Army Bob: What really is the No. 1 threat today?

Army Bob: What really is the No. 1 threat today?

by Robert M. Traxler

What is the greatest threat to our nation, to our continued existence? Let’s name a few that are in the media today: fentanyl, climate change and its variants, MAGA Republicans, agricultural chemicals, coal, and fossil fuels (burned in the United States), unfettered immigration, artificial intelligence, Covid-19 and variants, the cancel culture, talk radio, cow flatulence, and whatever can be used to raise funds or get votes.  

It is interesting that the number one concern for my generation is hardly ever mentioned: thermonuclear war. According to the media, the threat of hydrogen bombs, an estimated 13,000 of them worldwide, 26,000,000,000 tons of TNT, and increasing, are not a problem to concern ourselves with, but climate change is scary as hell.  An electromagnetic plus (EMP) event, a mass corona ejection that could fry the electrical grid and more, or a man-made EMP attack, pale next to Covid. The errant Chinese “weather balloon” that loitered over the geographical center of our nation, the best location to detonate an EMP weapon and capable of carrying ten or more weapons, is not a concern for our nation’s existence, not like the cows belching or flatulence. 

We have seen a sea change in the minds of Democrat leaders of cities and states who were proud to call their locations Sanctuary Cities/States. The “Migrants” landed in their areas in what overall are small numbers or a small percentage of the 6,000,000, and they are changing their tune. The old saying is that a progressive is a conservative who has yet to be mugged by reality. 

We toss around the threat/annihilation words with reckless abandon; progressives and conservatives do it. All the “threats” have a bit of truth to them, but in my opinion, all are extremely overstated compared to thermonuclear war or an EMP event. Let me recommend the book One Second After by William R. Forstchen. Yes, it is a book penned by a historian PhD, and yes, it is a work of fiction, but like all good fiction it is well researched and based on science. Also let me recommend reading the 2008 report by a Congressional Commission that assessed the effect of an EMP event on our nation. It is available on the internet. Google 2008 congressional report on an electromagnetic plus event. 

We have freedom of speech, and both the progressives and conservatives should practice it and guard it. We all saw the progressives use the cancel culture to their benefit, and now we are seeing the conservatives preaching that we silence Hamas supporters (political correctness tells us they should be called Palestinian supporters). One should cringe when we hear “we have freedom of speech but…” from either left and right. Banning politically incorrect speech from either side of the political divide is a real threat to our constitutional form of government, to our Republic.

We call all speech that we do not approve of hate or incorrect speech. We only need to go back to Covid-19 and the fact saying that the vaccine did not totally prevent the spread of Covid was incorrect/hate speech.        

Army Bob Traxler

It is past time we get real in our rhetoric. Not recycling your cardboard will not destroy the Earth and the existence of humans, artificial intelligence will not end life. It is past time we stop denying reality and can the hate. Disagreement is normal; excessive rhetoric, firebombs, explosives, rocks, looting, and chemical sprays used to make a political point are not.

We do not need truth police on the progressive or conservative side; speak out peacefully against what you disagree with, but do not ban speech. The supporters of Hamas have the right to protest our nation’s support for Israel and in my opinion have the right to be wrong. Allow them to protest peacefully and allow most Americans to protest in support of Israel.  

It may not be possible to stop the end of the world due to…( fill in the blanks) rhetoric, as it works to divide our nation, fire up voters, get millions of “clicks” and raise a boat load of money. It would be nice if the media just questioned each of the end-of-life scenarios. Fat chance, as the click culture rules.

It is simple to design your news source to receive news that reinforces the view of issues, and of the world you agree with, however, it makes us ignorant and narrow minded to do so. My Opinion.

15 Comments

  1. Misinformation and propagandizing is not only about telling people what or how to think. It is also about convincing them what to fear, what not to fear, and what it is that should be the most frightening.

  2. Mr. Baloney,
    Do we have to have the “most frightening”, most likely is a better question. Two nuclear capable nations (Russia and Israel) currently in wars is a situation we should all be concerned about. President Putin treating nuclear war and President Biden saying we are the closest to a nuclear war than ever before, should be concerning. Thanks for the comment.

    • Agreed. And the unstable mental capacity of those leaders (especially Putin and Biden) should be of immense worry. We need new leadership. Potential terrorists cross the border every day but yet our “president” continues to let them invade. He should be indicted for treason not protecting American citizens.

      • Bass Man,
        Thanks for the comment. Terrorism is indeed very possible, even probable given the world situation.

  3. I don’t believe I posed a question this time. No problem, I have asked quite a few previously (that went unanswered).

    To answer your question, no I do not believe we do, it is all relative. It seems to depend on what day of the week it is, the implied motivation of the moment, and perhaps most importantly what we are not “supposed” to give attention to.

