government and a state-run oil company, a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, on May 1, according to the plea deal first reported by the San Antonio Express-News. Akhoundova admitted to facilitating a $60,000 payment to Imelda Cuellar, the congressman’s wife, who was also indicted last month.

For nearly 20 years, Akhoundova has served as the president of the Houston-Baku Sister City Association, a nonprofit that builds ties between the Texas city and Azerbaijan’s capital, according to her LinkedIn profile. The plea agreement describes Akhoundova as an active member of the Texas Azerbaijani-American community. The court filing states that she served as the director of a U.S. affiliate of a Baku-based company, from approximately 2014 to 2017.

Unlike U.S. Senators, Governors cannot appoint interim U.S. House members. Article I, Section 2, Clause 4 of the Constitution states: “When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.” According to the Texas election code, U.S. House special elections operate under the same rules as Texas legislature special elections, namely “a special election shall be held on the first uniform election date occurring on or after the 36th day after the date the election is ordered. (b) If the election is to be held as an emergency election, it shall be held on a Tuesday or Saturday occurring on or after the 36th day and on or before the 64th day after the date the election is ordered.” If Cuellar resigns in May, June, or July, presumably Governor Abbott will call a special election for the seat.

In August, the issue starts running up on general election deadlines. By Texas law, a party official has 74 days before an election to remove a candidate’s name from the ballot, but the Texas Secretary of State says August 19 is the date, which looks like 78 days, which matches this doc on filling vacancies. If Cuellar resigns or pleads guilty before that date, Democrats can presumably pick another candidate to run in the November election. Beyond that date, presumably whichever of Republicans Jay Furman and Lazaro Garza Jr. (who are competing in the runoff to challenge Cuellar) is nominated will win the seat, since Cuellar will be ineligible to serve despite his name being on the ballot.

Final thought: Cuellar is the last even nominally pro-life Democrat in the U.S. House. The conspiracy-minded might think this is the only reason the Biden DOJ was allowed to indict him…

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Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Texas | 12 Comments »

Mayorkas-Linked NGO Tells Illegals To Vote For Biden

Wednesday, April 17th, 2024

Conservative have been asserting for years that Biden’s illegal alien invasion is to create new Democratic voters. Now there’s more proof.

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project posted an image on X of what they say is a flyer from a non-governmental organization operating in Mexico encouraging migrants to vote for President Biden once they arrive in the United States.

“Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open,” part of the flyer read.

The Oversight Project said the flyer was initially discovered by a Muckraker journalist while touring the site of Resource Center Matamoras in Mexico.

“They [flyers] also appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA,” the group said.

RCM founder Gaby Zavala told one of Muckraker’s journalists that she is trying to flood the US with as many illegal aliens as possible before former President Trump is reelected.

“RCM bills itself as an operation which houses functions for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which helps illegal aliens enter the United States,” Oversight Project said, adding that disgraced Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “is a former board member of HIAS, which received numerous grants from Soros’ Open Society Foundation over the years.”

Soros! What are the odds?

Given the lousy economy of the Biden Recession, Democrats know they can’t win this election without cheating, so they’re going all out on that front, and amnestying illegal aliens is a key part of their strategy, no matter how many black and Hispanic American voters it alienates in the process.

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Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 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 »

Electric Cars: No Panacea

Thursday, November 2nd, 2023

For all that Democrats at the state and national level want to force adoption of them, electric cars are no panacea to solving the “climate change crisis” those same Democrats claim will kill us all.

Peter Zeihan explains why.

