I have changed a sentence in the opening paragraph: "My mouth is your duty, and you have to fill it." I suddenly pictured the way a bunch of infantry E-4 types would read that sentence, sitting around in the barracks, and what they would say in response.
New infantry-proofed version: "My stomach is your duty, and you have to fill it."
Having been a young infantry officer in the USMC I see your concern with the sentence. Though the humor glands would have been exercised to the fullest extent. E3’s and E4’s are incredibly sneaky smart. What would Aristotle’s take on all this “stripping away” be? One could guess he had a view and it wasn’t that four to five truncated generations of dependency was a good idea. Everytime someone talks about 41 million mouths to feed, we see that Lincoln failed to free the slaves. We have a plantation system in place that is every bit as ugly as the one we fought a four year bloody civil war to eradicate…
There is nothing in the world like the wisdom of a Lance Corporal especially when that wisdom is skewered by a Corporal or Sargent, with chow hall humor. I was so lucky to be around those Marines and so privileged to “lead” them though not sure who was doing the leading!
I grew up with a dad who was a mustang admiral. I was surrounded by lots of military folks; I like to call it "military humor". I can spot it a mile away.
I also learned how truly special the Marines are, especially Marine officers.
E. Grogan, wow! I think we can count on one hand the number of Admirals that were/are mustangs. Your father sounds like quite something, thank goodness for mustangs and Limited Duty Officers! You are right on our brand of humor! It is unique. As mentioned, I was very very lucky to serve as an Infantry Officer and ergo serve my nation and live up to the that special trust and confidence that you and the American people bestowed upon via my commission. Thank you for noticing! Semper FI !
WOW, your post brought tears to my eyes! First of all, a very deep, heartfelt THANK YOU for your service to our amazing country!
Yes, my dad was quite something. He grew up under dire poverty, was born in 1920 to a single mom, was literally starving to death at age 12 by the time Roosevelt opened CCC camps for kids so they could be fed. I have a picture of him with his mom when she dropped him off at the camp. He worked hard and joined up with the navy only hours after Pearl Harbor happened. He served on Admiral Nimitz's personal staff. After the war, he was a journalist for L.A. Times and eventually opened up his own Public Relations firm - not to tell lies but to get the truth out to the public. He was wildly successful, stayed in Navy as a reserve and eventually became mustang admiral. He met Ronald Reagan before he became gov of Calif, at a club for Irish men called The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick - it was to help each other get jobs, grow their businesses and that kind of networking. When Reagan ran for president, my dad was on the committee to help get him elected and when Reagan became president, my dad became one of his top advisors. My mom fell in love with him because she absolutely knew he was going to be a huge success as a winner - and also she loved his rakish Irish humor along with that rakish Irish grin and charm so many Irish men have. He died 22 yrs ago and I still miss him very, very much. He wasn't perfect and he sure had his faults but he was one in a million and an amazing man. I still feel him having my back and putting his hand on my shoulder once in awhile. Thank you so much for appreciating my dad.
Kept hearing 'I have no mouth and I must scream' for some reason when I read that. And no, I don't think it's 100 proof but it's at least 90, lol. That what I get for growing up in a navy town, lolol.
Sadly Chris, you cannot undo the damage you have done…the image has become indelible in our infantile brains…(unfortunately, in all honesty, I must include myself in that particular cohort)
The solution to this one is material. And then the spiritual shall follow, because they will be in alignment again toward Homo Sapiens - and not Homo Domesticus, farmed by Homo Umbrans:
In my opinion, the problem is when we leave the military welfare benefit system we don't become just citizens again. We get tons of Big Gubmint shit that advantages us.
That seems reasonable to me. You take a risk by enlisting. Even if you never deploy the possibility is always there and you lose a lot of control over your life and many Army skills are non-transferable to civilian life. You should be compensated for those things. All I’m saying is that the army needs the state as much as the state needs the army.
I understand. Just saying, at the end of the day the soldiers need the government cheese too. That they are willing to lose their lives for validation from the state is a separate issue.
My two sons in the Army would disagree. They have several hundred dollars deducted from their pay each month as a food charge (and they're not paid much to begin with). Also, they don't have mess halls easily accessible that are open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My sons end up paying for and making their own meals most of the time (they do have kitchens in their "rooms"). When I was in the Army (87-90) we had a mess hall at every Battalion that was open for three meals a day, mon -Fri (one or two mess halls open per Brigade on weekends. I did not have money deducted from my paycheck).
Are your sons enlisted or officers? When I was in the Army (72-75), enlisted ate for free and officers paid cash for meals. This was written into law in 1962 (37 U.S. Code § 402), but was practiced long before that – Continental Army officers paid cash for their meals when in garrison and ate for free when on campaign.
They are enlisted. It's a bit more complicated now. They get a BAS (Basic Allowance for Subsistence) of a little over $450/month. However, if they have a DFac (Dining Facility) on base then that allowance is taken out of their check on the assumption they are using the DFac. At JBLM the DFacs are few and far between so they have to travel to get from their duty station to the DFac. They said the lines are long and slow, so they never have time to get their meal and eat before being back to work. Also, on weekends not all Dfacs are open. My youngest is in Korea now. They don't have a Dfac, so gets the BAS.
What a ridiculous statement. They work for room and a board. A private in the US army earns about $21,000 a year. He/she gets three meals a day and a barracks bunk.
New Mexican politics has been destroying economic opportunity and creating dependency. The state is in a sad third world position, intentionally. Restricting productive energy resources from coal and oil has been a suicidal pact since this Guv took office. She is silver spoon inheritor political family stand in for globalists who want this country to fail. NM, the Land of Enchantment, is drowning in disenchantment and despair thanks to despicable leadership and a cultivated culture of despair and hopeless mentality. As a former resident, it is disheartening but likely reflective of other parts of this country.
Everyone owes themselves the opportunity to spend a few days in Albuquerque to observe. It may not be the end phase of a dead civilization, but it’s pretty close. And it’s been going that way for decades. It’s an truly object lesson for Los Angeles.
Many trust fund and other migratory folks , whose leftist "wisdom" has prevailed in the once beautiful state of NM, particularly Santa Fe, have turned it into a third world environment.
Isn’t the point of these programs to enable dependency upon government and the politicians and party that support this dependency? Thus perpetuating their position of power? Duh!
But the department of the Interior has laws about feeding the wildlife in National Parks. You don't want to get those ground squirrels addicted to Cheetos. People buying Cheetos with SNAP benefits, that is encouraged, but fines for feeding wildlife in a national park can range from $100 to $5,000 or more, with potential jail time of up to six months for serious offenses. The exact amount depends on the park and the specific violation, but it is considered a federal offense with significant penalties designed to protect both wildlife and people.
I accidentally spilled a fair amount hot chocolate mix in a campground at North Cascades National Park, roughly five years ago, and I still think about the chipmunk who instantly slammed into that pile like a cocaine addict. Every last grain.
