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For years, there have been rumors of shady and illegal activity taking place in North Carolina's Fort Bragg, the world's largest military installation. A suspiciously large number of special operations soldiers have died there, but there's never been much of an explanation for what tied them all together.

I've been following journalist Seth Harp for a few years because he's been following this story closely. I'm now looking forward to reading his soon-to-be-released book, "The Fort Bragg Cartel," which offers an attempted explanation: there is a secretive drug and weapons trafficking operation run out of the base by a group of active duty soldiers and military officials. Here's an excerpt he's published in Rolling Stone.

Of all the drug cartels in Mexico, Los Zetas was by far the most feared. They were not just narcos. They were real soldiers, elite ones, trained in the United States. The cartel traced its origins to a joint project between the United States and Mexico to create a Mexican commando unit modeled on the Green Berets, called the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, or Airborne Special Forces Group. The original members of the GAFE, as the unit was known by its initials in Spanish, were schooled in irregular warfare at none other than Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as well as Fort Benning, Georgia, and also received instruction from Israeli trainers. Around the year 2000, the majority of the unit defected from the Mexican state and went to work directly for the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel, a powerful smuggling mafia that controlled the underside of the Texas border, serving as its armed wing and enforcer corps. Not long after, the rogue commandos again betrayed their employers, struck out on their own, and formed a rival cartel. “Los Zetas” was a reference to the alphanumeric call sign used by the group’s first boss, a Mexican special forces officer named Arturo Guzmán Decena.

The advent of Los Zetas inaugurated the darkest era in all of Mexican history. Trained in marksmanship, rapid deployment, ambushes, surveillance, and psychological operations, Los Zetas used overt military force to consolidate control over most of the Texas border and the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz. Augmented by the state and local police forces that they co-opted, as well as an endless supply of short-lived hit men recruited from the lumpen class of the northern borderlands, Los Zetas wore paramilitary uniforms, drove around in homemade armored vehicles called monstruos, and, to sow terror, filmed themselves committing sickening atrocities. Countless thousands died in their raids, assaults, and sprees of arson. Countless thousands more were abducted and disappeared...

That an Anglo who spoke only broken Spanish and lacked any familial ties to Mexico could simply approach an exceedingly dangerous transnational crime syndicate like Los Zetas and arrange to become one of their distributors in the United States would seem like an implausible plot point in an unrealistic movie, yet that is exactly what [former police officer] Freddie Wayne Huff did, court records show. From 2016 to 2021, he was Los Zetas’ main man in the Carolinas, with an operation extending into Georgia and Virginia. He went on running his appliance business, which was profitable in its own right, and used it as a cover for trafficking cocaine. He rented a warehouse in High Point, a muggy, traffic-ridden suburb of Greensboro and Winston-Salem, bought moving trucks and tractor trailers, and hired employees. At the peak of his criminal career, Huff was moving 50 to 100 kilos of cocaine every seven to 10 days, putting him in the top tier of all traffickers in the United States. “You’re the most badass white boy I ever met,” Huff proudly recalled [Los Zetas drug lord Miguel Ángel] Treviño Morales telling him.

Drawing on his past work as a K9 officer, Huff helped Los Zetas’ border smugglers understand how to pack and conceal shipments to thwart drug-sniffing dogs by wrapping the kilos in shop towels soaked in ammonia, vacuum sealing them in plastic, and then repeating the process, enveloping the bricks in multiple fail-safe layers of a sharply pungent chemical that dogs will do anything to avoid. To defeat X-ray machines, he procured a tractor trailer whose rear differential axle had been hollowed out and lined with lead, a custom job that cost $50,000. “It took 13 bolts to take apart, but it looked much more complicated,” said Huff, who understood how to exploit the ordinary human laziness of customs agents, among other weaknesses in the narcotics-interdiction apparatus. He also advised the cartel’s couriers on how to hide money in cars. “It was like I was teaching a fucking school,” he said...

It’s one thing to traffic drugs internationally and smuggle them across the country undetected. It’s another, often more fraught thing to convert stacks of bulk cocaine into cash. What made [Chief Warrant Officer and drug trafficker] Timothy Dumas such a valuable partner to Huff was that he could liquidate wholesale product at an incredible rate. The secret to his mercantile alacrity was Fort Bragg.

“Tim told me about basically a gang,” said Huff, “a drug-trafficking organization within the military,” made up of “an unspoken group of soldiers that policed themselves.” The bricks of coke that he passed off to Dumas were in turn distributed among the group, a confederation of semi-independent dealers in and around Fayetteville [the city where Fort Bragg is located].