    Anyway, no argument here regarding nuclear warfare. I see no sense in getting into the perceived leadership superiority. What matters to me, is that the specific uncredited and unacknowledged “reports” continue soldiering on with their due diligence.

    Irrational Fear is the bridle, and unreasonable pride is the saddle. These are primary devices our “masters” control us with.

  4. Your positions and assessments live up to your name. Rational and present dangers are a part of this terrible and irrational president and inept administration. Weakness displayed to our allies and enemies is not a good thing, but seems to permeate our government, and especially the physical and mental state of President Biden. His and his family criminality is finally being revealed after being cloaked and aided by the media over the years.
    Now getting closer to the next election the Democrats are nervous as they should be – dementia Joe is weak and getting politically weaker. There is no bench of aspiring candidates unless you count Gruesome Newsom as a challenger of any substance. He turned California into a disaster, I doubt he has a silver tongue enough to convince thinking Americans he won’t do to the U.S. what he has done to California.
    And Kamala is unfit to take over, with such low poll numbers and unlikeable person within her own party.
    Better get the ballot stuffing apparatus in gear if Democrats want to win in 2024!

    • There certainly is no question as to the things you have learned to fear.
      Rational or not I wish you luck in conquering them on a metaphorical level.

      If you don’t mind Bass Man, perhaps you could enlighten us as to the sources you trust to verify this solid and proven knowledge and inherent danger you convey?

  5. Mr. Baloney,
    Please view any of President Biden’s press conferences. His diminished mental acuity is on full display.
    As for the crimes, the indictment of Hunter and Joe’s insistence he’s never conferred with any of his family about their overseas business dealings has been thoroughly destroyed by the facts.
    Biden is a China puppet.

  6. OK, no sources, but we are supposed to take the self-assured word and judgement that Bass Man’s fears are infallible.

    Is he a trained and experienced evaluator of the functional parameters of “mental acuity,” or any medical deficit or psychological capability for that matter? If not, why should we give this righteous judgment so much weight? If it is not actually his credible opinion, where did it come from?

    “The crimes” is a bit vague in order to sway my opinion and understanding. I would appreciate legitimate sources for what he writes and concludes.

    As far as criminal activity, we could get into the actual ongoing legal proceedings regarding the attempted self coup. And the efforts to interfere with and overthrow an election, the outright tax evasion, and other significant alleged criminal offenses of the perceived former savior of this nation. Unfortunately, I suspect this would be a futile and overly contentious endeavor at this time. I believe it best to continue allowing the experienced experts to continue on the path of justice. It has worked out rather well so far.

    I understand that “Biden is a China puppet” may be a commonly repeated phrase in certain social media circles. The thing is, I am not aware of any actual provable reason or evidence to this assertion.

    I’ll end by repeating myself, Where Do You Get Your Information From, Sir?

  7. Mr. Baloney,
    I suspect you have electronic devices such as a TV? If so, you may want to turn it on and view the obvious and the “facts” as reported.
    Or do you only view CNN?

    • Thank you for continuing the dialog, It is helpful.  I truly appreciate the responses and in particular the way it helps in understanding the viewpoint. 

      Thanks for the extremely broad suggestion.  However, I’m not looking for a recommendation.  My motivation is actually understanding why you hold these opinions and the basis of what you consider factual.

      I can assure you that I am not a fan of CNN or any cable news network, I don’t subscribe to cable TV.  Although, this comment leads me to believe that you are at least somewhat aware that opinion based “news” is ripe with flaws.  

      I would like to believe that you are aware of the bias due to the advertisers, ownership motivations, and most importantly the personality opinions.  It seems even more apparent that the specific captive audience continues to trust this source because more often than not they are being told what they want to hear. 

      This brings us to a crucial point Sir.  Do you think it is possible that your preferred source is doing these exact same things, only from an opposing angle?  Or, are your sources only reporting “just the facts”, no right-wing bias, no alarmist appeals to emotion, no talking head opinions?   I’m honestly skeptical, especially when attempts at revealing the basis of an argument are avoided.

      It could be helpful and extremely eye opening to research the concepts of information silos, and filter bubbles.  This could shed some light on what we are actually up against and the way that reality is distorted in our vast media landscape.

      Ironically, the same way you assume I might be a fake news CNN viewing numb-skull.  I can’t help but wonder if you get your information from  a meme-spewing, social media propagated, hate group.  I would like to be wrong, unfortunately you don’t seem to be able to provide any evidence either way.