I had to fight off a fat marmot at lower Saddle Camp in the Grand Teton National park when i dropped some trail mix. I had hauled it up nearly 6,000 feet (we did an ascent of the Grand the next day), and I needed every calorie. Had i lost them I would have seriously considered having filet of marmot instead.
My point being is that nothing in this world is free, and most people in reality know this, especially anyone with a job, but the Dems cater to the somethin for nothin crowd, and chum the water with that sentiment with SNAP and other eternal goodies.
I honestly believe that Obamacare would have had even more initial popular support if Obama said, "Not only can you keep your doctor, but he has to pay you a $1,000 every time you do! And it is still free!"
This disqualifies you from ever holding military rank.
Brass: "Colonel Bray, we need you to organize an urban assault on armed foreign adversaries holed up in our city parks. It may be a siege situation and there are likely going to be civilian casualties."
Colonel Bray: "But, um, what about the squirrels? We can't just leave them to starve or eat the droppings from MREs. The thought is ghastly. [mumbling about some event 5 years ago] No squirrel left behind..."
And the irony of it all is that those laws are there to keep the animals independent and not reliant on hand outs, yet when it comes to humans however.....
I often refer to my pet dog. He's a lovable guy. And he is entirely dependent on us. If he's hungry, he comes to us to be fed. He has no concept of finding his own food.
Socialism is like that. If you are a socialist, you are somebody's pet dog.
They tell me I need to set aside at least two million in a trust for my special needs adult son, who cannot live unaided or unmonitored. In addition to that, he’s already receiving cash benefits equal to half my SS check, plus half his mom’s, plus Medicaid and a raft of programs that come with it, to the tune of tens of thousands per year. I’d chuck all that in a heartbeat for a real community. Imo, the love and concern of the people who know him is his only hope when we die: money or no money, programs or no programs. I know a lot more about how this stuff works than I wish I did, and about the so-called workers who infest the bureaucracies that maintain it.
Yes I understand as I have a 100% legitimately disabled adult daughter, who subsists fairly well with the help of multiple family members. She gets a decent disability check but it is 98% used just for her rent payment.
Narratives don't have to make sense to get some people to chant them, but I feel that the logic has devolved from questionable to nonsensical to contradictory. I don't know if this is a sign of desperation on the part of the globalists, or just a gleeful desire to Mind F with people to the maximum extent.
The original idea (Rome) of welfare was to avoid food riots and mobs being for hire to whomever provided food and coin.
The moral sentiment that a society able to produce food, clothing and shelter for everyone also ought to do so even for those individuals unable to provide for themselves (in no small part based on the very true realisation that "everyone is against welfare until they need it themselves").
Lengthy, best bring a snack:
However, what has happened and not just in the USA is that from ca the 1970s to present, welfare has de facto become UBI and as such a human right rather than a privilege you have to qualify for.
Not just conceptually but also in practice.
(I'm going to ignore the other well-known welfare-traps and mention something not often discussed or even thought about)
I doubt there's any plan behind it. Instead, consider this: 120 years ago, you didn't need a phone or a car, not even to work if you were of the proletariat or lower classes - there were lots of manual, heavy and dangerous and disgustingly underpaid jobs to do to scrape by another day.
Enter the phone, the radio, the newspaper, the car, commuting, computers, mobile phones, internet, smartphones - now, even for what few manual jobs remain (I think it's something like 1/20 of what it was 120 years ago) you need all that to file your application or to get a reply.
And since a large part of the idea of welfare is that it is temporary while you try to get a new job, all those things had to be included in the amount.
The same goes for basic COL. Water, heating/electricity, basic maintenance - not just standards and legal stuff has changed but materials, placement, and so on and they too serve to drive up the COL.
That welfare is now a problem, not just costs-wise but also culture- and psychological impact-wise as you mention is beyond debating. It is as obvious as my beard (backwoods-wildman style) is starting to go grey. Or gray, even.
But the problem is less the cherry-picked recipients chosen depending on the political stance of the one doing the picking, and more the entire economic structure of modern Western society. There aren't enough low-but-enough-to-live-on income jobs. There are barely any such jobs at all, and most of them are filled by endlessly replaced migrants in some government-subsidised project or other. The tax-structure basically forces both parents to work full time ("working poor" as an American author described it in the 1990s) and hand their kids over to the state for the better part of the day. Pricing structure followed the wave of women entering the labour market in the 1970s, again making double incomes a necessity.
People no longer have careers but are treated as meat-robots that can be replaced by any other human and "working your way up" was dead in the 1980s already; instead you either have the right degree from the right uni where you got to know the right people, or you're stuck at the bottom for the rest of your life.
(A historical parallel is the military: in many places, the best a commoner or working class man could achieve was the rank of sergeant or eq. while the middle and upper class men started out as lieutentant or similar - while WW1 seemed to put and end to that stupididty, it has long since returned with a vengeance in the political and corporate sectors, with entirely foreseeable results.)
Where's my point in this?
That the options are UBI, eventually, or the kind of class society that fomented the French and Russian revolutions. UBI leads straight to Idiocracy and Brave New World (is my feeling), while revolution means you eventually wind up back where you started.
I like that notion. I think it reasonable to assume those who are less motivated to vote are also the least knowledgeable about what they're voting for (which is why the "Get out the vote!" campaigns are a blight). And if they can be bought off with free stuff, better that they not be able to vote for whoever's promising more free stuff.
Many nations have had such bars to clear to get franchise - it didn't provide better voters nor better politicians, nor did it prevent buying the voter-base or corporations using the state for never repaid bailouts (i.e. corporate welfare).
I think it is high time to try the Heinlein-option: Service guarantees franchise and eligibility for holding office.
I’d settle for electing the House as we do now (popular vote) and electing the Senate based on tax dollars paid (by individuals, not corporations). The more you pay in taxes, the more votes you get.
I used to point to the Fall of the Wall in '89 when I was teaching, and tell my students that in 1985, the consensus among experts and researchers, economists and politicians of all -ism was that the Col War divide would last for several generations to come, at the very least until 2050.
UBI or whatever it'll be called is I think unavoidble. Our technology simply makes most of us surplus to the needs of society as a whole and what is making us spiritually sick is too much leisure and too much safety (as per that old experiment "mice paradise").
We, not just Western civilisation but as a species, need a new frontier to strive towards, I think.
Agreed. The “mice paradise” experiment completely changed my worldview long ago. We do need to be challenged to mature and live a reasonably satisfying lives. But challenge is now considered a violation of one’s rights and political disagreement is grounds for murder.
Our new frontier might be striving to rebuild of the guardrails of our old values, the ones that used to work until a certain cohort of narcissistic opportunists arrived and made it their objective to relieve us of our burdensome commonsense and pride in personal responsibility. So long as we can vote them into their place at the money river, everything will be fine. Until it isn’t.
