Mythical Military

As you may know, the heroic image is baloney.

I went through Army Basic Training twice. On top of that, I spent several years working in a whole division of drill sergeants. It was an Army Reserve unit. The entire division was devoted to the mission of setting up and running a Basic Training base should the nation mobilize for war honestly. I am very well acquainted with everything that goes into the very fundamental design of Army training specifically, and am acquainted with the training of the other branches.

Everyone knows it arises from our adoption of the Prussian military structure and culture.

So why is it the very best of the best are trained to differently? You can find plenty of published information, and it will be confirmed by people who have been through it. Even when they tell you stuff they shouldn’t, the basic story doesn’t change: Elite military training is totally different from the general run of military experience. If you attend an elite school for Special Forces, you are pretty much on your own, in the sense they don’t yell and scream. If you don’t want it, you go home. If your head isn’t on straight, you can’t take it.

That should be a magnificent hint as to what the military leadership thinks of the rest of the folks in uniform.

From the moment you first walk onto the assembly area of your basic training unit, it’s non-stop head games. The drill sergeants are carefully schooled in sadism and humiliation. They somehow imagine this will force some measure of conformity on the whiny brats what show up from God-knows-what social situation. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence recognizes this is not optimal. Yes, most people from the general run of the US population are totally useless for even the honest mission of the military, never mind the foul hateful stuff we actually have our troops doing in the world.

People who leave basic training already know that atmosphere does not reflect what they’ll face in any subsequent military assignment. So they pass through something they know instinctively is pointlessly brutal and dehumanizing and carry that spiteful cynicism with them. The only ones who don’t were decent to begin with, and didn’t need that sort of breaking down of dignity to become useful. Plenty of drill sergeants know it’s all wrong, but if they balk at being cruel and hateful, they get into trouble. A significant number of them didn’t want that assignment in the first place, but were pretty much drafted for it.

No, it’s not fun and not funny unless you are the scum of the earth.

Is it any surprise we have such a big problem with things like rape? I’m surprise how little there is of it, given the vast effort to turn people into abusive sons-of-bitches in the first place. Gleeful abuse is a fundamental necessity to what we have, in the sense that if you take it away, the whole thing would come apart. We’d have to start over from scratch. It’s made worse because genuine heroism in leadership is a ticket out the door, as the entire system prefers the most useless, gutless bean counters and soulless management types it can find. If you wear brass above the rank of captain in the US Army, it is highly probable I will despise you once I get to know you.

A significant number don’t stay for subsequent contracts with the military. That’s the good news. The bad news is our current evil adventures have demanded the command staff implement policies of not letting people go when the contract expires. So the worst are kept in and all sorts of insane measures are put into place to keep them under some semblance of control. It’s not working, as anyone can see.

For all that, I assure you I never felt I accomplished more than I did when wearing that fool’s uniform. That is, the people who did stick around, for whatever misguided reasons and under high manipulation, were responsive to the faith I have borne for many years. It called to them and they wanted all I could give them. It wasn’t the ego-stroking fact the took me seriously; I never took myself seriously. I wasn’t proud of my official accolades, especially when some of the foulest creatures got exactly the same rewards with exactly the same high-sounding words. Pretty bits of color I wore on my dress jacket meant precious little to me. What mattered was the trail of changed hearts I see behind me. Civilians haven’t been half as interested, but when I walked among the folks in uniform, they loved my faith and wanted their own share of it.

That is the part I miss, and I’d love to be among them again, because I already know they would be hungry for what I have.

Of Children and Angels 7

Preston insisted on climbing into the tent to lay down. Angie knew he wasn’t so very tired because they hadn’t ridden that far, and certainly not very hard. Lying on his back, he stared up at the interior surface of the tent.

“When I was in the Army, the Military Police in Europe always had access to VW vans with the police markings and emergency lights mounted on top, just like the older K-Mar vehicles before they started getting the fancy paint jobs they have now. The US version was dark green with large white patches and big black letters. On the inside, the had a heavy wire cage wall separating the front seats from the passenger area. The sliding side door always had the inside handle removed. It was basically a prisoner transport vehicle with room for six passengers.”

Angie finally understood. She lay down next to him. “So, we do some night watching,” she suggested.

“Yep.”

