This and That

 

Trump Sound Bites:

Trump: “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful, also, but they’re not. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that Mark Carney, the next time you make your statements.” Carney is the queen of Canada since Justin Castreau abdicated.

Trump: “China is smart. They make windmills, sell ‘em for a fortune, and sell ‘em to the STUPID PEOPLE that buy them! “Windmills all over Europe, all over the place, and they are LOSERS. One thing I’ve learned: the more windmills a country has, the more money that country LOSES. CHINA makes almost all the windmills, and yet I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China!”

Trump: “Without us, you’d all be speaking German and a little bit of Japanese, perhaps.” This surprised the Germans, but they’ll soon be speaking Arabic and a little Mandarin.

Trump: “The explosion of prosperity and progress that built the West did not come from our tax codes—it ultimately came from our very special CULTURE. We have to defend that culture.” Communists hate Western culture because it is an impediment to gaining power.

Macron attempted to rally Europe against Trump. Trump: “I said, here’s the story, Emmanuel, you’re gonna do it, and you’re gonna do it FAST. If you don’t, I put 25% tariffs on you and 100% on your wines and champagnes! ‘No, no, Donald, I will do it!’ TOOK ME 3 MINUTES!” Sunglasses won’t hide that punch.

Trump: “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass-import foreign cultures that have failed to ever build a successful society of their own.”

 

Bullet Points:

** The U.S. Department of Justice, through Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon, announced it is considering federal charges against former CNN host Don Lemon under the Enforcement Act of 1871 (commonly called the Ku Klux Klan Act). This Reconstruction-era law prohibits conspiracies to intimidate or interfere with individuals’ civil rights, including the free exercise of religion. The potential charges stem from Lemon livestreaming and allegedly participating in an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a Sunday worship service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on January 18, 2026. Protesters chanted against deportations, claiming a pastor worked with ICE. Lemon defended the action as protected speech, questioning why Christians support ICE deporting undocumented immigrants and suggesting Jesus would disapprove.

** Advance to Contact (right) – Don Troiani, Historical Artist. Here is a detail from the painting “Nathan Bedford Forrest”. I think these were some of my better horses. This print is long sold out, so if interested, please check the secondary market.

** SOLD! Nearly 300,000 people in Denmark responded to Trump’s Greenland plans with humor — by signing a satirical petition to “buy San Francisco.” The campaign was intentionally ironic, meant to highlight how absurd it sounds to treat countries or regions like real estate.  But seriously, throw down an amount, Denmark. We can make a deal. You have to take everyone with the real estate. It’s a package deal.

** On 20 January 2026, the Acquisition, Technology & Logistics Agency (ATLA) released official test footage showing a new Japanese coastal anti-ship missile prototype executing pronounced terminal evasive maneuvers over the sea. Published under the authority of the Japanese Ministry of Defense, the video offers a rare public view of a capability that appears to represent a qualitative shift in Japan’s approach to maritime strike and coastal sea denial. The disclosure comes as Tokyo accelerates efforts to strengthen stand-off deterrence and complicate adversary naval operations around the Nansei island chain and key maritime approaches to the Japanese archipelago. This appears to be a departure (in degree) from the terminal maneuver that MANY maritime cruise missiles use (sort of a corkscrew maneuver) in an attempt to defeat point defense weapons systems on ships.

** (article) The Supreme Court’s decision to deny legal recognition to trans women has ignited nationwide outrage, triggering protests and strong reactions from civil rights advocates and community leaders. Critics argue that the ruling strips trans women of essential protections, affecting their access to healthcare, employment opportunities, and basic legal recognition. The decision has intensified concerns about discrimination and the erosion of hard-won rights.

Across the country, trans women and their allies are speaking out, sharing personal experiences and calling attention to the real-life consequences of the ruling. Many emphasize that legal recognition is not symbolic, but foundational to safety, dignity, and equal participation in society. The issue has sparked widespread discussion about justice, inclusion, and the role of the courts in protecting marginalized communities.