> Our technology simply makes most of us surplus to the needs of society as a whole
I'll dissent from this point.
Technology is centrally controlled by organized clusters with financial incentives to organize work in ways that protect their interests. Everything else is "externalities," which, when they yield problems, well, that's later, right? And external.
Those interests in play reflect the technological pyramid. And that pyramid--being utterly financialized--has zero financial incentive to put citizen involvement and skill building and cooperation ahead of profit. It's entirely rational in its own way...but it's producing "externalities" that are ghastly, and dangerous to human potential.
ThinkBit: There is no reason that community farms and gardens could not have been established in major cities, as part of USDA's mission, and "welfare recipients" required to do service in them X amount of hours per Y units of time. The range and depth of tasks involved in going "off grid" with food production is broad, complex, and has something to interest pretty much everybody. It's not just dirtwork.
Plus this work builds a sense of competence and community like no other civic work I ever witnessed or participated in. In the '90s and '00s I knew people who built these food production options among prisoners, among former prisoners, in slums, in schools, on military bases, etc., and while their programs could get occasionally basic funding (say $12k a year for a part time trained coordinator) for a pilot study, that always sunsetted in a few years.
So why did we instead have this system where increasingly dependent people get government chits to buy massively processed and packaged goyslop from grocers at high markup and little nutrition?
Simple: food programs are basically welfare for Big Chow. Perhaps necessarily so. But let's not digress there at the moment.
I can't append here the infograph from 2016 showing what portion of the consumer food dollar goes to farmers (under 8 cents on the dollar at that time). The rest goes to processing, packaging, transportation, advertising, and even financing and insuring the operations.
I'll agree we need UBI, but I define that as Universal Basic Involvement. Financialization/Reaganismo/neocon globo intensified the removal from daily endeavor all of the productive interaction that people desperately need to feel whole, connected, and happy.
In the earliest years of "subscription farming"/"Community Supported Agriculture"--an approach imported from Japan, in which one pays a subscription to a producer and gets a share in whatever is produced each week or two--there was an enormous amount of confusion engendered by, say, the fact that your box this week might be all kale and potatoes, and in two weeks, more potatoes and squashes. "What do I do with all this kale!?!?" The griping would give way to excitement if there was someone on hand--prepared to respond--to skill up the customers in "what to do with all this kale." The next season, some of those customers could be called upon to teach.
This engendered joy--and academic papers, and grant proposals (many of them quite small, going to local people). But then it was all mostly abandoned in favor of much more lucrative pursuits that intensified the alienation and dependency. Or, Permastate being what it is, the jobs that formerly were held by innovators got occupied by Lifers.
Remember how people screeched when DJT suggested a similar "food box" approach for "food programs"? Once upon a time Dems and Progs considered this the ultimate in Sustainable Urban Agriculture...oh, but not if Orange Man suggests it.
I fear I'm not framing or putting this well, Rik; I'm in from working on my truck in the rain, a success, but now I'm showered and full of hot coffee and lunch...and a bit on the comfyweary side. So will stop here. I'm just trying to add to the idea of what lies outside the "mouse utopia"--it was "u-topos," no place. Not paradise. I'm skeptical of what conclusions can be drawn from a rodent torture study, and applied to humans...but then I'm very cranky about the "social" "sciences" and their "research" "methods" in general. An attitude I developed even before my own doctoral work.
I've seen so many things that work at the human level...that never got the support they deserved. We have no national program of small scale technology development and transfer. Such ones as we had were either taken over by Progs, or others. Watching the grassroots, genuinely diverse, Proggy axis get taken over by limousine liberals has been discouraging. The original Progressives were populist Wisconsinites sick to death of what the Republican Party (also a Wisconsin invention--lil schoolhouse in Ripon and all) had become by the early 1900s.
I don't think UBI is a good idea - I think it is unavoidable and will be implemented for an increasing percentage of the population in any Western nation, simply as an effect of technology and economism.
Not discouting there aren't people with Grand Plans too, but generally speaking technology is what drives societal change in no specific direction planned out beforehand.
Yes, some kind of "Victory gardens" sounds like a good idea on paper but even without corpos sucking the blood of the state or pearl-clutching do-gooders in the civil services, it runs into the problem of race/culture and the mental make-up of the individual being put there (a volunteer-scheme might have greater odds).
And here we went /from/ those kinds of programs (pre-1940s) because they didn't work; they always without fail became exploited as a re-invention of thralldom (otherwise banned since the 1200s): the statare as they were called became used as free labour by the state and by those with the right connections, paid only in room and board and the status of statare became something you inherited. You were locked-in from birth.
That was in Sweden when it was all Swedish, so you can imagine (or look at the US prison-capitalists) how it works out with races without the Nordic Protestant work-ethic.
I have no good answer how to fix it beyond a hard cap per person/household (don't ask me how to calculate it given how modern "families" look like), and a basic tax-free level of income, whatever is reasonable. Idea being to get back to one-income families being the norm, and family being mother-father-children.
> Yes, some kind of "Victory gardens" sounds like a good idea on paper but even without corpos sucking the blood of the state or pearl-clutching do-gooders in the civil services, it runs into the problem of race/culture and the mental make-up of the individual being put there (a volunteer-scheme might have greater odds).
It wasn't "victory gardens" but something much older.
Volunteer was exactly how the best of those programs worked IME. Especially in the big cities with all-black neighborhoods.
The missing piece was small funding to pay for a part-time coordinator, and to support them with mentoring, problem solving, etc.. Not enough money that someone would make it their career focus. Enough to constitute a sort of honorarium for people doing the work as a civic offering (already having an established path in life--for instance in black Chicago a number of the coordinators I knew were retired teachers and other civil servants).
I don't think there are easy answers. My point was just that there was a lot of promise in some of these models, but for various reasons they were abandoned.
One of the fiercest arguments I had with a long-ago ex was on your very point about "reinvention of thralldom." My point came directly out of the Swedish experience, including how that played out in the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as cultural memory of the before time. In my father's family, this "thralldom" issue was discussed as it related to why Communism got a foothold in Finland in the early 1900s, but let's not digress there.
On the question of race, culture, and work-ethic, I concur with what I think is your overall point. In the urban ag projects I note, these differences were the hardest to wrangle (in my experience) in places where there was a huge/robust pre-existing cadre of Permastate Lifers, or people aspiring to that, who took on "leadership" roles. These people would adopt whatever philosophies the local university or government sinecure-dispensers required for participation, because their ultimate goal was to turn the volunteerism experience into a resume item in seeking a Permastate sinecure. Those philosophies were designed to enable victimization and complaining, not demand work ethic and participation. So if a conflict arose that needed strong leadership to resolve, and the conflict was met with Kumbaya-singing, it wouldn't get resolved. "These are the rules, you must follow them to play." Obviously that's the opposite of the PC/DEI formula. But since even failed projects can be put on the career-climbing-Permastate resume, the projects' success could take back seat to that other motive. Taking a hard line to protect a volunteer project didn't have the potential payoff (and much possibility of cost) of GoodThink.