Preston couldn’t sleep. He tethered the laptop to his cellphone and began researching, looking for images to indicate whether the US MPs still used such vans. Apparently there were still some in service here and there across Europe. Social sites offered photos aplenty. Then he scanned the satellite images of the area.

“Without knowing for sure, I’m just guessing the car we saw was headed right over here to that new Albert Heijn shopping center. It’s probably the closest thing of that sort to Javelin. The next nearest thing is an Aldi out in Brüggen, tiny by comparison and not any closer. There’s also the Rheindahlen Complex” Preston seemed almost thinking aloud, but Angie understood he was explaining where his mind was going. “Without knowing where they might be going or bringing the next load of kids, all we need to do is establish a baseline of routine coming and going by any Military Police vehicles at night across the border.”

It seemed to take forever, but finally the sun went down. In the dead of summer, that meant nearly 9PM. They road slowly back to the small bridge passing over the autobahn. Parking their bikes out of sight at the bottom, the didn’t climb all the way up. Instead, they sat part way up where they could just see over the side for west-bound traffic coming from Germany.

While they waited and watched, Preston and Angie chattered about almost anything simply to occupy their minds and stay wide awake. “If I were planning to run small batches of kids into this area, I’d want to make sure I had the same vehicles come and go routinely so the local and national police never gave it a thought. I’d make sure they came across the border at least once nightly.”

He also told stories of apparent corruption he observed or had heard about in the US Army. He became just a bit passionate about it to the point of distraction. It was Angie who recognized the aging VW van with white patches and emergency light bar on top heading toward the bridge where they sat. Preston turned quickly, raised the camera from his lap and immediately began snapping still images. He then stood and made sure to catch the rear license plates.

The camera told him it was pressing midnight. He decided nonetheless to send a text message to his boss, explaining his notion and promising to post a picture of the rear of the MP van with the plates visible into the dropbox.

The next morning Preston’s cellphone twittered a reply while he was getting dressed. He snatched it up while still half-naked to see what it said.

Plausible. Plates ambiguous — Rheindahlen or Javelin. See drop.

In Preston’s mind, the idea of using a small skiff to transfer from barge to van would explain a lot. Düsseldorf had a great many private havens and several kilometers of beach areas with small roads nearby. Even if an MP van would be conspicuous, other types of cargo vehicles would not. At some point between Düsseldorf and the border were any number of transfer points to switch vehicles. But it would mean someone in the MPs with the means to control and corrupt several others to keep it all quiet. That would hardly be new in the US Army.

Checking the dropbox account, Preston and Angie saw this message:

You’ll need to stay around and catch where they take the cargo. No precise location known for the breaking house. Another unintended vacation.

Gary’s wry sense of humor kept this job sane.

Of Children and Angels 6

On the ride back to their campsite, Angie and Preston discussed this idea.

Angie insisted, “Corrupt officials are one thing. Local politicians are seldom clean any more than they might be anywhere else in the world. But the Dutch police seldom get too wrapped up in corruption. Gemeentes, maybe. K-Mar — I find it hard to imagine.”

Preston came back quickly. “Boy, you sure couldn’t say that about American federal law enforcement. They’re some of the biggest criminal operations in the whole country.”

He paused a bit. “It doesn’t seem the Gemeente police would be running back and forth across the border in their official vehicles that much. So that leaves the German Polizei. That’s pretty complicated. We know for certain they have been used a lot in espionage, or at least someone masquerading as them. I know the CIA has lots of friends in the Polizei. We’ve already discovered the espionage angle to this child trafficking; that’s how we got involved in the first place. But I can’t imagine the Polizei would be running across the border too freely, either. So about the only way I can see it is with them doing transfers along the many small routes in the woods.” He shook his head slowly. “Somehow, that seems entirely too risky and complicated.”

“But it seems for now that’s the most plausible,” Angie countered.

Over dinner outside their tent that evening, they scanned the maps of the border area, both paper and online maps. It became obvious that for quite some distance in both directions, the German side of the border was heavily forested. The Dutch side considerably less so, but there was that one area where Preston and his fellow troops used the firing range owned by the Dutch federal police. The next nearest border woodland on the Dutch side was a bit north of where they were camped, just on the south side of Swalmen.

They decided to divide the border region between north and south of the A52, which was the N280 on the Dutch side of the border. This was the major highway route east and west connecting Roermond with Düsseldorf.