  8. Mr. Baloney,
    Thank you for your epiphany and term paper responses… they are most enlightening!
    The proof I provide about Joey’s diminished physical and mental capacities is watching him walk and stumble with an old man’s gait and poor balance (of which I have been accused of to some degree in my advancing age) However, he stumbles quite frequently and even up stairs! This is indicative of dementia. This is observational, not medical assessment. I would presume his medical and mental acuity records are not released to the public because of the results. I suspect you’ve even viewed his stumbles, as has most of America. If there are medical experts in the reading audience of TB, please comment if you think my observations (and most Americans) are wrong.

    As for his mental acuity, it is obvious with long pauses in the middle of a sentence and then his blurting out “ah, hmm, anyway” and not completing his thought is quite embarrassing for him and the country. Nobody wants their president to resemble an imbecile as it projects weakness to our allies and enemies. He falls asleep at world conferences and had a bathroom episode at the Vatican a year or two ago. The Secret Service commented to a Vatican official he had to change his trousers!

    You can say all you want about our former president but he was physically and mentally sharp in office. You may not have like his initiatives and policies, but he was a sound president.

    There will be no debates if Joe is still the candidate for the Democrats. He cannot process and disseminate information to debate. He will be a basement dweller.

    His son Hunter is now in legal trouble with tax evasion and firearms charges. Please don’t debate these facts unless you live in a cave and don’t have news resources, which I doubt because you write much better than out president speaks.

    • The thing is Bass Man, I DO NOT Support Biden. This may be difficult to grasp for folks entirely absorbed in an A vs B, T or F, zero sum, team sport, sore looser mindset.

      I believe both of the over the hill, caucasian males of the current and former administrations have been divisive, destructive, regressive, stale, and obviously detrimental to the cohesion of the fabric of our nation.

      Do I have less faith in one over the other? Yes, and it is disgraceful that this is the current elective standard. I blame the mechanisms of the two parties(gangs), mostly I fault the ignorant citizenry.

      We do not have a king, emperor, “national CEO”, or whatever analogy the simple minded, dismissive folks want to imagine. It is a falacy, a wholly made up mythology.

      I realize it is simpler, and may even feel good, to pretend that “all we need is the right single individual in the office of the presider, and everything will be A-OK”. It just is not reality.

      A lot of folks like to use phrases, regarding “going back to a specific country”, as an argumentative. I prefer the statement, “Why y’all acting like we never had a war against King George? We won the revolution folks”. It is as if very few understand what we did, or how our government actually functions?

      You are allowing your chosen sources of continued indoctrination to reinforce mythological thinking, and pretending it is factual “news”.

      One ought to ask themselves how V Putin and X Jinping get “re-elected” so much? Aside from the blatant corruption, it is straight ignorance of the populace. We are not far off from this potential outcome. If it comes to fruition, I figure we deserve it.