The worst participants I worked with on that front were Operation Exodus Russian jews from the 1990s (the university city where I lived at the time had a huge incursion of these). My goodness, the sense of entitlement they had, and their constant ginning up of contention and trying to find loopholes, gain advantage, and undercut others. Quite a lesson. The program coordinators across the city tore their hair out over them. Since one was not allowed to discuss what was at issue (their palpable and even outright expressed jewish hostility to the local Scandi/Prot culture) without being called HITLARRRR or whatever, people would retreat from participation.
I see no path to fixing any of this that doesn't include removing from participation those incapable of participating. But we don't "go there" anymore.
Also, my sense is that we now have too many people who have zero experience of getting food from anywhere but the grocery store, paid for by Uncle Sugar. In the '80s to even '00s, there were still a good number of older people who remembered the self-sustaining culture, and aspired to restore parts of that, like the famiy garden. Even in cities.
By now we have human social units that are three, four, five, or more generations into total dependency and consumerism. (Bearing in mind that in some places, a generation is every 12 to 15 years.) The cultural memory of anything else is utterly gone. Lethe has drowned Mnemosyne.
In a similar vein, when NPR does their little bit thanking their sponsors, I keep hearing this blurb about one of them: “RWJF is a leading national philanthropy paving the way, together, to a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.” And how exactly is that going to work? I suppose one could argue that health is a right in the same way life is, in that no one should be forcibly depriving you of either your life or your health. But that’s not equivalent to failing to provide you with (or subsidize your) healthcare.
The only way health (or by extension, healthcare) is a right is if we reinstitute the draft and force conscripts to attend medical school and serve as doctors for their life’s work. How else do we fulfill the supposed obligation to provide health to all?
The only difference between this system and historical cotton plantations is the color of some of the workers.
It's a right, and with every right comes a responsibility. The problem is that the resulting responsibilities used to be incumbent upon those with rights, not upon government handout agencies and taxpayers.
Yes. And I can't tell you how many I've seen who get a job, no longer qualify for benefits, and start paying various large fees/costs now that they are longer covered by the state. Next, they find their job no longer is enough to make ends meet; especially if ongoing health care costs are involved. Often, those in this situation try to get another job, or figure out how to re-qualify. Stifles those trying to become more independent. But so many more are like the lady that was interviewed, it's just how life is for them, so any deprivation or limit or requirement is seen as a danger to the stability of that arrangement.
This isn't even hard; If ya need food, you can select from pasta with or without meat sauce (we got the vegetarians covered) and salad, EVERY DAY. For breakfast, eggers and toast (we'll throw in coffee and milk), lunches will be PB&J sandwiches and apples, EVERY DAY. Let's see how long it takes for the "food benefits" need to diminish.
They used to call it "Rations". That's what we need to revert to. A weekly box of supplies per person in the household. All the big store chains could prepare & box them up and have a distribution area just outside the public part of the store. If you enter the main store, you have to pay. You could even have a limited number of formulation variants for say 3-4 dietary needs.
Back around 2010 I lost my job and had to pivot careers. I had an EBT card for about 6 months. It did not fill me with pride to use it, but I appreciated the assistance. When I called in to qualify monthly eligibility the last time, the lady on the other end of the phone, voice full of sincere regret, told me I was no longer eligible and how sorry she was. I told her she shouldn’t be sorry, she should be congratulating me!
“6-9 Our orders—backed up by the Master, Jesus—are to refuse to have anything to do with those among you who are lazy and refuse to work the way we taught you. Don’t permit them to freeload on the rest. We showed you how to pull your weight when we were with you, so get on with it. We didn’t sit around on our hands expecting others to take care of us. In fact, we worked our fingers to the bone, up half the night moonlighting so you wouldn’t be burdened with taking care of us. And it wasn’t because we didn’t have a right to your support; we did. We simply wanted to provide an example of diligence, hoping it would prove contagious.
10-13 Don’t you remember the rule we had when we lived with you? “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” And now we’re getting reports that a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings are taking advantage of you. This must not be tolerated. We command them to get to work immediately—no excuses, no arguments—and earn their own keep. Friends, don’t slack off in doing your duty.”
I have changed a sentence in the opening paragraph: "My mouth is your duty, and you have to fill it." I suddenly pictured the way a bunch of infantry E-4 types would read that sentence, sitting around in the barracks, and what they would say in response.
New infantry-proofed version: "My stomach is your duty, and you have to fill it."
Having been a young infantry officer in the USMC I see your concern with the sentence. Though the humor glands would have been exercised to the fullest extent. E3’s and E4’s are incredibly sneaky smart. What would Aristotle’s take on all this “stripping away” be? One could guess he had a view and it wasn’t that four to five truncated generations of dependency was a good idea. Everytime someone talks about 41 million mouths to feed, we see that Lincoln failed to free the slaves. We have a plantation system in place that is every bit as ugly as the one we fought a four year bloody civil war to eradicate…
It's no small burden to retain a reliable voting population.
9,000 LIKES for you, sir! btw, I never knew we had "humor glands" - learn something new everyday...LOL
There is nothing in the world like the wisdom of a Lance Corporal especially when that wisdom is skewered by a Corporal or Sargent, with chow hall humor. I was so lucky to be around those Marines and so privileged to “lead” them though not sure who was doing the leading!
I grew up with a dad who was a mustang admiral. I was surrounded by lots of military folks; I like to call it "military humor". I can spot it a mile away.
I also learned how truly special the Marines are, especially Marine officers.
E. Grogan, wow! I think we can count on one hand the number of Admirals that were/are mustangs. Your father sounds like quite something, thank goodness for mustangs and Limited Duty Officers! You are right on our brand of humor! It is unique. As mentioned, I was very very lucky to serve as an Infantry Officer and ergo serve my nation and live up to the that special trust and confidence that you and the American people bestowed upon via my commission. Thank you for noticing! Semper FI !
WOW, your post brought tears to my eyes! First of all, a very deep, heartfelt THANK YOU for your service to our amazing country!
Yes, my dad was quite something. He grew up under dire poverty, was born in 1920 to a single mom, was literally starving to death at age 12 by the time Roosevelt opened CCC camps for kids so they could be fed. I have a picture of him with his mom when she dropped him off at the camp. He worked hard and joined up with the navy only hours after Pearl Harbor happened. He served on Admiral Nimitz's personal staff. After the war, he was a journalist for L.A. Times and eventually opened up his own Public Relations firm - not to tell lies but to get the truth out to the public. He was wildly successful, stayed in Navy as a reserve and eventually became mustang admiral. He met Ronald Reagan before he became gov of Calif, at a club for Irish men called The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick - it was to help each other get jobs, grow their businesses and that kind of networking. When Reagan ran for president, my dad was on the committee to help get him elected and when Reagan became president, my dad became one of his top advisors. My mom fell in love with him because she absolutely knew he was going to be a huge success as a winner - and also she loved his rakish Irish humor along with that rakish Irish grin and charm so many Irish men have. He died 22 yrs ago and I still miss him very, very much. He wasn't perfect and he sure had his faults but he was one in a million and an amazing man. I still feel him having my back and putting his hand on my shoulder once in awhile. Thank you so much for appreciating my dad.