  • “A lot of major auto manufacturers are scaling down their plans to make electric vehicles. Ford and GM have both suspended, well, cancelled plans to build a couple new facilities for battery and EV assembly. No changes to their internal combustion engine vehicle plans.”
  • Tesla production is also slowing. “They’re going to suspend and maybe even cancel the plans for the gigafactory that they were going to be building in Mexico, although that’s very TBD.”
  • “From an environmental point of view most EVs are at best questionable.”
  • “The data that says they’re a slam dunk successes assumes that you’re building the EVs with a relatively clean energy mix and then recharging it with 100% green energy, and that happens exactly nowhere in the United States.”
  • “The cleanest state is California they are still 50% fossil fuel energy, and they lie about their statistics, because they say they don’t know what the mix is for the power that they’re importing from the rest of the country, which is something like a third of their total demand. And the stuff that comes, say, from the Phoenix area in Arizona to the LA Basin which is something like 10GW a day, which is more than most small countries, is 100% fossil fuel.”
  • “More importantly on the fabrication side, because there are so many more exotic materials and because energy processed to make those materials is so much more energy intensive, all of this work is done in China, and in most places it’s done with either soft coal or lignite.”
  • “You’re talking about an order of magnitude more carbon generated just to make these things in the first place compared to an IC [integrated circuit, AKA computer chips]. And that means that these things don’t break even on the carbon within a year. For most you’re talking about approaching 10 years or more.”
  • But Zeihan is leaving the most important variable out of this equation: The smug sense of satisfaction and moral superiority American leftists feel when driving these cars. Isn’t that worth all those extra coal plants?
  • Number 2: Materials. “These vehicles require an order of magnitude more stuff, more copper, more molybdenum, more lithium, obviously, more graphite. And the energy content required to put those in process is where most of the energy cost comes from.”
  • “If we’re going to convert the world’s vehicle fleets to these things, there’s just not enough of this stuff on the planet. I’m not saying that we can’t build on in time, but that time is measured in decades.”
  • “Supposedly we need 10x a much nickel on all the rest. So the stuff just isn’t there. So even if this was an environmental panacea, which it’s not, we would never be able to do it on a very short time frame. You’re talking a century.”
  • They’re also way more expensive. “This is not a vehicle that’s for most people.”
  • “And that’s before you consider little things like range anxiety. I’ve rented an EV. It’s real. There just aren’t enough charging stations.”
  • “EVs are building up on the lots and people just aren’t buying them without absolutely massive discounts and the discounts are now to the point that the whole industry is no longer profitable even with the subsidies that came in from the Inflation Reduction Act.”
  • “1% of the American vehicle Fleet to EVs, and it looks like we may be very close close to the peak.”

    • Not every one of his points hits home (there are, in fact, lots of overpriced gas powered cars and trucks sitting on dealers lots, as a lot of YouTube channels will show you), but he’s mostly correct.

    For a more detailed look at all the taxpayer subsidies EVs benefit from, I point you to this Texas Public Policy Foundation paper, which concludes:

    Our conservative estimate is that the average EV accrues $48,698 in subsidies and $4,569 in extra charging and electricity costs over a 10-year period, for a total cost of $53,267, or $16.12 per equivalent gallon of gasoline. Without increased and sustained government favors, EVs will remain more expensive than ICEVs for
    many years to come. Hence why, even with these subsidies, EVs have been challenging for dealers to sell and why basic economic realities indicate that the Biden administration’s dream of achieving 100% EVs by 2040 will never become a reality.

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    Posted in Regulation, video | 14 Comments »

    Third Special Session: School Choice and Colony Ridge

    Thursday, October 5th, 2023

    Texas Governor Greg Abbott has made it official: a third special legislative session starts October 9.

    In a letter to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan and obtained by several media entities over the weekend, Gov. Greg Abbott warned he will bring lawmakers into a 30-day special legislative session starting the afternoon of Monday, Oct. 9, 2023.

    Abbott has teased for months that he would call the session to address school choice. That concept has proved popular with voters and even passed the Senate but has been thwarted by the Texas House. Recently, Abbott has indicated the agenda would also include matters related to the Colony Ridge housing development outside Houston that targets illegal aliens.

    School choice is an expected topic, one all Texas GOP leaders agree is a priority save the foot-dragging, Democrat-backed Speaker Phelan. After strong-arming Republican House members into an unpopular and ultimately futile impeachment vote against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, it remains to be seen how much juice Phelan has left to thwart school choice, though certainly his Democratic backers (and the teacher’s unions backing them) will make it a top priority.

    But the wild card here is Colony Ridge, a news story that’s been bubbling on the back burner for a while, and one I’ve been grappling to find out enough about to report on fairly.

    Colony Ridge is allegedly a high crime neighborhood in the Houston exurbs populated mostly by illegal aliens, some of whom have cartel ties, sold using questionable loan practices.

    As the crisis at the southern border continues, rural Texas is allegedly being settled by unlawful migrants through a system backed by drug cartels, leading to an increase in criminal activity.

    Nestled in a previously undeveloped area of Liberty County, northeast of Houston, the Colony Ridge development represents the largest “colonia” in the United States, home to anywhere from 50,000 to 75,000 unlawful migrants.

    Todd Bensman, the senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, has been documenting the colonia and highlighting the scope of the issue.

    “A vast jumble of single- and double-wide trailers on low stilts, hand-hewn shacks made of leftover construction material, and parked motor homes has quickly overtaken tens of thousands of Liberty County acres and eradicated its rural way of life,” Bensman wrote.

    “Upwards of 50,000 mostly Spanish-speaking Latinos, maybe more — nobody knows, really — are living on some 30,000 homestead lots they purchased in recent years over some 35 square miles from ‘Houston Terrenos,’” Bensman continued.

    The migrants are able to settle in Colony Ridge using Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) loans, which do not require applicants to have a legal residence or Social Security number.

    In recent testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, Bensman claimed that the crime wave followed the mass migration.