  9. Proud Liberal

    Dear GOP: You’ll Never Wash the Stink of Trump Off You or Your Party. Never.
    At least never in the lifetime of anybody around today. Trump’s stink is a tragic part of American history that will last generations…
    From Thom Hartmann:
    Dear Republicans,
    After the corruption of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations crashed the world economy, kicking off the Republican Great Depression in 1929, it took your party decades to rid itself of the stink.
    After Nixon extended the Vietnam War to get himself re-elected, unnecessarily killing more than 20,000 American soldiers and a million Vietnamese civilians, and then got busted for Watergate and the bribes he solicited in the White House, it took the you almost a generation to rid yourselves of the stink.
    But you’ll never rid yourself of the stink of Donald Trump. At least never in the lifetime of anybody around today. Trump’s stench is a tragic part of American history that will last generations.
    The entire world knows of his whipping up a crowd of thousands to try to assassinate the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House.
    Trump’s minions urinated on the carpets in the hallowed halls of Congress, smeared feces on the walls, damaged priceless paintings from the founding era of our country, and murdered police officers protecting our nation’s Capitol. That stink will never fade, no matter how often his allies try to rewrite history, blur faces, or tell stories about bizarre “deep state” conspiracies.
    Did you think Americans would forget the stink of the 30,000-plus documented lies he told America and the world while he was president? Or the lies he routinely spouts every time he speaks in public, so frequent now that even Fox “News” has to correct the facts when covering him?
    How about the reek of his dictator-like pronouncements that he will destroy the American Civil Service and fill our government with corrupt toadies, then imprison his political enemies and send the military into the streets like Maduro has done in Venezuela and tinpot dictators do all across the world?
    Do you really believe that we would forget the stink of his sucking up to murderous dictators like Putin, MBS, and Kim? Now that effluvium is being smeared all over Republican politicians, one after another, as they follow Trump’s orders — which he no doubt received from Putin — to abandon Ukraine.
    You are cowards, all. Covered in your wretched, cowardly, unpatriotic stink.
    This is the man who tried to blackmail a democratic ally into manufacturing dirt on his political opponent, withholding aid to Ukraine in the face of Russian attacks. The stink of that crime was so heinous he was impeached for it.
    What about the stink Trump created when he referred to mostly-Black nations as “shithole countries” and our veterans who’d died in war as “suckers” and “losers”? When he told General Mark Milley he didn’t want to again share the stage with an injured veteran because such heroes don’t “look good”?
    Or when, at the height of the pandemic in April 2020, Trump ordered people back to work and began to ridicule wearing masks, leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths (according to his own science advisors: the British journal Lancet put the number at around a half million)?
    At that time, most Covid deaths were in Blue states (CT, NY, WA, NJ) and Trump agreed with Jared that they could politically benefit by blaming the deaths on Democratic governors. An “effective political strategy” they called this decision redolent with the stink of mass death.
    That same son-in-law, by the way, who Trump helped hustle $2 billion from the Saudis in exchange, apparently, for downplaying the murder of a Washington Post journalist and looking the other way at how they oppress women. Do you think we failed to notice the reek of nepotism and corruption?
    Speaking of women, do you really believe that stink of your support of a man credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by over 20 women, including one as young as 13, would just go away? Even after he was found by a court of law to have raped the first woman whose case finally made it through the courts?
    As average working Americans struggle to pay their taxes, Trump pushed through an odious $2 trillion tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies, creating the largest budget deficit by any president in the history of the nation. Do you think America will forget?
    Or the stink of his multiple business frauds? He was convicted and forced to pay millions in restitution to victims of his Trump University fraud; they shut down his phony New York charity; now he’s been found by a New York court to have committed bank, tax, and insurance fraud: they’re just trying to figure out how big the stink is so they can quantify it as a fine.
    How about the overwhelming stench of tearing babies from their mothers’ arms at the border and then trafficking them into phony “Christian adoption” services that then vanished, leaving over 1000 grieving families still not knowing the whereabouts of their little girls and boys to this day?
    Or the stink from the naked campaign lies he blithely told to get votes, promising a new national health care system, a revitalization of America’s infrastructure, or his claims that he supported organized labor at the same time his appointees to the Department of Labor were working to block unionization efforts across the nation?
    Even worse, this adulterer — who had affairs outside his marriage with every one of his three wives and never goes to church but still claimed to be a Christian — told sincerely religious people he was their champion. Not noticing the sulfurous smell that surrounds Trump, many believed him and still do. In actual fact, he was only championing the hypocritical multimillionaire TV preachers who shared their hustle with him: he supported their violations of tax law in exchange for their endorsement from the pulpit.
    Then he tried to overthrow an election he knew he lost by 7 million votes, and is today threatening to try it again. The whole world is aghast at the stink of that tinpot dictator effort, and terrified that he may succeed the next time.
    Germans still struggle with the stink of a leader who referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and promised he was going to “root them out.” Who attacked the press because they told the truth about him. Who played on and amplified people’s fear of “the other.” You will, too, for generations after Trump himself has shuffled off this mortal coil.
    Pathetically, you Republican members of Congress have now smeared yourselves with the slime that has surrounded Donald Trump his entire criminal life. Have you noticed how many of your colleagues are fleeing? Do you really think you can ever wash off yourself the reek of your association with treason, an attempt to betray and overthrow America, even worse than what Benedict Arnold tried?
    Seriously, Republicans, do you not think America can smell what’s going on? Trump bragging that he ended women’s rights to bodily autonomy? His promotion of guns and assault weapons because the racist nutcases who follow him think they’re going to be soldiers in a coming civil war? His refusal to do anything about the climate change that is now killing Americans every day?
    America has had a few truly awful presidents. Andrew Jackson “The Indian Killer.” Andrew Johnson, who tried to undo Lincoln’s legacy. Calvin Coolidge and Teapot Dome. Richard Nixon’s criminality, Ronald Reagan’s commitment to destroy America’s middle class, George W. Bush lying us into two wars as part of his 2004 re-election strategy.
    But none stink as bad as this miserable cartoon of a man, with his bizarre orange spray-tan, absurd comb-over, and compensatory phallic-length red ties.
    America is not going to forget, and many Americans will never forgive.
    You will never wash the stink of Donald Trump off yourselves or your party. Never.”

    And there you go.

  10. Quoting a Marxist who hates this country.. that is rich
    So you’re happy with everything dementia Joe has done for and to our country the past 3 years? If yes, you are the problem and crackpots like you voting Marxist.

    And Thom Hartmann is the the epitome of off the rails commentator. His historical compass is quite off kilter as what he has ascribed to Republicans is mostly Democrat created BS. Whatever the Democrats cry about is usually from their own creation and fault.

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