Semper Fi, sir. So very nice to meet you!
And the Demtoids love it that way. A closed loop as far as they are concerned.
Kept hearing 'I have no mouth and I must scream' for some reason when I read that. And no, I don't think it's 100 proof but it's at least 90, lol. That what I get for growing up in a navy town, lolol.
They reviewed that book review in American this week not long ago.
I have to read it.
The jarhead version is the spiritual, "Make me Hole Again".
Sadly Chris, you cannot undo the damage you have done…the image has become indelible in our infantile brains…(unfortunately, in all honesty, I must include myself in that particular cohort)
Lol - clever edit.
The jokes just write themselves LOL
Good call
Good call Chris
Keep your eye on the ball and get poked in the eye. Old Army saying.
lol yes the E4 mafia would have a field day with your original wording.
I'm still hearing it in my head
It wouldn’t have been just the infantry reading it that way. Signal Corps would be there with them.
The solution to this one is material. And then the spiritual shall follow, because they will be in alignment again toward Homo Sapiens - and not Homo Domesticus, farmed by Homo Umbrans:
"If a man shall not work, neither shall he VOTE."
Soldiers are fed by the government.
They earn it. It's not like they're doing nothing for their country in exchange, like, you know, laying down their lives.
In my opinion, the problem is when we leave the military welfare benefit system we don't become just citizens again. We get tons of Big Gubmint shit that advantages us.
That seems reasonable to me. You take a risk by enlisting. Even if you never deploy the possibility is always there and you lose a lot of control over your life and many Army skills are non-transferable to civilian life. You should be compensated for those things. All I’m saying is that the army needs the state as much as the state needs the army.
I understand. Just saying, at the end of the day the soldiers need the government cheese too. That they are willing to lose their lives for validation from the state is a separate issue.
My two sons in the Army would disagree. They have several hundred dollars deducted from their pay each month as a food charge (and they're not paid much to begin with). Also, they don't have mess halls easily accessible that are open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My sons end up paying for and making their own meals most of the time (they do have kitchens in their "rooms"). When I was in the Army (87-90) we had a mess hall at every Battalion that was open for three meals a day, mon -Fri (one or two mess halls open per Brigade on weekends. I did not have money deducted from my paycheck).
Are your sons enlisted or officers? When I was in the Army (72-75), enlisted ate for free and officers paid cash for meals. This was written into law in 1962 (37 U.S. Code § 402), but was practiced long before that – Continental Army officers paid cash for their meals when in garrison and ate for free when on campaign.
They are enlisted. It's a bit more complicated now. They get a BAS (Basic Allowance for Subsistence) of a little over $450/month. However, if they have a DFac (Dining Facility) on base then that allowance is taken out of their check on the assumption they are using the DFac. At JBLM the DFacs are few and far between so they have to travel to get from their duty station to the DFac. They said the lines are long and slow, so they never have time to get their meal and eat before being back to work. Also, on weekends not all Dfacs are open. My youngest is in Korea now. They don't have a Dfac, so gets the BAS.
"...they never have time to get their meal and eat before being back to work..." Wow, been there, done that! Thanks for the memories (I think)
So they’re paying the food charge AND making their own food? That sounds bad.
It's ridiculous. A lot has changed in our military since I served. And not for the better.
What a ridiculous statement. They work for room and a board. A private in the US army earns about $21,000 a year. He/she gets three meals a day and a barracks bunk.
Having been an Infantry Spec4, I can attest that the revision is warranted!
“I have depended on those benefits since the 1990s, and it is detrimental to my life if I don’t get them.”
-- Argument of every guy that has been married for over 30 years and is still trying to get some loving on a Monday night.
PS. This doesn't work
"Don't make me go to the food bank."
But we can't turn it "off" like females can. Its hard wired. There's a reason for that.
Its also a "game" when you get married. Guys like that more than you think.
I think you should feel great that your husband is still hot for you! Lolol...at least that's what I tell my wife.
95% likelihood that she feels secure that maybe your eye isn't in imminent danger of being caught by a homewrecker, and that's all.
That’s why renting is often better than owning.
Lolol. I tried, but my wife, before we got married, said "you can't milk the cow for free anymore"
You're lucky Ryan, at least she warned you ahead of time!
I know. Im truly blessed by God with the best wife and kids a man could ever hope for!
this is as sad as it is true, I now think
Ha! Ha! 😉🤣
New Mexican politics has been destroying economic opportunity and creating dependency. The state is in a sad third world position, intentionally. Restricting productive energy resources from coal and oil has been a suicidal pact since this Guv took office. She is silver spoon inheritor political family stand in for globalists who want this country to fail. NM, the Land of Enchantment, is drowning in disenchantment and despair thanks to despicable leadership and a cultivated culture of despair and hopeless mentality. As a former resident, it is disheartening but likely reflective of other parts of this country.
Such a beautiful state, too.
Yes, truly heartbreaking for me.
Everyone owes themselves the opportunity to spend a few days in Albuquerque to observe. It may not be the end phase of a dead civilization, but it’s pretty close. And it’s been going that way for decades. It’s an truly object lesson for Los Angeles.
“It’s a truly object lesson for Los Angeles.”
But it will be taken by LA as a model, not a warning.
Many trust fund and other migratory folks , whose leftist "wisdom" has prevailed in the once beautiful state of NM, particularly Santa Fe, have turned it into a third world environment.
As a current resident you are 100% correct. At least I’m in the SE close to Texas and not the shit hole of ABQ.
Isn’t the point of these programs to enable dependency upon government and the politicians and party that support this dependency? Thus perpetuating their position of power? Duh!
100%
The rise of the nanny state, intensified by the Karen political class coming to power.
I remember they warned about this in the 90's, and they were correct.
But the department of the Interior has laws about feeding the wildlife in National Parks. You don't want to get those ground squirrels addicted to Cheetos. People buying Cheetos with SNAP benefits, that is encouraged, but fines for feeding wildlife in a national park can range from $100 to $5,000 or more, with potential jail time of up to six months for serious offenses. The exact amount depends on the park and the specific violation, but it is considered a federal offense with significant penalties designed to protect both wildlife and people.
I accidentally spilled a fair amount hot chocolate mix in a campground at North Cascades National Park, roughly five years ago, and I still think about the chipmunk who instantly slammed into that pile like a cocaine addict. Every last grain.
In their culture, going "nuts" just doesn´t have the same meaning.
Well everyone knows chipmunk are Demtoids.