    “Legacy residents are increasingly alarmed by criminal atrocities never seen before,” Bensman alleged.

    Pointing to an incident that occurred in April, he told the representatives about how “a five-time deported Mexican national who owned a home in neighboring San Jacinto County allegedly murdered five members of a Honduran family that lived next door after they complained that his firing of a semi-automatic assault-style rifle at 11 p.m. was keeping the baby awake.”

    Good times, good times.

    Bensman testified that the Gulf and Sinaloa Cartels invested resources into the Colony Ridge development early on, financing safe houses used to smuggle drugs and people into the interior of the United States.

    “Liberty County reflects a microcosm of what unnecessary crime can look like anywhere large numbers of foreign nationals who are only thinly vetted settle,” Bensman added.

    The first question is: Where exactly is it? If you enter Colony Ridge in Google maps, you get a location just southeast of New Caney that’s in Montgomery County, not adjoining Liberty. I believe this is the sales office for Houston Terrenos. This appears to be the actual extent of Colony Ridge:

    It’s not a new problem, though I only became aware of it this year. This TPPF PDF report dates from 2020, states Colony Ridge has been in development since 2011. Some quotes:

    Cleveland ISD’s elementary, middle, and high schools are bursting at the seams with students, growing by over 100 new enrollments per month. To finance the multiple new schools that are needed at all levels, the district’s residents are on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds issued and are experiencing crushing, double-digit growth in their property tax bills…The initial, unrestricted development undertaken by the area’s largest housing land sales company, Colony Ridge Land, LLC, caused considerable consternation and foreboding among residents and local government officials alike. More recently, a number of measures have been taken to better manage the population boom, including the creation of a Municipal Management District for a core 5,000-acre section under development. Moreover, the Houston El Norte Property Owners Association has begun to aggressively enforce covenants…

    Because thousands of unauthorized immigrants are among the new residents, however, more needs to be done. Collaboration in enforcement of U.S. immigration laws should be maximized by federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities through initiatives such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) and Warrant Service Officer programs…These programs enable common-sense cooperation across jurisdictions and effectively prevent communities from becoming sanctuaries for criminal aliens.

    Fast forward to this year, and Cleveland ISD’s population has doubled in three years.

    A housing development outside Cleveland, Texas, just north of Houston, is populated primarily by illegal aliens and putting strain on the local school district.

    “Colony Ridge Communities” is a land development project that markets land to illegal aliens through loan loopholes and is one of the largest settlements of illegal aliens in the country.

    In the 2019-2020 school year, Cleveland Independent School District only had 6,584 students. As the current school year begins, the number of students has nearly doubled to more than 12,400.

    At the district’s back-to-school convocation, Superintendent Stephen McCanless said the district has enrolled 1,092 new students in the past weeks and more students are expected to be registered in the next few weeks.

    The district has hired 1,498 staff members since the 2021-2022 school year, and due to the limited capacity of the Cleveland High School gym, the district almost did not hold the back-to-school convocation. To accommodate these students, the district built six new schools.

    The Colony Ridge settlements are believed to have a population of 22,000, according to the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office.

    Then there’s the Abbott donor connection: “Colony Ridge is partially funded by William Harris, a major donor of Gov. Greg Abbott, who gives yearly contributions of $300,000 to Abbott’s campaign.”

    And those aren’t the only controversies surrounding Colony Ridge. There’s an active lawsuit against Terrenos Houston and Colony Ridge on a variety of allegations:

  • Payments Being Stolen: There are clients who are making their payments and yet the Colony Ridge company claims that they have not done so and proceeds to repossess their land to keep it or sell it to others.
  • Flooding: Lack of drainage planning has caused flooding for residents and flood problems for surrounding communities that have been in that territory for generations.
  • Intimidating: They have intimidated the surrounding communities with lawsuits and other practices when they have tried to resolve the situation of the waters with garbage that have reached their homes.
  • Inhumane Conditions: Many in the community have complained about poor garbage management, lack of potable water in cases, high crime rates, and roads in very poor condition.

    • Here are the figures the lawsuit alleges are behind Colony Ridge:

  • William Trey Harris III
  • John Harris
  • Robin Lane
  • Brent Lane

    • As with all lawsuits, keep the “allegedly” in mind.

    What sort of remedies are available? Well, the Biden Administration could always control the border and enforce laws against illegal aliens, but they seem very loath to do that, very recent statements otherwise not withstanding.

    At the state level, Texas could implement E-Verify for all employment, which would severely curtail the attractiveness of Texas as a settling spot for illegal aliens. And the legislature could require either citizenship or legal immigration status as a requirement for a home loan in Texas.

    It should prove to be an interesting session, as both school choice and illegal aliens have proven powerful issues with black and Hispanic voters, much to the chagrin of the Democratic Party establishment.