The backlash highlights a broader struggle for equality and human rights that continues to unfold nationwide. Advocates stress that visibility, solidarity, and continued resistance are critical in the face of policies seen as harmful. The response reflects resilience within the transgender community and a growing movement demanding recognition, respect, and lasting change.

(VM Comment – What exactly are tranny rights? – I understand that equal protection under the law applies to everyone, but when did we agree that they get something extra?)

** As the central column companies started to arrive at their next camp site – a place called Isandlwana – some redcoats noted the similarity between the mountain and the Sphinx collar dogs on their uniforms (24th Foot) as a good omen; others saw it differently.

** Chinese exports of rare earth magnets to Japan in December fell 8% from November, when a diplomatic spat left market players concerned about future shipments – concern exacerbated by a ban Beijing imposed in January on the export of dual-use items to Japan.

** Muslims in Texas – the new trend is explored here. I don’t know if things have changed. There used to be a prohibition against law enforcement undercover activity in or around mosques. Does anybody know if that rule has been rescinded?

** Minnesota travel brochure – schooled by Babylon Bee. Why would anyone want to visit Minnesota – unless they want that taste of Africa?

** ONE DAY after he challenged Pam Bondi to arrest him, William Kelly is in handcuffs. Kelly is the Minnesota domestic terrorist leader of the anti-ICE group that invaded the church along with the famous homosexual former CNN employee, Don Lemon.

 

Canada?

Canada considers deploying troops to Greenland. The only question on everybody’s mind is whether they’ll support a NATO mission or the PRC’s acquisition of the island. You need to choose Canada, and you can’t pick both. Maybe the idea is to deploy under NATO and then turn coat?

 

Not all Somalis are Idiots

And before you jump on me, I’ve always thought that Somali-born activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali was squared away. Her story is an interesting one. There is a good article here (h/t Claudio) that explains why she believes President Donald Trump is right about Western civilization. I agree with Pres. Trump, who said that Europe has been overrun and the place (including the UK) is almost unrecognizable, in his speech at the WEF. Any of the Euro-People who were there would have agreed with Pres. Trump in the recesses of their wicked, timid, liberal hearts.

From a personal perspective, I’m more comfortable in Dubai, Doha, Baghdad, or Erbil than I am in Frankfurt, London, or Paris. They’re all Islamic strongholds. Many British cities are now majority Islamic. The fix will be painful, and I don’t think that the insanely woke UK is capable of doing it.  The Germans might be able to pull it off. The Danes are pushing back, and Sweden, which is completely overrun with sand people, is trying to do the same. Norway never let that many in.

In the US, the band-aid has been ripped off the Somali situation, and we’ve discussed a lot of that on this blog. They need to be deported. Send them home. They should be ineligible to receive government benefits. That will cause most to self-deport to England or Mogadishu.

 

Old Europe

In a bombshell speech, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz just called the EUROPEAN UNION A COMPLETE FAILURE in front of global elites by stating, “Germany and Europe have wasted incredible potential. We have become the world champion of over-regulation and zero growth.”

Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever: “We were used to very friendly presidents like Obama, and we didn’t notice that America’s shift isn’t tied to one presidency, it’s structural. America’s focus has turned toward the Pacific and its back toward the Atlantic, and this won’t change after Trump; it’s a structural shift.

“Regarding Russia, negotiating with Putin, in my opinion, is not a very good idea, because the Americans said: if you want to talk, talk calmly, but carry a big stick. We don’t have a big stick; we can only speak softly.”

Europe thought America was its big stick. And many Americans are tired of condescension from Old Europe. I was on a conference call with EuroTrash from Belgium (which is part of the Caliphate now) the other day, and a Greek colleague who was also on the Zoom call said that he thought that I wanted to reach through the phone, rip his arm off, and beat him to death with it – very astute. The “woke, green, homoweird” of Europe is offensive to many/most Americans, and they can shove it where the Sun doesn’t shine and keep circling the drain. Yes, Belgian PM, we’re tired of you sponging off the USA.