I had to fight off a fat marmot at lower Saddle Camp in the Grand Teton National park when i dropped some trail mix. I had hauled it up nearly 6,000 feet (we did an ascent of the Grand the next day), and I needed every calorie. Had i lost them I would have seriously considered having filet of marmot instead.
My point being is that nothing in this world is free, and most people in reality know this, especially anyone with a job, but the Dems cater to the somethin for nothin crowd, and chum the water with that sentiment with SNAP and other eternal goodies.
I honestly believe that Obamacare would have had even more initial popular support if Obama said, "Not only can you keep your doctor, but he has to pay you a $1,000 every time you do! And it is still free!"
The chipmunk still thinks about it too…
This disqualifies you from ever holding military rank.
Brass: "Colonel Bray, we need you to organize an urban assault on armed foreign adversaries holed up in our city parks. It may be a siege situation and there are likely going to be civilian casualties."
Colonel Bray: "But, um, what about the squirrels? We can't just leave them to starve or eat the droppings from MREs. The thought is ghastly. [mumbling about some event 5 years ago] No squirrel left behind..."
If the squirrels voted there would be Cheeto dispensaries in Yosemite
And a U.S. Cheeto Security Administration.
Because Yosemite is a Cheeto desert.
stop it guys you are killing me
All squirrels vote democrat, everyone knows that.
Which is why I have no problem terminating them with extreme prejudice whenever I see one trying to dig up my wife’s flower bulbs. Varmintcrats!
And the irony of it all is that those laws are there to keep the animals independent and not reliant on hand outs, yet when it comes to humans however.....
I often refer to my pet dog. He's a lovable guy. And he is entirely dependent on us. If he's hungry, he comes to us to be fed. He has no concept of finding his own food.
Socialism is like that. If you are a socialist, you are somebody's pet dog.
Don´t feed him for a week and you´ll see him develop quiet a concept.
The lady in this video is not warm & snuggly:
https://youtu.be/tpAOwJvTOio
Good point. Then again, some pet owners prefer pit bulls.
And they underfeed them, because it makers them more vicious...
They tell me I need to set aside at least two million in a trust for my special needs adult son, who cannot live unaided or unmonitored. In addition to that, he’s already receiving cash benefits equal to half my SS check, plus half his mom’s, plus Medicaid and a raft of programs that come with it, to the tune of tens of thousands per year. I’d chuck all that in a heartbeat for a real community. Imo, the love and concern of the people who know him is his only hope when we die: money or no money, programs or no programs. I know a lot more about how this stuff works than I wish I did, and about the so-called workers who infest the bureaucracies that maintain it.
Really good perspective, thank you.
Yes I understand as I have a 100% legitimately disabled adult daughter, who subsists fairly well with the help of multiple family members. She gets a decent disability check but it is 98% used just for her rent payment.
Not giving me food is taking
Silence is Violence
Children can self identify.
No Kings
Etc.
Narratives don't have to make sense to get some people to chant them, but I feel that the logic has devolved from questionable to nonsensical to contradictory. I don't know if this is a sign of desperation on the part of the globalists, or just a gleeful desire to Mind F with people to the maximum extent.
“Silence is Violence”
…except when it is Mamdani refusing to denounce “Globalize the Intifada”
…or leftist Jewish rabbis refusing to denounce Mamdani.
For modern readers:
The original idea (Rome) of welfare was to avoid food riots and mobs being for hire to whomever provided food and coin.
The moral sentiment that a society able to produce food, clothing and shelter for everyone also ought to do so even for those individuals unable to provide for themselves (in no small part based on the very true realisation that "everyone is against welfare until they need it themselves").
Lengthy, best bring a snack:
However, what has happened and not just in the USA is that from ca the 1970s to present, welfare has de facto become UBI and as such a human right rather than a privilege you have to qualify for.
Not just conceptually but also in practice.
(I'm going to ignore the other well-known welfare-traps and mention something not often discussed or even thought about)
I doubt there's any plan behind it. Instead, consider this: 120 years ago, you didn't need a phone or a car, not even to work if you were of the proletariat or lower classes - there were lots of manual, heavy and dangerous and disgustingly underpaid jobs to do to scrape by another day.
Enter the phone, the radio, the newspaper, the car, commuting, computers, mobile phones, internet, smartphones - now, even for what few manual jobs remain (I think it's something like 1/20 of what it was 120 years ago) you need all that to file your application or to get a reply.
And since a large part of the idea of welfare is that it is temporary while you try to get a new job, all those things had to be included in the amount.
The same goes for basic COL. Water, heating/electricity, basic maintenance - not just standards and legal stuff has changed but materials, placement, and so on and they too serve to drive up the COL.
That welfare is now a problem, not just costs-wise but also culture- and psychological impact-wise as you mention is beyond debating. It is as obvious as my beard (backwoods-wildman style) is starting to go grey. Or gray, even.
But the problem is less the cherry-picked recipients chosen depending on the political stance of the one doing the picking, and more the entire economic structure of modern Western society. There aren't enough low-but-enough-to-live-on income jobs. There are barely any such jobs at all, and most of them are filled by endlessly replaced migrants in some government-subsidised project or other. The tax-structure basically forces both parents to work full time ("working poor" as an American author described it in the 1990s) and hand their kids over to the state for the better part of the day. Pricing structure followed the wave of women entering the labour market in the 1970s, again making double incomes a necessity.
People no longer have careers but are treated as meat-robots that can be replaced by any other human and "working your way up" was dead in the 1980s already; instead you either have the right degree from the right uni where you got to know the right people, or you're stuck at the bottom for the rest of your life.
(A historical parallel is the military: in many places, the best a commoner or working class man could achieve was the rank of sergeant or eq. while the middle and upper class men started out as lieutentant or similar - while WW1 seemed to put and end to that stupididty, it has long since returned with a vengeance in the political and corporate sectors, with entirely foreseeable results.)
Where's my point in this?
That the options are UBI, eventually, or the kind of class society that fomented the French and Russian revolutions. UBI leads straight to Idiocracy and Brave New World (is my feeling), while revolution means you eventually wind up back where you started.
Wouldn't be so bad if UBI was an "opt-in" benefit for all. But if you "opt-in" you are ineligible to vote...until such time as you "opt-out".
Careful, you're bordering on suggesting that people assume some degree of responsibility for themselves.
And that, (shudder), is NOT permitted.
I like that notion. I think it reasonable to assume those who are less motivated to vote are also the least knowledgeable about what they're voting for (which is why the "Get out the vote!" campaigns are a blight). And if they can be bought off with free stuff, better that they not be able to vote for whoever's promising more free stuff.
Many nations have had such bars to clear to get franchise - it didn't provide better voters nor better politicians, nor did it prevent buying the voter-base or corporations using the state for never repaid bailouts (i.e. corporate welfare).
I think it is high time to try the Heinlein-option: Service guarantees franchise and eligibility for holding office.