The core members of the underground military mafia, in Dumas’ telling, were Special Forces soldiers who had gone over to the dark side during deployments to Afghanistan. The main players were “guys that are trained killers, that have already killed people,” Huff said. As such, they played by cartel rules. In order to settle debts and resolve disputes, they “would resort to anything,” Huff said, “including murder.”

Besides dealing drugs on base and off, “they were taking grenades,” Huff said, “taking automatic arms,” stealing them from Fort Bragg armories, and reselling them on the black market. Dumas’ role in the gun-trafficking portion of the conspiracy, before he was kicked out of the Army, was to falsify entries in the property book accounting system to keep anyone from noticing the disappearing items. “That was his job,” said Huff. “Maintaining records.”

During the second decade of the Global War on Terrorism, criminal organizations in the United States sourced much of their weaponry from corrupt members of all four branches of the armed forces. The Florencia 13 street gang bought assault rifles from marines stationed at Twentynine Palms, California; a Navy SEAL sold machine guns to the Mongols outlaw motorcycle club; and the Gangster Disciples obtained the pistols used in Chicago shootings from soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to name a few cases. American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines participate significantly in that clandestine “river of iron” that keeps Mexico’s paramilitary cartels, especially Los Zetas and their progeny, better supplied than the Mexican government with military-grade machine guns, grenades, antitank bazookas, helicopter-mounted rotary cannons called miniguns, and plastic explosives, as well as advanced laser optics and night-vision goggles.

In 2018, a pair of Fort Bragg soldiers attempted to sell dozens of stolen assault rifles and blocks of C‑4 to men whom they believed to be representatives of Los Zetas in El Paso. In June 2021, Associated Press published a multipart series, the product of a decade-long investigation, on the Army’s massive unacknowledged losses of weapons, and detailed the case of a single pistol stolen from Fort Bragg that was used in four shootings in New York. The soldier who diverted it to the black market was never identified...

Although four sources independently attested to the existence of Dumas’ “insurance policy,” and described its contents in broadly similar terms, Huff alone claimed to have actually read the text. According to him, the lengthy letter was addressed to a high-ranking general and alleged that “soldiers were involved in bringing opiates from Afghanistan and distributing it on Fort Bragg.” The letter specifically identified the service members who were supposedly transporting commercial quantities of occupied Afghanistan’s marquee national product into the United States. “It names each one of them dudes,” Huff said.

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i think it's important to acknowledge that the reason why mastercard/visa has such a stranglehold on american society is because cash is not the main form of payment in the usa. the predominance of card has effectively privatized currency

in japan, one of the reasons why dlsite and other similar websites are able to just remove visa as a payment option instead of changing any of their merchandise (aside from the fact that visa doesn't have a monopoly here) is because cash payments for online transactions remain an option. even if you don't have a jcb credit card or paypay or whatever, you can still pay for your online purchases using cash by taking your barcode to a convenience store, and you can do this for essentially every online vendor, meaning credit card companies can't just impose their moral judgments on your purchases with much repercussion

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Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!

The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.

This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.

Here is a short and easy video showing this in action

The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.

You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.

If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!

I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.

If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!

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the whole point of a zine is that it's cheap to produce, amateur and homemade. if you're being asked to apply to participate in a print project, it is not a zine. if the final product is being printed and bound professionally, it is not a zine. if you are being asked to enter into any kind of licensing agreement more complex than "my work can be reproduced as part of this publication" it is not a zine. nine times put of ten if the final product costs more than $5 you have left zine country. im so serious about this.

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Do you know anything about :David-Wynn: Miller? Shits crazy

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Writing tool for your fight scenes.

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this post altered my brain so now whenever i have a bowl of any food i think Oh fuck yes it’s a little bowl of seeds for me

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LAW AND ORDER: AN AUTOPSY TEMPLATE BY MORBIDRPA

it’s not pretty but it’s certainly accurate!

psd comes with the filled in text layers, so everything is very easily editable and user friendly

fonts used are arial, hand writing, and signature vp

please like or reblog if downloading, saving, using, or appreciated

credit is always appreciated but never required

consider buying me a drink for continued support

download here !

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guy who plays geoguesser goes too deep and falls desperately in love with a set of gps coordinates

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a single andes chocolate mint from the olive garden can fully nourish an adult human for up to 96 hours

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If you were to try to characterize the differences in how theocratic and repressive Saudi Arabia and Iran are, how would you do so? Not necessarily "which is more theocratic and repressive", but just, what would be some noticeable differences?

Hmm. It’s complicated.

For one, Iran technically allows a few other religions. In Iran Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism are officially recognized as “legal” religions alongside Islam. Whereas in Saudi Arabia Islam is the only legal religion. Technically the millions of foreign guest workers (who are Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, etc.) in Saudi Arabia are allowed to practice their religion privately at home—I can’t imagine how anyone could practically enforce a ban on praying at home in your bedroom anyway—but they’re not allowed to have any churches or temples, nor meet in public for religious worship.

However Iran should not be confused for a tolerant place. There’s a substantial minority who follow illegal minority religions (larger than the small minority who practice the legal religions I mentioned) such as the Bahai faith and Ahmadiyya Muslims, and they are quite cruelly repressed, and discriminated against in jobs and education.

Saudi Arabia is also what I would call more “backwards” in many ways. They still have prosecutions for “witchcraft”, including capital punishment in several cases. And they still retain the female “guardianship” system where women essentially have no legal personhood, and must have a male guardian who is responsible for them. Polygamy is still fully legal in Saudi Arabia but not in Iran.

Iran by contrast is simply a more modern society. They’re more educated and technologically advanced, and it would be simply economically impossible for them to persecute women to the same extent as the Saudis. Iranian women are engineers and college professors and industrial workers, and hold public office. The religious conservatives obviously still demand the symbol of female submission—the veil—but in actual practice, women are freer in Iran than in Saudi Arabia.

I should note that Saudi Arabia has made a few extremely small steps toward liberalization in the past 5-10 years under Prince Muhammad bin Salman. Like women were recently allowed to get drivers licenses, and Christian religious services in private homes have started being tolerated without the police barging in to arrest people (which used to happen as recently as the 2000s). It remains to be seen whether these small steps will lead to anything bigger or if these are just PR moves by MBS trying to keep his Western patrons happy.

The crucial nuance is essentially that because theocracy is weaker and more contested in Iran, it has to be enforced with more extensive violence. I see this as kinda similar to the point @collapsedsquid made about blockades the other day: a strong successful blockade appears basically nonviolent, no ship is fired upon since they all just stay away without having to be openly threatened, whereas a weak less-successful blockade involves lots of chaos and firing upon ships that attempt to challenge or disregard the blockade.

In Saudi Arabia, the theocracy is all-encompassing and there’s relatively little resistance to it. Not zero resistance, but relatively little. In Iran, by contrast, the theocracy is increasingly unpopular and openly resisted all the time. There are mass demonstrations and uprisings all the time attempting to challenge it. These have to be put down with brutal violence. Hundreds shot dead in the street at a time.

The Saudis are much more able to nip the resistance in the bud before it gets to that size. They arrest a few dozen here, execute four or five there, and it all dies down. Why they’re able to do that is complicated and I can’t pretend to have all the answers. But I think 20th century history has a lot to do with it. Iran has a 20th century history of revolutions and Saudi Arabia doesn’t. And Iran has a 20th century history of relative openness religiously and culturally that Saudi Arabia has never had.

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I FUCKING HATE YOU PEOPLE (Sizhen System, 2025, pixel, critical thinking worksheet, paper, the "environmental impact" of "AI image generation", earnest hatred, Google form, .png, time, .pdf)

I FUCKING HATE YOU PEOPLE is an interactive multimedia art experience by Sizhen System, an alias of NYT-acknowledged and Academy of American Poets-published poet Nora Hikari. It features a series of AI-generated images of fictional White female US American military soldiers, drawn in an "anime" style, in various levels of eroticism and pornography. The images contain various computer-generated hallucinations of what the image model conceptualizes as "American iconography." A critical element of the images are the ways that the machine corrupts these actual images -- flags, in particular, as well as the distortions which arise in anatomy, increasing over the course of the image series.

Following the series of images is a piece of creative nonfiction writing in the form of a six-page interactive "worksheet", styled as a classroom worksheet for a hypothetical course in "Johnny Jackass’s Introduction to Non-Terminal Thought" and titled "Sizhen System's Curricular Torsion 6: WHO'S AFRAID OF THE CRITICAL THINKING SECTION?" In addition, there is a public Google form which allows participants to submit their answers to the worksheet directly to the artist.

Artist statement: "I made I FUCKING HATE YOU PEOPLE because I fucking hate you people. Your reactionary sentimentalities cause you to refuse to reckon with anything that could possibly expand your consciousness unless you are literally bludgeoned over the head with it. This piece is Not Art. There is No Art contained within this piece. This device is a weapon designed to hurt the reader/viewer. Any and all art which comes from this piece, or is produced by this piece, is purely incidental, and not the political responsibility of the artist, who did not make a piece of art."

The full body of the work can be found as a compressed file, with assets, at this link: https://system-wires.itch.io/i-fucking-hate-you-people

THIS NON-ART PIECE CONTAINS SEXUAL NUDITY AND IS NOT APPROPRIATE FOR PEOPLE WHOM THAT IS NOT APPROPRIATE FOR.

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