French President Emmanuel Macron: “We prefer respect to bullies. We prefer science to obscurantism. We prefer the rule of law and predictability.” He said that while wearing glasses to hide his shiner reportedly given to him by his husband/partner/whatever.

More Macron: “If you want stability, you’re welcome in Europe. You’re welcome in France.” Just avoid the No-Go Zones run by Muslim invaders.

Responding to a report that a Danish pension fund will dump $100 million in Treasury bonds, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “Denmark’s investment in U.S. Treasury bonds—like Denmark itself—is irrelevant.” The fund’s holdings were three millionths of the outstanding Treasury bonds.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte: “Trump is right. We have to do more there! We have to protect the Arctic against Russian and Chinese influence!” You mean the 37 soldiers France, Germany, and others sent this weekend are not enough to defend Greenland? Send more dog sleds then.

More Rutte: “I know many of you criticize Trump. But do you really think that, without Trump, 8 major European economies would have reached the 2% defense spending target in 2025? If your country isn’t worth defending, why should the USA?” Exactly.

Ebba Busch, the deputy prime minister of Sweden: “Europe needs to toughen up. We need to hold the line. We will not be bullied or blackmailed into letting go of territory that is, in this case, Greenland’s and Denmark’s.” Sweden needs to toughen its stance toward immigrants. Sweden leads Europe in rapes. Half are committed by foreign-born men. 20% of Swedes are foreign-Islamic-born.

Finland President Cai-Göran Alexander Stubb: “I can unequivocally say that Europe can defend itself without the U.S.” Stubb 11 minutes later: “I didn’t say that Europe can defend itself without the U.S.” (Am I the only one who misses the hot Fin party girl PM?)

 

Space Junk – Rand

Key Findings

Recommendations

 

Venezuela and Latin America

(h/t AND) The arrest of Venezuelan “President” Nicolas Maduro in an astonishing U.S. commando raid shocked the world. The U.S. naval campaign against drug trafficking speed boats had caused unease among some sectors in Washington, but the Maduro operation was of an entirely different order of magnitude.

The Washington foreign policy, military, and national security/intelligence community has always been wary of Trump and his policies. Some of this concern is sincere and, up to a point, justified. Trump has led us into uncharted waters. Many are uncomfortable with the dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy, and some can’t cope with the disappearance of the geopolitical landscape that emerged after WWII. They see Trump as reckless, ill-informed, and perhaps dangerous to world stability. All of this is understandable, but – at least on the issue of Venezuela and our position in the Western Hemisphere – the traditional Washington Consensus is wrong.

More than a few of the Washington pundits have gone so far as to deliberately lie about Trump’s actions, the “Venezuelan fishing boats” canard being a shameful example. Most of the people making the false claim that “innocent fishermen” have been killed know next to nothing about Venezuela, the drug cartels, or the facts on the ground.

The boats that have been destroyed were indeed trafficking drugs, most on the Venezuela or Colombia route to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where the cocaine is offloaded for further shipment to the U.S. or Europe. The crews are not “fishermen.” They are narco-terrorists, as Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth have described them.

The drug cartels are merely one part of a vast structure that includes not just criminal activity but an organized effort to undermine the United States and its friends in Latin America and other parts of the world. Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, China, Iran, Hezbollah, the Colombian terrorist organizations (the ELN and the so-called “Dissident FARC”), and the drug cartels of Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East work together, and all see the United States as an enemy to be weakened by any means necessary. The Biden “refugee” disaster is only one example; Cuba, Venezuela, and leftist NGO’s worked together to flood the United States with paupers and other even more undesirable people. This structure controls vast amounts of money, and it has used it to buy elections for Globalists and extreme left politicians, finance the “refugee” invasion of the United States, and undermine our political and social stability. Time will show that much of the money that has funded the lawfare and street warfare against Trump had its murky origins in those countries and organizations.

The dramatic capture of Maduro was a strong signal to our enemies, but it appears that the president, although acting with the best of intentions, has been badly advised by the intelligence community on Venezuela, Cuba, and the rest of Latin America. He risks fumbling the ball and losing an opportunity to rid the Western Hemisphere once and for all of hostile foreign influence and local dictatorships.

The reason for the lack of solid professional advice on Venezuela and the region is not hard to detect. Since the end of WWII, Latin America has been seen by the Washington establishment as a backwater, a place for “second-rate minds”, as one smug diplomat put it. Service in Latin America for State Department officers, CIA officers, and others in the foreign affairs community was, if not a career killer, certainly not viewed as career-enhancing. Our personnel who served there generally fell in love with the region, but this did not translate into interest in the halls of power. Real experts on Latin America are thin on the ground in the higher reaches of the U.S. foreign policy club.

Let me reflect for a moment on a CIA case officer/Clandestine Service Officer who was sent to Guadalajara when I was active in Mexico. She stayed in a luxury flat, never went out, and had food delivered because she was terrified. She read the newspapers and reported on what she found as official information gleaned through recruited assets. DEA was present, as was one FBI Special Agent who was worthless but not a coward. I ratted her out, and rather than yanking her short of tour, they left her there to produce bunk. The justification was that nobody really cared what came out of Mexico in reports. Good to know, and not exactly true because even though Obama didn’t read the national intelligence daily, VP Biden did and marked what I produced in Mexico as “high value.” At the time, eleven agency heads who had access to the NID also marked the information the same way, so I was allowed to continue doing what I had been doing.

Many of the CIA analysts. foreign service officers, think tank intellectuals, and NGO operatives are, to be polite, romantics who view such figures as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, and other Marxist or extreme leftist Latin American political figures as worthy of respect who should be taken seriously as examples of an authentic Latin American alternative to what they have been taught is “American imperialism.” They see Latin Americans as comic book caricatures, bemedaled military thugs, greedy landowners, effete urban oligarchs, all squatting on a long-suffering mass of honest, upright, saintly peasants. While such a view might have been closer to the truth in the 1930’s, it does not reflect the Latin America of today.

This lack of knowledge and realism about Latin America on the part of the U.S. government has been largely responsible for such things as the “triumph” of Fidel Castro in 1959, the rise of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, countless terrorist and guerrilla campaigns across the region, and a corrosive undercurrent of hate directed at the United States by the largely Marxist intellectual class in Latin America. The United States has certainly not been without sin in Latin America, but allowing guilt over past mistakes to hobble our ability to defend our vital national interests is a grave mistake.

Relatively few senior U.S. officials have spent significant time in Latin America. This is even more true of many of the analysts who prepare the briefing papers that get to the president and his close advisors. They may have spent a tour or two at a Latin American post or studied for a semester or two in a South American or Mexican university, but few of them have ever come face-to-face with the sort of people who run the Venezuelan regime, to say nothing of that of Cuba. If they have, it has been in controlled and sedate diplomatic settings. It is easy for a novice or even an experienced diplomat to be deceived by the surface charm of most Latin Americans, of any political stamp or social background. Hard-core Communists and their friends are usually quite careful to show visiting American officials a civilized face. The reality is very different.

The people who run the Venezuelan regime are dedicated, convinced Communists. Delcy Rodriguez is the daughter of a terrorist “hero” of the Venezuelan extreme left (they blame the CIA for his death), and to paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s comment about Lillian Hellman, every word she says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. It is indeed possible that Rodrigez (and perhaps Diosdado Cabello) betrayed the hapless buffoon Nicolas Maduro to Trump. They are perfectly capable of such treachery towards their “comrade.” The slimy nature of the cartel running Venezuela makes such a thing entirely believable. This, however, does not mean they intend to “bend the knee” to the United States. Her meeting with Trump was choreographed in detail by the Cubans to buy time while they hope something will turn up to save their milk cow.

Venezuela is atypical of South American countries in many ways, but the basic mindset of Latin American Communists and their friends never changes. The core of their belief system is a burning hatred of the United States, coupled with a thirst for power at any cost.

As for the Cubans, they are desperate men, and desperate men do desperate things. They know well what the future holds for them if they lose their grip on power. None of them, Cubans or Venezuelan Chavistas, will give it up without a fight.

The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, the drug cartels, and the Colombian ELN and “dissident” FARC terrorists are not inclined to go quietly into the night either. If they lose Venezuela, they lose everything in Latin America. It is their base and rear-guard area.

The U.S. stood by as the so-called “Bolivarian Revolution” took root across the region. It will take more than a successful raid on a house in Caracas to destroy it. A significant number of thugs in Venezuela owe their status and income to the government. They don’t want to see that patronage disappear because if the common people feel empowered, the thugs will find themselves being hung from light poles. President Trump promises to break their ricebowls, and they’ll push back. In the U.S., it is likely that there are hundreds of people, many in high positions and occupying prestigious offices in think tanks, NGO’s, and government agencies, who also have everything to lose if the Venezuelan and Cuban intelligence archives fall into our hands, or if after the regimes stumble some of the henchmen decide to save themselves by spilling the beans on those in our own country who collaborated with them.

In 1948, the Soviet spy Laurence Duggan “fell to his death” out of a ten-story window in Manhattan a few days after the FBI began to question him. Duggan had been an American diplomat – and head of the South American desk at the State Department – in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Should those Cuban and Venezuelan archives ever come to light, it would be a good idea to avoid walking near tall buildings near key U.S. government offices. Those potential “fallers” have much to gain by advising the Trump Administration to “go slow” on Venezuela and Cuba.

Direct military action against either country is a risky course for Trump and probably not necessary. What is necessary is a clear understanding of who and what we are dealing with. Constant pressure and demands for verifiable results from someone such as Delcy Rodriguez must be the order of the day. If she does not come through, the screws must be turned tighter.

Internally, the “Colectivo” criminal gangs must be disarmed and disbanded immediately.

The appropriate U.S. agencies should work alongside Venezuela on these tasks. Among other things, new cedulas and passports should be issued to all Venezuelan citizens, and the old ones (produced under Cuban supervision) must be invalidated. This will go a long way towards separating the sheep from the goats who have acquired dodgy Venezuelan “citizenship.”

We can assume that there is a viable provisional government in waiting for Venezuela. It must be supported, funded, guided, and – security permitting –gradually allowed to take over the levers of power until free elections can be held.

This leaves Cuba. For all their bluster and obsolete Soviet-era equipment, the forces of the Cuban regime have up to now shown no sign of facing reality. Driving a wedge between the Cuban military and the Communist party bosses (and the Ministry of Interior thugs and intelligence agencies) must be a priority. The Cuban armed forces are the only force in Cuba able to both rid the country of the existing regime and maintain order until a legitimate government can be established. The Cuban military is, of course, led by loyal Communists, but they have sent subtle signs from time to time that they want to change Cuba’s relationship with the United States. One can’t put too much faith in this, but as the saying goes, it is the only game in town for the moment. What we do not want is a chaotic, violent end to the Castro regime. This would cause a humanitarian catastrophe that would make the perennial Haitian collapses look positively sedate.

Venezuela is only one of the many initiatives of Trump to change the geopolitical map in our favor, but it is the most important in the Western Hemisphere; Greenland is an entirely different matter. We should hope that our decisions and actions are guided by hard-eyed realism and not wishful thinking or the promises of the crime syndicate in Caracas.

 

Identify the Armor

1

 

2

 

3

 

 

 

 

 

End