I’d settle for electing the House as we do now (popular vote) and electing the Senate based on tax dollars paid (by individuals, not corporations). The more you pay in taxes, the more votes you get.
Historical context is pathetically rare today and always welcome, Rikard.
Have we passed the tipping point? We seem to be overrun with idiots already even without UBI.
Hard to say.
I used to point to the Fall of the Wall in '89 when I was teaching, and tell my students that in 1985, the consensus among experts and researchers, economists and politicians of all -ism was that the Col War divide would last for several generations to come, at the very least until 2050.
UBI or whatever it'll be called is I think unavoidble. Our technology simply makes most of us surplus to the needs of society as a whole and what is making us spiritually sick is too much leisure and too much safety (as per that old experiment "mice paradise").
We, not just Western civilisation but as a species, need a new frontier to strive towards, I think.
Agreed. The “mice paradise” experiment completely changed my worldview long ago. We do need to be challenged to mature and live a reasonably satisfying lives. But challenge is now considered a violation of one’s rights and political disagreement is grounds for murder.
Our new frontier might be striving to rebuild of the guardrails of our old values, the ones that used to work until a certain cohort of narcissistic opportunists arrived and made it their objective to relieve us of our burdensome commonsense and pride in personal responsibility. So long as we can vote them into their place at the money river, everything will be fine. Until it isn’t.
> Our technology simply makes most of us surplus to the needs of society as a whole
I'll dissent from this point.
Technology is centrally controlled by organized clusters with financial incentives to organize work in ways that protect their interests. Everything else is "externalities," which, when they yield problems, well, that's later, right? And external.
Those interests in play reflect the technological pyramid. And that pyramid--being utterly financialized--has zero financial incentive to put citizen involvement and skill building and cooperation ahead of profit. It's entirely rational in its own way...but it's producing "externalities" that are ghastly, and dangerous to human potential.
ThinkBit: There is no reason that community farms and gardens could not have been established in major cities, as part of USDA's mission, and "welfare recipients" required to do service in them X amount of hours per Y units of time. The range and depth of tasks involved in going "off grid" with food production is broad, complex, and has something to interest pretty much everybody. It's not just dirtwork.
Plus this work builds a sense of competence and community like no other civic work I ever witnessed or participated in. In the '90s and '00s I knew people who built these food production options among prisoners, among former prisoners, in slums, in schools, on military bases, etc., and while their programs could get occasionally basic funding (say $12k a year for a part time trained coordinator) for a pilot study, that always sunsetted in a few years.
So why did we instead have this system where increasingly dependent people get government chits to buy massively processed and packaged goyslop from grocers at high markup and little nutrition?
Simple: food programs are basically welfare for Big Chow. Perhaps necessarily so. But let's not digress there at the moment.
I can't append here the infograph from 2016 showing what portion of the consumer food dollar goes to farmers (under 8 cents on the dollar at that time). The rest goes to processing, packaging, transportation, advertising, and even financing and insuring the operations.
I'll agree we need UBI, but I define that as Universal Basic Involvement. Financialization/Reaganismo/neocon globo intensified the removal from daily endeavor all of the productive interaction that people desperately need to feel whole, connected, and happy.
In the earliest years of "subscription farming"/"Community Supported Agriculture"--an approach imported from Japan, in which one pays a subscription to a producer and gets a share in whatever is produced each week or two--there was an enormous amount of confusion engendered by, say, the fact that your box this week might be all kale and potatoes, and in two weeks, more potatoes and squashes. "What do I do with all this kale!?!?" The griping would give way to excitement if there was someone on hand--prepared to respond--to skill up the customers in "what to do with all this kale." The next season, some of those customers could be called upon to teach.
This engendered joy--and academic papers, and grant proposals (many of them quite small, going to local people). But then it was all mostly abandoned in favor of much more lucrative pursuits that intensified the alienation and dependency. Or, Permastate being what it is, the jobs that formerly were held by innovators got occupied by Lifers.
Remember how people screeched when DJT suggested a similar "food box" approach for "food programs"? Once upon a time Dems and Progs considered this the ultimate in Sustainable Urban Agriculture...oh, but not if Orange Man suggests it.
I fear I'm not framing or putting this well, Rik; I'm in from working on my truck in the rain, a success, but now I'm showered and full of hot coffee and lunch...and a bit on the comfyweary side. So will stop here. I'm just trying to add to the idea of what lies outside the "mouse utopia"--it was "u-topos," no place. Not paradise. I'm skeptical of what conclusions can be drawn from a rodent torture study, and applied to humans...but then I'm very cranky about the "social" "sciences" and their "research" "methods" in general. An attitude I developed even before my own doctoral work.
I've seen so many things that work at the human level...that never got the support they deserved. We have no national program of small scale technology development and transfer. Such ones as we had were either taken over by Progs, or others. Watching the grassroots, genuinely diverse, Proggy axis get taken over by limousine liberals has been discouraging. The original Progressives were populist Wisconsinites sick to death of what the Republican Party (also a Wisconsin invention--lil schoolhouse in Ripon and all) had become by the early 1900s.
Man, how that got hijacked.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/15/the-progressive-movement-is-a-pr-front-for-rich-democrats/
I don't think UBI is a good idea - I think it is unavoidable and will be implemented for an increasing percentage of the population in any Western nation, simply as an effect of technology and economism.
Not discouting there aren't people with Grand Plans too, but generally speaking technology is what drives societal change in no specific direction planned out beforehand.
Yes, some kind of "Victory gardens" sounds like a good idea on paper but even without corpos sucking the blood of the state or pearl-clutching do-gooders in the civil services, it runs into the problem of race/culture and the mental make-up of the individual being put there (a volunteer-scheme might have greater odds).
And here we went /from/ those kinds of programs (pre-1940s) because they didn't work; they always without fail became exploited as a re-invention of thralldom (otherwise banned since the 1200s): the statare as they were called became used as free labour by the state and by those with the right connections, paid only in room and board and the status of statare became something you inherited. You were locked-in from birth.
That was in Sweden when it was all Swedish, so you can imagine (or look at the US prison-capitalists) how it works out with races without the Nordic Protestant work-ethic.
I have no good answer how to fix it beyond a hard cap per person/household (don't ask me how to calculate it given how modern "families" look like), and a basic tax-free level of income, whatever is reasonable. Idea being to get back to one-income families being the norm, and family being mother-father-children.
A silver bullet for how to get there I ain't got.
> Yes, some kind of "Victory gardens" sounds like a good idea on paper but even without corpos sucking the blood of the state or pearl-clutching do-gooders in the civil services, it runs into the problem of race/culture and the mental make-up of the individual being put there (a volunteer-scheme might have greater odds).
It wasn't "victory gardens" but something much older.
Volunteer was exactly how the best of those programs worked IME. Especially in the big cities with all-black neighborhoods.