The next day saw them angling from their quiet country hiding place down along the back roads to where the highway crossed the border. There was a farm lane connected to a small pedestrian bridge crossing over the autobahn. They turned left off the lightweight bridge onto a narrow bike path. From there they had less than a half-kilometer to the border marked by an almost unbroken treeline on the German side. It was a very pleasant ride and they were hardly the only cyclists on the trails.

On the one hand, the border was shot through with crossings, most of them south of the Javelin Barracks area. On the other hand, Preston could imagine determined traffickers could get a small van down there, but trucks or buses would be nigh impossible. By mid-morning, they decided to head back through the Dutch villages a kilometer or so off the border. There was still the large forested area and they cut it in half by taking the fairly solid lane running past the golf course. By the time they got to Asenray they were ready for a snack. Stopping at the only cafe, they grabbed a vacant table out front and reassessed the task in front of them.

Preston wasn’t exactly tired, just feeling a little frustrated. “Somehow I get the feeling trying to watch this border area day and night would be way too much. Catching them red-handed seems almost futile. I just don’t get that positive feeling about this. It’s as if our angels aren’t in on that idea.”

Angie agreed. “I think it’s a dead end, too. It seems too inefficient.”

Heading east out of the village, they followed a zigzagging route back to where the little bridge crossed the autobahn. As they rode up over the top, Preston suddenly stopped. He watched a vehicle approach from the east, pass under and cruise off toward the northern end of Roermond. Angie followed his eyes.

It was a UK Military Police car, an Opel station wagon.

Preston looked back at Angie. While his features were nearly blank, he had a very intense look, as if his mind worked furiously. He looked again where the vehicle had gone, then back across the bridge, staring off into space. Angie waited expectantly, but all he said was, “Military Police vans.”

The ride back to the manor and their tent was silent.

Of Children and Angels 1

(This begins Part 3 of the saga of Angie and Preston in the Benelux.)

It was time for a bit more mundane work.

Besides, Preston had not been this close to the old POMCUS site since coming back to the Netherlands. It was a short ride east across Heerlen, through Landgraaf and then Abdissenbosch. They turned left along the primary northerly route, which offered fine bike paths. The entrance to the golf course was just visible down the road where they turned off into the woods. This took them to a road running right along the Dutch-German border.

Preston wanted to see the site from the backside first. While he never was sure what the company was doing digging into the old slag heap from the ancient coal mining days, he saw how a great mound had been reduced from his military days.

They followed the route around to the north side of the complex, and then turned left along the main road. In large cities like this, bike paths were everywhere, and very well maintained with their own traffic lights. The road curved around back south and they could see the large metal warehouses up on the high flat ground. From what he could tell, Preston realized this particular site had been expanded considerably, and reasoned some of the equipment from the sites that they closed had been brought here.

They turned left again and climbed up to follow the street along the fence line. Preston had heard the entire operation throughout the Netherlands had been turned over to Dutch contractors. There was not an American uniform anywhere, just armed Dutch guards and other functionaries.

The administrative offices had been moved, but the main gate was in the same place. There was an old guard sitting there just outside the door of the shack enjoying the breeze. Preston rolled up as close as he dared.

“Hallo!” He waved at the guard.

The man waved back with the typical Dutch friendliness, but said nothing.

“I used to work here!”

The guard perked up and stood, moving to the corner of the gatehouse. His accent was very thick. “That would be a long time ago. The Americans left it to us ten years ago.”

“So I heard. A lot of things have changed.” Preston agreed.

“Ja. Do you know they finally closed the old Schinnen Camp?”

Preston was a little surprised. “I knew they had reduced its status, but I wasn’t aware they were closing it. They had spent so very much money fixing the place up.” He pushed his bike a meter or two closer.

“Ja. DSM is trying to find someone else to rent it. But the other NATO allies would not let the Americans just walk away from this area. So the made them keep a reduce section up at old Bruggen — Javelin Barracks, I think they call it now.” The old man was enjoying the conversation.

“That would be just over on the German side. I remember we used to use a firing range up there in the woods near Herkenbosch.”

The old man nodded. “Ja, I worked here long enough to remember that. Now the few American troops could almost walk there from the airbase. It’s just a few American MPs and some civilians. The Brits offered them some space when they deactivated some units. Pretty soon there won’t be nearly so many NATO folks around. Ah, we don’t worry about no Ruskies. We trade with them now.” The old man laughed heartily.

