It's that day again!

That day being Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican national holiday. As a public service we present, in graphic form, the story of the origins of this day.

Walt, Poor Len [and Ed.! Ed.] 

wish all Mexicans still in Mexico

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Your Singhs today - Part of the Wedding party nabbed at the border

In a story straight out of Border Security, two graduates of the notorious Singh School of Truck Driving -- Ranjit Singh Rowal and Iqbal Singh Virk -- both "Toronto men", have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine and other federal charges in California, in connection with a transnational drug-smuggling conspiracy, allegedly led by former Team Canada Olympian Ryan Wedding.

The Sikh gentlemen are the first Canadians to sign plea deals with US prosecutors following the FBI's "Operation Giant Slalom", a massive investigation revealed last fall. The probe -- named after Mr Wedding's previous career as an elite snowboarder [snowboarder, geddit? Ed.] -- sought to dismantle his alleged drug trafficking network, which uses commercial transport trucks to move tons of cocaine and fentanyl across North America.

The group has also been linked to at least four murders in Ontario. Mr Wedding, who competed for Canada at the 2002 Olympic Games in Utah, is listed as one of the FBI's most-wanted fugitives, with a $10-million reward offered for information leading to his capture. Readers may send their tips to Walt at the usual address, and I will definitely pass them on the relevant authorities.

According to documents recently filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, .Messrs Virk and Rowal have each committed to plead guilty to charges including conspiracy to distribute cocaine. The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

They were arrested in August of last year as they tried to cross the Blue Water Bridge from Michigan to Sarnia ON, while carrying 95 kg of cocaine bricks and 20 kg of heroin in a secret compartment in the trailer. 

They attempted to conceal the drugs by carrying legal goods and documentation to show the products were meant to be hauled from the US. to Canada. However, CBP agents pulled their truck over for a secondary inspection, where an X-ray scanner and a sniffer dog revealed the "non-factory" compartment.

CBC News discovered that the trailer was registered to a company based in Brampton ON linked to Mr Rowal. A grand jury indictment unsealed last October named him and Mr Virk -- Indian citizens who hold permanent resident status in Canada -- as well as 14 others as members of Mr Wedding's drug ring. 

The indictment said the pair worked on behalf of a transportation network that handled the gang's shipments to Canada. However, the transnational criminal operation didn't always go smoothly. Court documents reveal an internal dispute in May 2024 led to one big drug shipment being called off. 

According to the plea, Messrs Virk and Rowal pulled over at a rest stop in southern California, expecting to receive a 347-kg load of cocaine. Their truck, however, only had room for 250 kg. Through an intermediary, Mr Wedding purportedly offered to pay C$150,000 (about $108,000 in real money) to move the reduced shipment, instead of the agreed rate of $220,000. 

But Gurpreet Singh, a Sikh and allegedly a leader of the transportation network, wouldn't agree to the cut rate.The shipment was called off. Mr Singh and his uncle, Hardeep Singh Ratte, who are accused of co-ordinating cocaine shipments to Canada for Mr Wedding, both remain in custody in Ontario while facing extradition to the US of A. How difficult it must be at the jail when the guards call for "Singh" and everybody stands up!

CBC News recently reported that a historic drug bust in Peel Region, west of Toronto, mirrored the smuggling route used by the Sikh truckers. Peel police (known locally as "boobies") said it's highly likely the Wedding network remains active in the so-called Greater Toronto Area.

Mr Wedding -- alias "Public Enemy", "Giant", "El Jefe", and "The Boss" -- is said to still trafficking drugs while on the run, and to have access to a network of hitmen. The FBI thinks he may be hiding in... wait for it... Mexico, under the protection of the murderous Sinaloa cartel.

Note from Ed.: This is an edited version of a report by Thomas Daigle, of CBC News. Since the Canadian Broadcorping Castration is funded by Canada's very Liberal government, we assume they don't need any money they might get by suing us.

Reading the thoughts of Zelenskyy at the White House

Today, at 0001 EST, Canada and Mexico got Zelenskyed. Worse is to come, for all concerned. Lifetime pct .987.

The origins of Cinco de Mayo

Walt, Poor Len [and Ed.! Ed.] 

wish all Mexicans still in Mexico

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

VIDEO: By request: Biden meme of the week

Ed. again. Yes, as noted in the introduction to Poor Len's piece (below), we do get mail. An assiduous reader asks why we didn't post a meme making fun of poor Old Joe Biden's triple fall up the stairs to Air Force One. The truth is we didn't see one that was particularly funny, until yesterday. Here `tis.

Do we need to tell you that's from the Babylon Bee? It accompanies the article headlined "Mexico Installs Stairs To Keep Biden Out".

Yas, yas, it's Lent, and we shouldn't make fun of the old and infirm. Hey, we're old and infirm outselves. So take this as an expression of our concern about how much longer it will be before Kamala Harris asks the Cabinet to invoke Amendment XXV to the Constitution of the United States. 

But we're not the only ones putting up memes. Here's Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX), speaking in the House, with a poster mocking Sleepy Joe's forgetting the name of his Secretary of Defense.

Speaking of special days, months, years, etc

In my earlier post today I admitted to nearly forgetting to mention "Stop Blaming White People" month, which ends tomorrow. I think I should be forgiven for that near-omission. There are so many bogus and useless days, months and years to celebrate, that's it's hard to keep track of them all.

And then there are the festivals. Nearly every weekend sees an ethnic festival of some kind going on in 100s of cities across the land. Then you have the harvest festivals, spring festivals (e.g. Groundhog Day, mentioned here earlier this month), national independence festivals, religious festivals, and on and on and on. One that I hadn't heard of until I saw this report in Metro News (UK), is Mexico's not-very-famous Exploding Hammer Festival.

The event, which takes place every February, involves people attaching a mix of sulpher and chlorate to the ends of sledge hammers. They they smash the hammers against rail beams, making the substance explode and send up massive clouds of smoke. Like this.

This unusual festival, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, is held in the small town of San Juan de la Vega. San Juan, so the story goes, was the victim of bandits who made off with his gold. (Where the gold came from, no-one knows.) St John the Baptist helped recover the gold, thus becoming a Mexican Robin Hood. What this has to do with exploding hammers is unclear, but never mind.

As you can see, some of the hammerers are flung backwards by the force of the explosion. One man hurt his leg in the blast and had to be carried off on a stretcher. Others were less seriously injured, bringing the total to 43 hurt. Assuredly, God and Saint John know their devotion.

VIDEO: Catholic priest burns effigy of Pachamama

Traditional Catholics, who try to keep the Faith of our fathers, were pleased this past weekend to see a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Mexico City burning effigies of the pagan "Pachamama" statues, while leading the faithful in prayer to atone for the sin of worshipping the statues during the recently concluded Amazon Synod at the Vatican. Here's the video, originally posted on LifeSite News.



Father Hugo Valdemar stands outside a Church dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, while flames leaped out of a metal fireplace on top of a table covered with a white cloth. He stands next to an altar-boy holding an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The priest was also flanked by an icon of Saint Michael the Archangel, to whom we pray earnestly, now more than ever, to protect us in the day of battle and deliver Holy Mother Church from her enemies, without and (especially) within.

"The most blessed Virgin of Guadalupe", Father Hugo says, "is a young woman who is pregnant. She has Jesus in her womb, who is to give birth to the new continent [the new world]. She says that she comes to grant her love to all the inhabitants of this entire continent (not just Mexico). She is pregnant and carries Jesus who will bring us the Gospel and drive away the darkness of idolatry and the devil."

The priest then picks up one of the Pachamama effigies and, holding it next to the image of Our Lady, explains the difference between the two.

"A friend exorcist says that this idol [Pachamama] is actually the figure of the Antichrist. It is a blasphemy and parody of Mary. Pachamama is pregnant but carries the Antichrist to give birth to him in the Masonic church, to destroy the sacraments, which is to return to idolatry and superstition. So, this Antichrist who is to give birth to a church with an 'Amazonian face' is an abomination, it is a contradiction to Church doctrine, which is the dynamic into which these idolaters want to enter now.

"So, in sign of repugnance to the offences that they made to the most Blessed Virgin Mary in Rome, in Her Church of Transpontina, we, as a protest and as a sign of reparation, burn this satanic idol of the Pachamama."

Father Hugo then drops the Pachamama into the fire, where it was consumed. Two more effigies were later burned. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ, and to your Blessed Mother.

Payback for the Lady in Red - Trump set to stick it to Canada

As the picture above shows, the Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Canada's Minister of Global/Foreign/External/Whatever Affairs, is a natural-born diplomat. So much so that, last June, Foreign Policy magazine, the voice of the one-world crowd, gave her its Diplomat of the Year award, which she travelled to Washington to accept.

Today, even as I write, the talented and fragrant "Lady in Red" is jetting down to the nation's capital [It's not in Richmond any more? Ed.] for an emergency meeting with... well... whoever in the American administration is willing (or obliged) to talk to her about free trade. Yesterday, President Trump (hahaha, liberals!) announced the demise of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the beginning of a new US-Mexico trade agreement. Canada is to be shut out of what was supposed to be a three-way deal, and now it's up to Ms Freeland to get America's second-biggest trading partner back in there.

Ms Freeland's skills as a negotiator are well known, and have been discussed in WWW before. As reported here in October of 2016, her ass in the hole [Please use your spell-checker. Ed.], played at a meeting to discuss a Canada-EU trade agreement, is throwing a hissy fit and storming out of the meeting room to tell the meeja "These people are impossible! I'm going home to my children!" Amazingly, the obstreporous Belgians (the objects of her feminist wrath) went for it and got the meeting going again, although the agreement in principle has yet to be ratified.

That's just one example of Ms Freeland's fine feminist SJW form. Like Hellery Clinton, she does not hesitate to diss anyone who disagrees with the enlightened and progressive principles which she shares with her boss, Canuck Prime Minister Just In Trudeau. It was the lovely Chrystia who insisted that gender equity, indigenous rights and climate change be included in any new North American free trade pact. Why the Americans and Mexicans didn't put anything in their new agreement about those important issues is undoubtedly a mystery to her.

Like Mrs Bill Clinton, Ms Freeland is one of those who lay the blame for all the world's troubles at the feet of President Trump. Without actually calling him "deplorable", she managed to infuriate him by the foreign policy speech she delivered while accepting the award mentioned above. In the speech, she directly addressed Americans in the room, raising "concerns" about the direction the United States has been taking under the Trump administration. She criticized America's approach to international relations, including NATO, tariffs and trade.

According to people who should know, both President Trump and Robert Lighthizer, the lead American trade negotiataor, viewed the speech as an insult, not only targeting administration publicly but doing so on their turf in Washington. Worse, the speech came hard on the heels of the acrimonious and unproductive G7 meetings in Charlevoix QC. It will be remembered that in the closing presser, M Trudeau said he'd had good meetings with President Trump et al. Then, only minutes after Mr Trump's plane had lifted off, Mr Socks said Canada would not be bullied, yada yada yada!

The White House was not fond of Chrystia Freeland even before her speech. The President's staff and allies dislike her, her policy positions (gender equity???), and her negotiating style ("These people are impossible!"). So they made Canada pay for Ms Freeland's feminist rants, by disinviting the Canucks from recent meetings. See "While Canuck minister plays SJW, USA and Mexico near NAFTA deal", WWW 11/8/18.

Senior government officials in Ottawa insist they're not worried about Ms Freeland's having got her tits in the wringer, saying the deal is far bigger than personalities. In their liberal smugness, they actually think the "Lady in Red" is only disliked because she has been so relentless in bluntly pushing forward Canadian interests, such as, errr, indigenous rights and, errr, gender equity, and [That's enough Canadian interests. Ed.]

The Liberal government and its apologists in the state-owned CBC are telling worried Canadians that this could be the most critical week yet in NAFTA negotiations and that a deal could be done by the end of the week. Walt will take that bet. Lifetime pct .989.

Further reading: "Questioning the CBC's love affair with Chrystia Freeland", WWW 8/10/17. Spoiler alert! The link to Ms Freeland's disastrous appearance with Bill Maher, in which her biases and ignorance were revealed to an incredulous public, doesn't work. YouTube has deleted that video. Any suggestion that pressure from the Trudeau government had anything to do with its disappearance is, of course, completely unfounded.