The missing piece was small funding to pay for a part-time coordinator, and to support them with mentoring, problem solving, etc.. Not enough money that someone would make it their career focus. Enough to constitute a sort of honorarium for people doing the work as a civic offering (already having an established path in life--for instance in black Chicago a number of the coordinators I knew were retired teachers and other civil servants).
I don't think there are easy answers. My point was just that there was a lot of promise in some of these models, but for various reasons they were abandoned.
One of the fiercest arguments I had with a long-ago ex was on your very point about "reinvention of thralldom." My point came directly out of the Swedish experience, including how that played out in the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as cultural memory of the before time. In my father's family, this "thralldom" issue was discussed as it related to why Communism got a foothold in Finland in the early 1900s, but let's not digress there.
On the question of race, culture, and work-ethic, I concur with what I think is your overall point. In the urban ag projects I note, these differences were the hardest to wrangle (in my experience) in places where there was a huge/robust pre-existing cadre of Permastate Lifers, or people aspiring to that, who took on "leadership" roles. These people would adopt whatever philosophies the local university or government sinecure-dispensers required for participation, because their ultimate goal was to turn the volunteerism experience into a resume item in seeking a Permastate sinecure. Those philosophies were designed to enable victimization and complaining, not demand work ethic and participation. So if a conflict arose that needed strong leadership to resolve, and the conflict was met with Kumbaya-singing, it wouldn't get resolved. "These are the rules, you must follow them to play." Obviously that's the opposite of the PC/DEI formula. But since even failed projects can be put on the career-climbing-Permastate resume, the projects' success could take back seat to that other motive. Taking a hard line to protect a volunteer project didn't have the potential payoff (and much possibility of cost) of GoodThink.
The worst participants I worked with on that front were Operation Exodus Russian jews from the 1990s (the university city where I lived at the time had a huge incursion of these). My goodness, the sense of entitlement they had, and their constant ginning up of contention and trying to find loopholes, gain advantage, and undercut others. Quite a lesson. The program coordinators across the city tore their hair out over them. Since one was not allowed to discuss what was at issue (their palpable and even outright expressed jewish hostility to the local Scandi/Prot culture) without being called HITLARRRR or whatever, people would retreat from participation.
I see no path to fixing any of this that doesn't include removing from participation those incapable of participating. But we don't "go there" anymore.
Also, my sense is that we now have too many people who have zero experience of getting food from anywhere but the grocery store, paid for by Uncle Sugar. In the '80s to even '00s, there were still a good number of older people who remembered the self-sustaining culture, and aspired to restore parts of that, like the famiy garden. Even in cities.
By now we have human social units that are three, four, five, or more generations into total dependency and consumerism. (Bearing in mind that in some places, a generation is every 12 to 15 years.) The cultural memory of anything else is utterly gone. Lethe has drowned Mnemosyne.
“Lengthy, best bring a snack:”
We expect YOU to supply the snack.
How can you not know this?
There's an opportunity to flip this and use the programming against them. Illegal aliens have stripped away wages and wealth.
In a similar vein, when NPR does their little bit thanking their sponsors, I keep hearing this blurb about one of them: “RWJF is a leading national philanthropy paving the way, together, to a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.” And how exactly is that going to work? I suppose one could argue that health is a right in the same way life is, in that no one should be forcibly depriving you of either your life or your health. But that’s not equivalent to failing to provide you with (or subsidize your) healthcare.
It's already a right. It's always been a right. Oh, you mean you want it to be "free"?
For most people, death will arrive just ahead of the "future". So problem solved.
The only way health (or by extension, healthcare) is a right is if we reinstitute the draft and force conscripts to attend medical school and serve as doctors for their life’s work. How else do we fulfill the supposed obligation to provide health to all?
The only difference between this system and historical cotton plantations is the color of some of the workers.
“How else do we fulfill the supposed obligation to provide health to all?”
You do what Canada and the U.K. do:
High taxes plus long queues for service.
Oh, and “death panels” on top of that.
It's a right, and with every right comes a responsibility. The problem is that the resulting responsibilities used to be incumbent upon those with rights, not upon government handout agencies and taxpayers.
Thomas Jefferson warned us that the government that gives you everything is the same government that can take it all way.
What is the purpose of the federal government? To protect us from invaders? What else?
Furthermore, America created a new phenomenon- poor fat people. WTH?
We don’t need no stinkin’ government to take care of us and the poor need to get used to that idea.
Here's a great short clip from Milton Friedman on the role of government in a free society:
https://youtube.com/shorts/DY47BgDKS9E?si=KigFK4HnJAOCnE5R
Yes. And I can't tell you how many I've seen who get a job, no longer qualify for benefits, and start paying various large fees/costs now that they are longer covered by the state. Next, they find their job no longer is enough to make ends meet; especially if ongoing health care costs are involved. Often, those in this situation try to get another job, or figure out how to re-qualify. Stifles those trying to become more independent. But so many more are like the lady that was interviewed, it's just how life is for them, so any deprivation or limit or requirement is seen as a danger to the stability of that arrangement.
This isn't even hard; If ya need food, you can select from pasta with or without meat sauce (we got the vegetarians covered) and salad, EVERY DAY. For breakfast, eggers and toast (we'll throw in coffee and milk), lunches will be PB&J sandwiches and apples, EVERY DAY. Let's see how long it takes for the "food benefits" need to diminish.
They used to call it "Rations". That's what we need to revert to. A weekly box of supplies per person in the household. All the big store chains could prepare & box them up and have a distribution area just outside the public part of the store. If you enter the main store, you have to pay. You could even have a limited number of formulation variants for say 3-4 dietary needs.
Exactly.
Back around 2010 I lost my job and had to pivot careers. I had an EBT card for about 6 months. It did not fill me with pride to use it, but I appreciated the assistance. When I called in to qualify monthly eligibility the last time, the lady on the other end of the phone, voice full of sincere regret, told me I was no longer eligible and how sorry she was. I told her she shouldn’t be sorry, she should be congratulating me!
So yeah, that’s the problem.
The Message version of the Bible verse you noted-
“6-9 Our orders—backed up by the Master, Jesus—are to refuse to have anything to do with those among you who are lazy and refuse to work the way we taught you. Don’t permit them to freeload on the rest. We showed you how to pull your weight when we were with you, so get on with it. We didn’t sit around on our hands expecting others to take care of us. In fact, we worked our fingers to the bone, up half the night moonlighting so you wouldn’t be burdened with taking care of us. And it wasn’t because we didn’t have a right to your support; we did. We simply wanted to provide an example of diligence, hoping it would prove contagious.
10-13 Don’t you remember the rule we had when we lived with you? “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” And now we’re getting reports that a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings are taking advantage of you. This must not be tolerated. We command them to get to work immediately—no excuses, no arguments—and earn their own keep. Friends, don’t slack off in doing your duty.”
This is a very modern version
Yes. It’s not my “go to” bible version but I liked the translation from the King James.
The Message is not a Bible translation. It’s Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase.