Seven Days in May(be)

Today's journey will take us from sunshine to dark paranoia.

First, sunshine...

The crown prince and princess of Denmark had their second baby on Saturday and on Sunday there were 21 gun salutes from Kronborg (the castle in Hamlet) to celebrate the birth of the third in line to inherit the crown of a kingdom with an unbroken [more or less] succession going back more than a millennium to Gorm the Old and Harold Bluetooth.

Some clouds -- an odd news item from the Happy Little Kingdom...

A former head of PET, the national security police, told of an case in the 70's where a young fellow in the Danish military drew up a plan for a state coup in Denmark. It was a 40 page detailed plan whose implementation required just a few hundred people. The fellow who drew up the plan was no smarter than that he sent it to the Soviet Embassy and the Danish Communist Party. According to the former head of PET, the incident was taken quite seriously and the planner got 8 months in jail...

The odd thing is that the incident was never known to the public until now. How he was tried and jailed is beyond me -- we don't have secret trials in Denmark, do we?

Now we descend into darkness...

The other day, Moon of Alabama had a disturbing reference to an exercise named "Noble Resolve 07". The exercise is taking place this week in the US and Europe. The exercise takes as its starting point the smuggling into the US of a ten kiloton nuclear which is them brought to explosion in a ship container in a port in Virginia.

One of the agencies participating in the exercise is NORTHCOM, located in Colorado. This entity is the one charged with imposing and enforcing martial law, should that ever be necessary because of a terrorist attack or other serious threat to national security.

Do you remember two years ago a many-starred general mentioned to the press that if the US again was the target of a major terrorist attack, it would be "necessary" to suspend democracy and impose martial law? Who decides this kind of shit? The Decider? I'm just asking!

Finally, the dark paranoia...

If a "few hundred" could take over a country like Denmark, with a population of 5-6 million, how many would be needed for a country of 300 million? Simple arithmetic would say 60 times as many, but I think that is misleading as there is not the same redundancy of institutions. Perhaps ten thousand would be enough? Thirty thousand would perhaps be overkill? Could it be done?

The bulk of US ground forces are overseas, so they would have no say in the matter.

The Air Force is notoriously infiltrated by people who believe that the end of the world and the ushering in of the Kingdom of the Holy Idaho is imminent.

The public would need to be primed to understand that liberals, progressives, gays, atheists, the immigrant fifth column -- you fill in the blanks -- had betrayed us to the terrorists. When the radio hate-mongers and the television bobble heads read their prepared texts, all good, patriots will understand that it is for our own good and for security against a terrible threat to the Very Homeland of Freedom and Democracy! Who, in all decency, could be against that!

No, I don't believe that could happen -- I must have eaten too many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before I went to bed last night!