While Canuck minister plays SJW, USA and Mexico near NAFTA deal

Canadian investors and businesspeople are chewing their nails, waiting and hoping for their federal government (Just In Trudeau, Prop.) to get serious about reaching a deal with the Paranoid States of America (and maybe Mexico) to renew the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The economies of the Land of the Somewhat Free and the Great No-longer-white North are so intertwined that a reversion to the status quo ante would be disastrous for Canada, less so for the USA. Canucks are worried about the possible failure of negotiations, Americans... not so much.

Chrystia Freeland, Canada's silver-spoon liberal Minister of Global Affairs [sic], announced as negotiations got under way that her Liberal government's priorities would be: aboriginal rights, gender equity and climate change. The American negotiators replied, "Huh? Don't you want to talk business?" Months of dithering have passed with Canada and the USA failing to even get on the same page, while the Mexicans look on in puzzlement.

So tired are the Americans of having to deal with the fragrant Ms Freeland and her SJW agenda that they resorted to holding "lower level" meetings without her. See "Canuck foreign minister Freeland skips 5th round of NAFTA talks", WWW 16/11/17. Mr Socks responded by putting former Conservative Prime Minister Lyin' Brian Mulroney and cabinet minister Rona Ambrose on the negotiating team, but everyone knew that was just for show since Ms Freeland won't talk to anybody who doesn't agree with the liberal orthodoxy. "These people are impossible to deal with! I'm going home!" was how she responded to questions from the Belgian government during negotiations for a Canada-European Union trade deal.

The Americans' next ploy was to let it be known, through "back channels", that they would be happy to sit down with someone more business-minded. That led to a clandestine visit to the White House by Stephen "Call Me Steve" Harper, the Conservative who Junior defeated in October of 2015. See "Mysterious meeting between WH bigshots and former Canadian PM", WWW 28/6/18. Unfortunately, word of the visit leaked out, and the Liberals can't afford politically to follow up on any progress which might have been made.

The state of play at the moment is that, absent the distraction of Ms Freeland and her SJW demands, the USA and Mexico are having productive talks, getting down to where the rubber meets the road. Reports this week suggest they're getting close to a deal, including an agreement on the contentious auto sector. That a deal is imminent was confirmed by none other than POTUS himself, who sent out this tweet on Friday.

Because of tariffs and trade barriers, President Trump said, "Canada must wait." Bad news for the Canucks, but not unexpected.  Two days earlier, Breitbart News reported that former New York Stock Exchange President Tom Farley said expected Trump to reach a trade deal with Mexico before the midterm elections. "Likely not Canada. China will be the bogeyman," he said. "You’ll see China continue to struggle. And then the idea will be can we get a big trade deal prior to [Donald Trump's] next election" in 2020.

Before the NAFTA negotiations got underway, many predicted that President Trump would have the hardest time working with Mexico because of his promise to erect a wall along the border. Instead, American negotiators have discovered they have a lot of common ground with the Mexicans, and talks have gone well. The stumbling block in renegotiating a tripartite NAFTA is... wait for it... Canada!

"Mexico has got to help us at the border!" tweets POTUS

Earlier this morning, in my report on the findings of a French public opinion poll strongly supporting deportation of Islamic extremists, I opined that the only leader of the so-called Western democracies likely to listen to the people who elected him (or her) is President Donald J. Trump. Now I see by the mojo wire that POTUS is up and on the job, calling on Congress to use the "Nuclear Option if necessary" to keep undesirable migrants out of the USA. Here's what he tweeted while Walt was still asleep.

The President has previously called for the "nuclear option" -- changing Senate rules to end the filibuster -- but establishment Republicans have rejected that option. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says Republicans will welcome the filibuster when they return to being the Senate minority, something that (IMHO) seems sure to happen if the anti-Trumpers in the GOP persist in their obstructionism.

Mr Trump began tweeting about immigration this past weekend, threatening to pull out of NAFTA unless Mexico does more to stop people from crossing into the United States. Mexico must "stop the big drug and people flows," he said, "or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!"

With a caravan of 1500 potential wetbacks heading north even as I write, strong action to close the border by whatever means would seem to be exactly what the American people want. And President Trump doesn't need a public opinion poll to tell him so!

Agent 34 explains the origins of the Mexican national holiday

Ed. here. This has been a slow news day in this corner of the forest. So we are much obliged to Agent 34 who sent us this explanation of the origins of the national holiday of Mexico. Muchas gracias!