“Thanks for your time, sir. We have some other places to visit.” Preston waved. The old man seemed just a bit disappointed it was over so soon.

They rode back down the street to the main road and turned left. As they approached the high plateau, Preston noticed there was not a trace of the old mining buildings at the JHQ, formerly called AFCENT HQ. The old AFCENT International School, previously a collection of single-story prefab buildings strung together, was now a huge multi-story building and a sign said AFNORTH.

They had been stopping to take photos all morning, but carefully avoided aiming the cameras at any of the military structures. There was plenty of other interesting shots. That included the ancient cable wheel removed from the top of the mine shaft and mounted as a monument in a small park right beside the main gate.

Angie was curious. “I don’t remember what happened. Did the mines just play out?”

Preston snorted. “No. The Americans and their ultra-cheap strip mining put the Dutch State Mines out of business. With the unions here and all those safety regulations against our terribly unsafe operations and hideous earth scars, we undercut you guys and put thousands of people out of work. Those were bad times in the Benelux.”

She pursed her lips. “So that’s why DSM does no mining at all, just chemicals and stuff.”

“Yeah. They still own all those mine camps and NATO was a good paying renter. Those days are about gone, it seems. We had a huge number of supporting operations all over the Netherlands, not just the POMCUS sites. It was extravagant for a long time — missile sites, life support services, all sorts of secret communications bunkers. I only heard about the places we had people. About all that’s left now are the places directly involved in NATO coordination activity itself.”

Preston pointed out how the original coal train path was now a bike path. They decided to follow it around to Schinnen. It was a long quiet ride through Hoensbroek. At some places the route was simply gone, at other places it was an actual street, but there weren’t that many detours. It wound down around the picturesque village of Terschuren with its beautifully kept ancient stone cottages. They took lots of pictures there.

Eventually they got back on the route which went through some woods, then alongside a sand and gravel operation used by Dutch Rail, very close to the tracks. Then the path turned and required they run alongside the built up highway where it bridged over the rail line, cross over the top, and dove through some foliage. It closely paralleled the railroad. On the other side, the trail continued. By that time, the landscape had been changed so much that the original route disappeared. However, a fine wooded path remained along much of it, and they took what was available.

Part of it was elevated above the surrounding terrain. The last section running along the backside of Schinnen Mine was inaccessible, thickly grown over with trees and shrubs. It had been just barely possible to crawl through it twenty years before, but was impassable altogether now. They turned and followed the main route toward what had been the one gate into the old complex. While a bike path on the left ran along between the fence and train tracks on the south side of the site, they stopped at the gate and gazed into the now abandoned facility.

Except for the original headquarters building and one or two other structures, the place was all new buildings, now vacant. The duck pond was overgrown with weeds, but the ducks were still there. It was actually the first sediment pond from the water treatment system. The water passed from there back under the roadway to a wooded fish pond. Preston decided he’d seen enough and they turned to go back.

Observations Along the Path

Perhaps some of these merit longer comment, but not right now.

Advertisers are too focused on the end product to notice how bad they are doing. All the more so in the coming Network Civilization. Think in terms of time preference: How to people want to spend their time? Facebook is a good clue. It gives people what they want, but it won’t make money because the folks running it don’t understand how to make it pay. The Zynga games are a great way to keep them tied into the time channel, but the monetization is utterly clueless. The advertising which works is that which most entertains. You get people to watch your spiels because they want to, because you offer something worth that time with their attention. Visual spam is not worth their time; entertainment is.

People still go to YouTube and actually look up certain old TV commercials because they are still entertaining. Give them a reason to invest their attention.

Bureaucracies have zero interest in what you think and care about. They have a mandate handed down from some other space entirely, and even when they interview you, it’s all being filtered through that narrow set of things they intend to do. They’ll do those things at the cost of your life, and the bureaucrats can be incredibly spiteful and angry when you dare suggest they don’t understand.

In the current context, about the only good moral thing possible for disaster relief is to do what you can to match demand with availability. Giving people what you know in your greatest understanding of human need is pointless if they have no interest in it. Making people accept and use what you have decided they need is hateful, and qualifies you as a justified target of violence. It’s not your concern whether people are demanding things which will kill them. That’s their decision to make. They’ll understand completely if you simply can’t offer what they really want, but if you demand they corral themselves to your agenda, you deserve their hatred.