    It should be an interesting session…

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    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Republicans, Texas | 14 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for July 21, 2022

    Friday, July 21st, 2023

    More Biden corruption, a bit about music, and cute dogs. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Here’s a fairly extensive timeline of Biden corruption.

    2009 – The Obama-Biden administration takes office

    November 1, 2013 – China / BHR:

    Hunter Biden, business associate, and Chinese investors agree to create Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. (BHR), an investment fund controlled by the Bank of China, to focus on mergers and acquisitions, and investment in and reforms of state-owned enterprise.

    December 4, 2013 – China / BHR

    Vice President Biden travels with Hunter Biden on Air Force 2 to China and meets CEO of BHR, Jonathan Li. Shortly thereafter, BHR’s business license was approved and Hunter Biden was a board member.

    February 5, 2014 – Kazakhstan

    Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani businessman, meets with Hunter Biden at a hotel in Washington, D.C.

    April 15, 2014 – Ukraine

    Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, appoints Biden business associate to their board of directors.

    Etc. etc. etc.

  • “California Democrats retreat on their effort to defend child slavers.”

    After initially killing a bill on July 12, 2023 that would have increased the penalties on child sex traffickers, the Democrats who completely control the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee reversed course one day later and voted to advance the bill.

    With a final vote of 6-0, including two abstentions from progressive Democrats, the bill now moves to the Appropriations Committee, after which, if it is approved, can move the bill to be voted upon by the entire State Assembly. If passed, SB 14 will make trafficking of minors a serious felony that would qualify under California’s three strikes law, which keeps dangerous, serial criminals off the streets, and make individuals convicted of the crime ineligible for early release.

    I highlight the two abstentions by Democrats. Even after a nationwide uproar over their willingness to block harsh penalties on those who traffic young children for sexual slavery, these two Democrats, including Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), still could not bring themselves to vote for the bill.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • State Senator Charles Schwertner (my state senator) has his DWI charges dismissed. Still, he hardly crowned himself in glory. At least he didn’t yell “Call Greg!” (It did make me wonder what Rosemary Lehmberg is doing today, and if she ever conquered her alcoholism…)
  • Mexico surpasses China as America’s biggest trade partner. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Remember Toast Tab’s 99¢ fee from last week’s LinkSwarm? Well, public reaction was so negative that their shares cratered and they rescinded the fee.
  • Will the Biden Administration use a lizard to kill the Permian Basin shale revolution?
  • “This car has all the annoying things about EVs and none of the cool stuff…this car doesn’t live up to any expectations. Nothing
    works.    ”

  • TSMC delays Arizona plant opening due to labor shortage.
  • A detailed look at the recording of one of my favorite albums of all time: Peter Gabriel III.
  • Just what does electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon” sound like? You know that scene in a 70s SciFi dystopia where someone’s face gets ripped off to reveal they’re a robot? It sounds like that.
  • GWAR plays for NPR. So on one side you have horrible monsters who are unbearable to listen to, and on the other side you have GWAR…
  • That’s one sly kissing bandit.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    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 »

    Cartels Buying Weapons From Mexican Military

    Tuesday, October 25th, 2022

    For all that the Mexican government tries to blame American arms manufacturers for arming the cartels, it appears that they’re getting their weapons from a source much closer to home.

    A massive security breach of the Mexican government unveiled documents from the Mexico Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena). The leaked documents, published online by a group called Guacamaya, reveal that the Mexican military has been supplying cartels with weapons.

    According to the leaked documents “On May 31, 2019, the military offered operators of the criminal group (Tejupilco drug cartel) 70 fragmentation grenades at a cost of 26,000 pesos (1300.29 USD) each; the criminal cell confirmed the purchase of eight of them, which were delivered to Atlacomulco, State of Mexico.”

    The document then explained that not only were cartel members offered weapons, they were given classified information by military personnel that disclosed in full detail information on armed forces mobility and operations.

    Following the May 31 document was an intelligence report made on June 10 of the same year that revealed that Sedena had full knowledge of the exchange and refused to act on it

    The revelation comes just weeks after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations and as millions of illegal aliens have poured across the southern border since President Joe Biden took office.

    In light of the Biden administration’s inaction, some members of Texas’ congressional delegation say the time has come for Texas to declare an invasion on the southern border.

    “Not only are the United Nations, the Biden Administration, and U.S. nonprofits supporting the invasion of our southern border, now the Mexican military is arming the Cartels smuggling migrants with hand grenades,” U.S. Rep. Lance Gooden told Texas Scorecard. “I fully support declaring the border crisis an invasion and closing our border with Mexico until this coordinated onslaught of migrants is under control.”

    Maybe Mexico should get their own house in order before blaming American arms companies…

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad | 4 Comments »

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