Pentagon Insurrection Chatter?

 Chatter started up today as heads of the Pentagon got around of reminding troops of their oath, and not to say anything about sedition or insurrection. 

Where this is going to lead to?  I suspect between the Pelosi/Schumer leadership, and President Biden....a tasking will come to the Pentagon to evaluate 'all' members for potential for sedition or insurrection behavior.  

The issue?  The National Guard is made of 450,000 members, and the Reserve/Active duty crowd?  2.4 million.

Time to conduct an evaluation?  The audit/investigation folks would just start laughing and telling it'd take five years unless you just got people to admit it in the open.

Would people admit internet habits?  I doubt it.  Some might suggest they watch gay-generals having romps at such-and-such site....just to see how the audit guys would react.  

After you get the info back....what happens?  

Lets say that 320k members of the National Guard admitted Twitter/Facebook accounts where 'anger' is mentioned and the distrust of the election was expressed.  Then what?  Are you willing to dismiss them?

The odd factor?  You don't get liberal or extreme far-left folks to sign up for the National Guard.

Lets turn to the 2.4 million in the Reserve or Active duty deal.  There?  It might be 50-percent.  Would you dismiss them?

My humble guess...they'd try a quick six-month review, and then launch into a propaganda-deprograming episode with both the National Guard and Reserve/Active duty folks. 

The Generals?  They would realize a month into this that they are being laughed at and heavily criticized.  

Recruitment? It's go down like a rock in southern states.  By 2024, the majority of services would complaining heavily that they can't reach even 50-percent of their goals.  It would be openly discussed in the House and Senate....asking how they can rectify the mess.  

Oddly.....if you start to look back over Roman history, and how the empire fell apart....it leads to one serious factor.  The lack of support by the Roman Army.  This would be one of the ten big reasons of the 'fall'.  

Just something to think about.  

Comments of a Past Trip

Back in the summer of 2019, I went on some 10-day trip to Dubrovnik, Croatia.   There's about 300 things I could write on....regarding this trip, but the key 'adventure' was this 15-hour trip arranged with a local tour bus deal (note: I went by myself, the wife didn't care for the deal).

The trip was basically built around seeing the landscape of Croatia, crossing the border into Kosovo, spending an hour around Apparition Hill/Medjugorje, then going down some 15-degree inclined hill to reach Mostar, and then walking around a half-civilized-half-warlike Mostar.  It was one of those five-star adventures that you kinda fall into.

First, the tour bus was marginally qualified as 'safe'.  It was a no-name brand, and you generally lifted up in the air about three inches each time you hit a pot-hole.

The tour-guide lady had some thick accent....so whatever came out during the tour....was about 50-percent understood.

About two hours into this adventure, we got to the 2-mile Bosnia border (along the port area).  On entry, you had to show a passport.  You drove two miles, to reach Croatian border, where you showed the passport again. 

About an hour after this, we ended up at Medjugorje.  It has some status...basically going back to 1981.  Six kids had walked up to some hillside, and then came back to swear they'd seen Mary (of Jesus-fame).  She'd appeared as a apparition (ghost figure).  

It took around 15 years, but eventually in the 1990s....this whole thing (Apparition Hill) had become some tourist hot-spot for Catholics to come to and spend time in hopes of seeing or feeling the apparition.  

Thousands drive in each day, and the whole town is focused on apparition tourism (the Catholics hate this term). 

I asked if anyone else besides the six juveniles had ever seen anything.....'no' was mostly the answer you got. 

This ate up an hour, and I sipped through a Pepsi because of the dry heat for the day.  Seeing any apparitions?  Well....no.  I did feel something but it was probably from the lack of shock absorbers on the bus than anything else.  

Then we proceed on.  The description of the roads to Mostar?  Well....I would have marked all the speed limits to 45 mph at best, but I'm guessing the bus driver was easily doing 65 mph.  On my scale pot-hole intensity....this road (R424) was a '8'.  

How best to describe Mostar?  Well....prior to the 1993/1994 war period....it was a tourist 'hot-spot'.  After the war, it's safe to say that about every single building in the town had bullet-holes....some more than others.

The driver dumped us at some central point, and the tour-lady led us to the shopping 'zone' (mostly cheapo gift items that were mostly made in China). I separated from the group, and did a two-hour walk.

The bridge business?  Well, that's what 99-percent of tourists come to Mostar to see, but it's just not as big as you'd kinda expect.  

At the end of the walk....I stopped at some local grill and had a fantastic plate of beef and fries (double your normal portion), with two local beers....all for about $6.  

I came back to the bus point thirty minutes early and sat at a bench.  Across from me....sat some 12-story apartment building.  I sat for a few minutes and counted bullet-holes (probably 300 noted up to the 5th floor, and then I just stopped counting).

Our group assembled and then we drove like some bat-outta-hell through some marginal roads, and then hit several towns with no-name potential (all having a Jesus-statue somewhere in the mix).

Somewhere around 9 PM, we finally got back to Dubrovnik.  Easily ranked as one of the ten most worthless day-trips of my life.....I easily fell asleep that night and filed around twenty photos of the trip without any real notes.  What you can generally say from the day's journey....there seems to be just an awful lot of fairly religious people in this region, and they seem to spend a lot of time discussing religious matters.  

I would easily rank this like a weekend trip to Demopolis, Alabama and eating at a local bar-and-grill, with a dozen dogs sleeping around the picnic table out front.  

How Many Conspiracy Theories Exist Today?

 Around six months ago, I got onto this topic and spent several hours looking across the spectrum...the US, the UK, Europe, Russia, etc.  Somewhere around 1,000....I just stopped and started thinking about the subject itself.

Maybe as a 18-year old kid in rural Alabama....I probably had seen around a dozen conspiracy theories.  The most popular one was JFK's shooting.  

I think around 1990 (age 42), I probably could list around a hundred conspiracy theories, with Freemasons being near the top.

Today?  Well...you can jump off into topics like Epstein being killed, 9-11 being a bigger deal, the Denver Airport being some headquarters for something, Patton being executed, and New Coke relating to something weird/sinister.

Today, there's even a phobia for people, who automatically dismiss a conspiracy completely, without consideration of the data or facts.

News groups just helping to generate more of these?  There's no doubt.  I might suggest that CNN actively works on conspiracy ideas on a daily basis, and helps to make the problem even worse.

Hunter Biden now part of the conspiracy process?  I don't think he really tried to get himself into the mess....he just fell accidentally into it (maybe the cocaine helped).

Trump and Biden both worked up into the conspiracy business?  No doubt. 

If you count both Hillary and Bill's conspiracy situations....I would imagine at least twenty conspiracy theories exist.

On Covid-19?  I would imagine all total....if you count in the UK, China, Europe and the US....there's probably one-hundred different conspiracies.

Global warming?  There might be well over 500 conspiracies now existing within this line of thinking.

MK Ultra?  You can throw ten basic conspiracies on the board, and each has a different path and different conclusion....which complicates finding a fake conspiracy or true conspiracy end-point.

The NFL?  I can task most football analysts, and they will cite well over a hundred conspiracy situations.

The NCAA bowl system?  Overloaded with conspiracy ideas.

Aliens? Thousands of conspiracy concepts.

I brought this topic up with a guy who'd spent time in Turkey, and he laid out a dozen-odd conspiracy theories that most all Turks engage upon (like it was a regular topic for them).  One of the weird ones for them revolves around the Treaty of Lausanne (1923 signed) and that it officially runs out in 2023, with some secret 'promise' (totally secret from the public) and this will allow Turkey to drill for oil off the coast as of 2023.  

The fact that these all grow in nature?  That's the weird thing about conspiracy theories....I would imagine in the US alone, there's probably three-hundred new theories developed each year.  

Are we suffering from conspiracy theories?  This would be a debatable topic.  In some cases, we are suffering as a society because of the increasing lack of trust.  

But what are you going to do....to halt or correct these issues?   

Lefty or Righty?

 So I'm going to point this out.  There is a fake movement to bring militia-type groups to DC next week during the Inauguration.

The ad for this deal is shown to the side.

So you look at the picture for a few minutes and then it kinda hits you....the hand with the torch?  Wrong arm.....it's the left hand. 

The actual statue....the torch is in the right hand.

All part of some Antifa effort?  Yeah, but conservatives might be stupid enough to fall for this group.  

Old East Germany and Censorship

 Officially, from 1949 (first day of the Communist republic) to 1990 (last day of the Communist republic)....no censorship existed (it was widely repeated).  Most bureaucrats of the country were proud of their free and open society (wink-wink).

Prior to 1949 (from 1945 on), the government that existed....had a listing of books which were fully banned (not to be sold, seen or read)....called 'Liste der auszusondernden Literatur' (basically meaning 'banned literature'.  If you fell on the list....it meant you had dangerous ideas.  Even if this were fictional in nature....it could be viewed as dangerous.  

Sometimes, it was simply wording that got shifted.  An example....Huck Finn by Mark Twain was allowed to be read....but it needed to be in German, and the translation had to be done in a particular way....so an English version of Huck Finn was practically impossible to find, but plenty of German translated copies were around.  It should be noted that when translated over....it was meant to ONLY be a child's book and reflect nothing of value for an adult.  

To this 'rewriting' effort....at some point, there were fifteen different translations existing on Huck Finn, and all were slightly different in meaning and description.

As they sat and actually wrote the 1949 Constitution for DDR....it was actually inserted into the text....censorship was forbidden (article 9).

There was simply no part of society left untouched by the censorship.  If you did some kind of art to suggest you were anti-government....it got banned.  If you wrote out some song and suggested anything subversive about the government, it got banned.

If you said anything about the crappy education system, or poorly-run university sytem....it got banned or censored.  

If you talked about pollution (like your local stream was crapped-out)....that got banned.

If you suggested racism?  That got banned.

If you suggested sexism?  That got banned.  

If you suggested extreme violence existed (over in the bad part of East Berlin)?  That got censored.

Wanted to talk about gay topics?  Banned.  Weird sex stuff?  Banned.

Wanna talk about alcoholism, drugs, mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia?  Banned.

Got corruption issues?  Forbidden and censored.  

At least once a week, the national news people would release a updated 'don't talk about' listing....which would suggest the bad topics which could not be reported in news.  To suggest that fake news was the standard?  Most all East Germans accepted that as their landscape.

To make all of this work....print-media, radio-media, and TV-media were all part of a state apparatus.  If DDR existed today....they'd have the internet existing under the state-umbrella.  Facebook-like, Google-like and Twitter-like devices would exist and be geared to censorship.

How older East Germans view the media and news apparatus today?  Even in a relatively free landscape....they are skeptical and often question precisely what they are told.  Even if the Chancellor herself says something....it's not entirely regarded as factual.

The last people on Earth who have any appreciation of censorship?  Well....yeah, I'd suggest that older East Germans are at the top of the list.