Part of what we are seeing with the Petraeus affair is the infighting between the FBI and CIA which has been going on for a very long time. Let’s just say: If it was possible to know Petraeus was having an affair recently, it was well documented before he was ever placed as head of the CIA. You can draw your own conclusions about why the system still chose him for the position, but they knew. Personal immorality is so common at the top levels of our system, you should be frankly surprised when there is no evidence of it. Genuinely moral people are the single greatest threat to the system, and such people are simply not allowed to hold power. They may be put in positions where they can be used, but they will not have any real power.

The current ruling clique have been saving up the firing and shuffling of military brass for over a year. Right now we’re seeing a planned purge. While I do not by any means defend the military system, it’s all too easy to understand the perception among military brass things are ripe for a good military coup. From where they stand, it is hard to justify not taking over a very nasty political system which treats them with the utmost contempt.

Most of what you think you know is a lie.

Warrior as Shepherd

The moral ideal of a warrior is the shepherd.

Continuing from the previous post yesterday, I’m exploring a better way to view things. I tried to portray the moral character of a shepherd in light of romantic relations already. There is a huge overlap, of course, with just about everything else.

Attempts in recent history to use troops for disaster relief have ranged between comical and sick. Without a fundamental cultural bias in favor of actually helping folks, troops are really the worst at this job. They are trained night and day to think of killing people and destroying things, even to the point of mandatory marching chants about the likes of “napalm sticks to kids.” This is not simply dark humor, but is a well-known method of desensitizing civilized folks to uncivilized behavior necessary for modern warfare.

The only reason troops are ever used for emergencies this way is because they are used to jumping into the unknown, and will hit the ground running. Change the objective just a little, and they can open access, move people and stuff, sometimes actually do something good. Their primary virtue here is readiness for moving and doing really difficult stuff, not any actual fitness for the task. They are very much better prepared for a wide range of unexpected challenges.

It should be obvious this is a primary virtue which should be cultivated in everyone who is mission driven from the Spirit Realm. All the more so since we reject the importance of this realm. Our existence here on this plane is a demonstration of why you might be in a hurry to find some other universe, some other reality. Because the mystical mind does not take too seriously the concerns of this realm, we should have no trouble with packing light.

It’s this preparation to live nobly in the most ignoble conditions which distinguishes the warrior in our popular mythology. That precious few of our military actually rise to such heights is why we give out medals. There are medals for simply doing most of what you are supposed to do, and not causing any real trouble. That’s because there is really so very little we can do on this plane of existence to make each other care about what matters. We can offer incentives for external performance, but actual personal morality is simply not that malleable with the tools available. If it’s not already there, your best hope is to persuade someone to fake it, ironically by appealing to their lower motivations. Actually being internally noble can come only as a gift from Above.

We as seekers of truth, who represent something far above this plane of existence, should strive to embrace the essence of the fantasy without the silliness. We are the shepherds of those willing to participate in the upward drawing of truth, until they become shepherds in their own right. It’s the method, the ethic of the warrior ideal, which we adopt. We can afford to see our lives here below consumed in the fire of devotion, and let it end under any circumstances and at any time, because the truth demands it. So it shouldn’t be too much to ask that we endure deprivation with a serious commitment to keep trying until something inside us — connected to the Spirit Realm — knows it’s time to move on to something else.

The one thing I cannot do is make these words anything more than nice thoughts for you.

Unexpected Success

Self-doubt need not be crippling.

Without apology I claim there are processes above the intellect which can be distinguished from emotion, and superior to any formal reasoning. Most people become vaguely aware of it through intuition, a process just outside the conscious intellect by which we arrive at conclusions without formal reasoning. We intuit an answer based on something more subtle, and going with it works well enough we learn some measure of trust for it. In essence, it’s a mental shortcut, an ability to process outside the conscious mind. That’s as clinical as I can get, except to note you can improve your intuition by asserting some effort in learning patterns.

During my military training, I was fully conscious of the whys and wherefores of what they were doing to us. I disagreed with most of it, but understood why they thought it was necessary. The military presupposes the most untalented mass of humanity. Because it teaches to that level, and constructs training based on that assumption, it actively interferes with human talent. Most of your real abilities will be rudely shoved aside. You won’t be permitted to use your talents, and promotion depends on forcing your talents to fit the pattern. The point, of course, is maximum survival in combat, as it were. Everyone has to be taught to act the same so the dummies can keep up, so it’s all dumbed down. It boils down to drills which ensure approximately appropriate responses to surprises.

It works okay, but the long term trend sucks the life out of innovative thinking which keeps things improving. We are stuck with tactics that don’t work so well against our current enemies, but well enough they can get away with trumpeting their successes. Our troops tend to survive okay, but they aren’t beating anybody who doesn’t use the same tactics. We get that much only because our enemies are even less competent. A truly competent enemy would eat our boys alive, and require far less men and resources to do it.

But life remains full of surprises. We continue to see how training is okay, but only if someone in charge has an actual education to go with it. Someone has to absorb the whole purpose, and also have a broad acquaintance to how humans operate. Even with the military now requiring some college for even enlisted troops, we lose it by having such a complete failure of colleges to actually educate, and the military still assuming the lowest common denominator — doing so with a vengeance. The whole point is to make everyone with the same certifications interchangeable, which requires dehumanization. So while such training is not a waste for someone with a full awareness, we could surely do better all the way around.

At one time our education did recognize the necessity of cultivating non-conscious operations. It wasn’t in the same terminology as I use, but you can detect it by how it worked. Well educated men knew there was something some men had which could be caught, but not taught, and they made the most of it. We can reliably expect future generations as a whole to ignore it even more completely, even as a handful rediscover it. I don’t claim to have it, but I’m willing to bet I have a piece of it.

Some fifteen years ago the Internet was new to me. I made all the same idiot mistakes as most people typically do, in terms of interacting with other users. This was aggravated by a very powerful turmoil in my soul as I began shifting from the Western orientation to something long forgotten. I ran through a serious depression, among other things. In other words, my netiquette failures were far worse because of other serious issues. The symptoms were a very slender clue to things much more serious. So a serious improvement will also manifest the same.

Twice in the past few weeks I managed to respond to something far better than I knew at that time. I was confronted with something unexpected, not just in what someone else said, but in the full context. I was agitated, but the emotions didn’t get in the way of a really good intuitive response. I wasn’t fully aware of just how appropriate my response was until much later. You have to understand how dramatic a change this is for me, when blundering and making a fool of myself was previously ubiquitous for me.

This is just a small sample of other things going on in my world right now. It’s far more than mere intuition, as I strive to walk the talk of someone who claims there is a spirit-Spirit communion possible which can steer our behavior far better than mere human logic. On the one hand, I was gripped by this belief, held by it for several years before I actually experienced anything I could point to and say, “There it is.” Well, it’s starting to show up. Now I’m getting a taste of how it can actually work.

Something inside me was utterly certain of this long before I tasted it, and I knew the problems were in me, not the ideas.

We Get Stories

What can you believe?

Steve Quayle and a handful of echoes are telling some wild story about Chinese troops, or at least Chinese forward battle equipment storage, just south of Laredo, Texas. Supposedly a truck driver delivered a load of groceries down that way, and was directed by an armed guide in the passenger seat and escort vehicles. Then another fellow went down and checked where he thought it had to be. If you follow the main highway south by southwest from Laredo, the estimated sixty miles brings you just about to Arroyo Blanco. Between there and Monterey (another sixty plus miles) and scanning quite a bit side to side, there is nothing matching the description. There’s even a video someone made showing a search using Google Earth and the map coordinates supposedly given, but it’s a huge cheap housing addition.

While serving with the US Army in Europe, I visited quite a few combat equipment storage sites. These things are huge, with truly substantial fences, armed guards and attack dogs. There are a couple of small buildings, and acres of huge steel storage buildings. Exposure to weather is a serious threat to idle combat vehicles, most of which are poorly designed and built by the lowest bidder. The soldiers stationed at these places are almost all mechanics and other equipment specialists who do nothing except a constant rotation of various maintenance tasks on everything there. I can’t imagine the Chinese military would be less fastidious, so either you’ll see tons of vehicles in orderly formation or a huge collection of really large buildings. You would see fences strong enough to show up on aerial photography.

In other words, you won’t see them on any mapping site, nor on Google Earth. At the very least, you would expect to see masking, something which obscures what’s really there. For example, I invite you to check Google Maps, and search for Brunssum, The Netherlands. Switch to the satellite view. Right near the center of town where Google puts the marker is a junction between Rimburgsweg (running generally east and west) and Prins Hendricklaan. Just south of this junction is an obscured map feature, labeled “AFNORTH” (Allied Forces Northern Europe). When I was there, it was AFCENT HQ (Allied Forces Central Europe). All the references I can find show it still is, so I’m sure it’s just goofy Google labeling, but I don’t really care. It’s obscured because it’s a NATO installation.

It was originally built as a coal mine camp, as the whole thing is perched on high ground. The waste from the mine (called “slag”) was piled just east of there. Rimburgsweg curves a bit, then runs almost straight east from town. Virtually everything north of that line is high ground, the old “slag heap” — the nickname now used by everyone in that area. The ground under all the greenery slopes steeply upward to a flat table, and is mostly black rubble. Near town, branching north from Rimburgsweg runs Ganzepool, and the first major right turn is Kranenpool. That street runs between a bunch of obscured images, which should obviously represent some sort of “secret” government map feature. You’ll also see a sports field, and it’s no secret this is used by the NATO personnel.

If you were there driving or walking around, you’d see everything without much trouble. Among the sights would be those huge steel buildings behind tightly guarded fences I mentioned earlier. You notice, though, all this obscuring indicates pretty large land space used for this activity. Google can hide the appearance, but not the amount of land space used. By the way, those are NATO installations in Brunssum, but just down the road a ways is a smaller base owned solely by the US in Schinnen, not obscured by Google. It’s another old converted mining installation just west of town, tightly jammed between the A76 Autobahn and a line of trees (shading a creek). Lots of buildings and parked cars. Zoom in close enough and you can see the fenceline. You can see the gated entrance at the west end of Borgerweg, and a small gate shack standing between the curved entrance and exit lanes (the first building next to the gate on the north side is the Military Police building). Even though the aerial shot is old, it’s still much newer than my memories ending in early 1993.

While the aerial view of Mexico isn’t quite as new as the ones for the Netherlands, you should still see something visible from higher altitudes (zoomed out) that would give it away in terms of land use. It’s not there. Steve Quayle is infamous for this crap, and it marks him as a liar. It’s possible he doesn’t actually know any better, but that doesn’t change the effect of his spreading such crazy rumors.

On the other hand, we have the story of Russian troops massing on the border of Georgia near the passes into South Ossetia. Take a quick look at maps and you’ll see how short a run it would be from there to the Iranian border. While the MSM isn’t making much of this, it does come via more or less reputable sources. I doubt China intends to invade the US over the Mexican border, but I’m quite sure Russia would roll quickly down to help Iran due to treaties and trade deals.

Oh, and Russian military planners say they figure an attack on Iran will be sometime this summer.

The Meatgrinder

I still bear a powerful empathy for military people. That was my world for a significant chunk of my life. Despite the very ponderous moral questions regarding involvement in such a hideous enterprise as the US military has become, they are still people and my heart longs to see better things for them.

But someone intends to make them sick or dead.

Baughman began his own investigation into four American soldiers who died in their sleep, in 2008. Baughman writes: “all in their twenties … no signs of suicide or of a multi-drug ‘overdose’ … as claimed by the Inspector General of the VA… All were on the same prescribed drug cocktail, Seroquel (antipsychotic), Paxil (antidepressant) and Klonopin (benzodiazepine).”

Baughman calls on the Surgeon General to embargo the use of all antipsychotics and antidepressants in the military.

Baughman’s initial inquiry suggests as many as 247 soldiers have died from cardiac arrest after ingesting these drugs.

To get the entire picture, you have to understand there are plenty of elites who simply don’t care what happens to the cannon fodder in uniform. There’s always more where that came from, right? The US has a lot of bodies, and increasing numbers are unemployed, so sending them off to illegal wars is a good way to employ them.

A good number of them are driven mad. They are required to do things unconscionable, and do it a lot. Trying to keep their moral apprehensions down is a hard job. On top of that, the job is simply impossible in the first place. And the atmosphere is insanely artificially difficult for reasons of satisfying someone’s sick demand everyone go through what they imagined they went through some years ago, as if it were somehow sacred. A huge portion of military regulations have no justification, and much of that is justified only by evil. Been there; done that and read the history of how those regulations came into being. There is simply no good reason for most of what makes life difficult for the troops.

At some level, this is wholly intentional. It’s not just the random results of “don’t give a damn” policies for corporate profits, but someone sees this all too clearly, and promotes it. There are people actively pleased by these outcomes, or it would have already changed. Instead, it gets steadily worse.

Don’t pay any attention to what they say; look at what they do.

This is all part of the overall plan I posted yesterday to reduce the human population of the world. The troops will murder senselessly thousands just doing their job. Then they’ll come home in a box or so insane they’ll do more killing here. Pumping them full of psychosis inducing chemicals is just another way of cutting down the population.

Blundering Oppression

The most competent people in government service have a tendency to leave that service. What’s left is a vast army of idiots.

You realize, of course, I am attacking the popular social orthodoxy which reveres the military in particular, and government service in general. Oh, those sacred souls bearing the sacrifice of poor pay in order to serve “we the people”! This sentiment is assumed so you aren’t permitted to question it without risking physical abuse from some grouchy old Marine, or other true believers with a similar disposition. How do you dare; what right have you?

Okay, I’m a disabled veteran, and have sacrificed normal functioning of my body parts while wearing that uniform. I paid my dues. And I still say the military is loaded with psychopaths who lead a bunch of nincompoops. Yes, there are good people in uniform, some intelligent ones, but not many wise ones. When they figure out what’s going on, they leave. Were it not this vast army of idiots representing the way government operates as a whole, we would be glad we found a place to keep them all out of our way. The problem is, we have a terribly active and intrusive government, and it’s run by those idiots.

And then you realize the very safety of our national security lies in the hands of these people. Sadly for Lynnae Williams, what few competent people there are in the CIA are those assigned to keeping her quiet. Since it’s too late to prevent her ranting, I’m waiting to see how long she lives. Without knowing where her heart is — Twitter doesn’t lend itself to broad self-disclosure — I’m guessing she is more rattled at the CIA than the government in general. The CIA is loaded with self-important jerks, and her tolerance was just about pushed to the limit during training. What I hope to point out, in case you didn’t already know it, is this is the sort of people who run CIA field operations.

I attribute any #CIA successes to accidents, not #competence. CIA recruited too many incompetent misfits, it can’t be an accident

I suppose those in the upper ranks aren’t quite stupid, but I have to wonder what their real goals are. Protecting US citizens is hardly of any importance to them. If anything, the CIA is probably one of the greatest threats to the average American. But since my college days, CIA recruiters always went after the most incredible jerks who felt they should be ruling the world. And my limited experience with CIA agents is they didn’t get any wiser during their training.

Most of us who see this sort of thing don’t bother to write books about it. Sure, I’ve mentioned this problem in previous posts, but it was only a small part of my mission. It’s just one minor truth which looms large only in certain contexts. The broad general truth of psychopaths running the US government applies all the way down the chain in all directions. Thus, our military is hardly that competent. You never hear of the vast number of debilitating incidents which plague all military operations. You seldom hear about the huge waste that arises from sheer incompetence. If they were honest, the largest single cost in the military budget is loss from bungling. It’s institutionalized at every level; I know because I helped compose budget requests for military operations, and it would never be tolerated in a profit-making business.

How do you describe extravagance which still results in an artificially stressful environment such that stupid mistakes are the norm? It’s madness.

As with virtually every military operation today, by far the majority of what the CIA does is not in pursuit of a sane agenda. I’m pretty sure there is some intelligent sinister purpose in it, but the government continues to absorb some of the worst of humanity. At the same time, the net result of government behavior maintains a high ratio of idiots to choose from. We get just a peek at this through the Twitter activity of people like Lynnae Williams. There is no reason to doubt what she says, and she’s not telling the half of it.

Here’s what I hope you take away from it all: Include this in your calculations and general awareness. Cynicism is a gift from God, but don’t let this slow you down. You still have to pursue your mission. When you remember it’s not about accomplishments, but faithfulness, you don’t feel so overwhelmed by a very concerted effort to overwhelm you with fear and general panic. The real battle is not on the ground, but in your soul.