There is on the left a peculiar blindness which in a way speaks very well of the people who have it, in another speaks very badly indeed, and in other ways makes you wonder if they’re aliens.
When faced with anything from disease to poverty to homelessness, they always come up with material causes. From the bizarre idea of the “Bee sting” that if you are poor you run into so many frustrating things that you can’t do anything to help yourself, to their very strange idea that poverty causes crimes and wars.
So, we end up with them being very sorry for robbers and murderers because they couldn’t help but do what they did, since they were so poor. This always makes me think of the once upon a time friend who was kidnapped at gun point in a grocery store and taken from ATM to ATM to empty his account and give the money to his kidnapper, but who ended this account with “I’m blessed that I’m not so poor I have to do that.”
If your jaw just dropped, mine did.
We have been poor — not right, now so much, because the kids are moving on to their own thing — and — when older son was tiny — poor enough that we didn’t know where food would come from. (Literally. We missed some meals. We sat outside a soup kitchen, but didn’t have the courage to go in. So next money we had we bought 50lbs of rice, and lived on that, more or less.) I have to say NEVER in the history of EVER have we felt we should steal money from…. anyone really.
Look, the part about the left that means they’re better than we’d expect, as people, is that they think it takes extraordinary circumstances for people to be lazy or larcenous enough to be “poor” (Poor now isn’t poor in, say, the middle ages, or even the early 20th century), they think it takes extraordinary circumstances for anyone to commit a crime (which means evil people wouldn’t exist), so they themselves must be relatively decent, self motivating, hard working people. On the other hand they’re probably envious, and view coveting someone else’s stuff or situation as reason enough to steal or hurt others. Or at least they view it as reason enough for other people.
The part where they are aliens? They seriously seem to think it’s all material.
“People are poor. If we give them money, they’ll be better off.” This when speaking as to the rest of human history, our poor are living better than the upper middle class of other eras, and might be living better than kings. (No? Well. Availability of food at relatively cheap prices; modern medicine — yes, ER but you know, it ends being more or less free –; heating in winter, cooling in summer; in the west relative peace and security.)
It is entirely possible the reason we have so many poor is that they already have too much and are too comfortable — as in they are getting what the monkey-brain, which was trained for the paleolithic identifies as “More than enough.” So, no they won’t do extraordinary work/effort. Because, well, no motivation. (Even for those of us who are broken and HAVE to do something sometimes it’s hard to make the effort.) In many ways the issues of poverty on the welfare system is children, living in their parents basement, because they haven’t been kicked out to sink or swim on their own.
In the same way, the left looks at homelessness and decides the problem is that there aren’t enough houses. This, btw, requires refusing to see that subsidized housing developments quickly become hell on Earth or that with few exceptions, the “homeless” are an interesting collection of addictions and mental illness, which is the real cause of their plight, and not some imaginary lack of “housing.” Which is why the left keeps building more and more subsidized housing, and the problem grows instead of shrinking.
This requires being aliens who have never met a human being.
Me? Personally I resent the “poor equals crime and war” thing the most. Because, you know what? The village was d*mn poor. We didn’t realize it, because everyone was poor. But you know what? Most of us were ‘poor but honest’. And you could, as a little kid, walk down main street in the dark of night, even carrying something relatively valuable, like food and clothing, and not be scared, let alone attacked.
It is insulting to all the people I knew in childhood — all that weren’t the one family who stole clothes from other people’s lines, and chickens from their hen houses — to believe that they “couldn’t help” but be thieves and murderers or even whores. Because none of that was true. Most people lived “tiny” lives, very restricted and carefully counted that they earned by the sweat of their brow. And they would have been furious if you called them poor, let alone criminals. They were also, always ready to hand over bread and butter to someone in need, even if they couldn’t afford to give an egg or a piece of meat (but that too, when they could.)
In fact, many times, the equation goes the other way. Someone decides he or she is too smart to work, and starts trying to make a living in shady ways. It’s not that crime doesn’t pay. It’s that like communism — who, now I think about it is also criminal — it only pays for a select few, at the top. The others? yeah, they barely manage a living, and often fall into addiction and other issues. And once you fall into crooked habits, it’s very difficult to pull up out of it and into “honest work” again, particularly if everyone assumes the bourgeois virtues are evil-bad and being criminal means you’re a victim.
So…. you know, this is how the left has rats in their head, and keep trying the same thing, now harder, when it doesn’t work.
I hated being poor, and I don’t know anyone who loves it. It hurts the rest of us to watch, particularly for children or other innocent victims.
But, as with the kid in the basement, at some point you have to wonder if you hurt the poor and criminal (as a class) and even the just poor on welfare by making the ride too cushy and being so incredibly compassionate that we let the public purse be extravagantly drained (Now for illegal entrants into the country) and let communities — we’re looking at you, NYC — live in fear.
Because as someone or other said, to be kind to the cruel you always end up being cruel to the kind.
The few people who live in public housing because of genuine issues and disabilities get their lives turned into hell by criminals and drug addicts and barely human feral creatures.
And those who live in cities where our compassion just turns criminals loose live in fear or die needlessly because of that “compassion.”
And people who could otherwise start at the bottom and learn skills and become valuable members of society and rich even maybe, never get started because of the false compassion of our welfare which not only gives them the “minimum” but makes it hard to leave and strive.
People are people, and the poor and even the criminal have agency.
Let’s stop enabling and start demanding they act as human beings capable of thought and action.
*Sorry this is late and semi-disjointed. It’s been a whole day of fighting with insurance to get a prescription filled. I don’t even know if it worked, as of right now.*
According To Hoyt 
Fundamentally they don’t believe in and reject individual responsibility and agency, and believe everything is consequence of collectives. This is why they are so enamored with communism.
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One of the hidden doctrines of marxian faiths is that no-one of the anointed is responsible. In order to maintain that fiction they are forced to invent reasons why they were not responsible.
This is also why Communists are never responsible for the atrocities they commit: if they were responsible, they could not have been of the anointed of the faith, because if they were of the faith, they could not have been responsible for such bad things. Therefore they must have been something else.
And they never seem willing to explain how they’re ensuring that that ‘something else’ isn’t running the show in their new shiny version. But the allure of never being responsible for anything is a strong one, so it continues to draw people in.
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I think that’s the way it works with abortion, too.
“Im a good person and good people don’t kill their children or other human beings, therefore that thing in my womb that I killed wasn’t a child or a human.”
And that why they can condemn right-wingers for wanting to kill criminals. Because Criminals are humans and good people don’t kill humans.
It a very childish way to reason, in a lot of ways.
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I think that one is different. From what I understand in most cases they chose to abort because they are terrified of what having the kid entails, and then spend the rest of their lives hiding from the choice. Loudly announcing that it was not a real kid is just trying to convince themselves that they didn’t do something tragic.
And the ones who do regret it later all seem to go through major emotional turmoil to get there.
Honestly, I’m now thinking the way to deal with that is to built support systems for expecting single mothers who don’t think they can deal with it to give them the tools to get through having the kid and tools to either bootstrap themselves into being able to support themselves and the kid, and/or streamlined paths to adopt out the kid if they don’t feel they are up to it.
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I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but in the Midwest, that support system most definitely exists.
Actually, when I was barren, it irritated the crap out of me. I couldn’t drive five miles down the road without seeing a billboard for a crisis pregnancy center. It felt like if you got pregnant, the whole world was lining up to bribe you not to have an abortion. If you were barren and wanted to have a baby, you were just one more supposedly deep pocket to be tapped for the mom’s benefit.
And then there were people like a classmate’s fiancee, who happily explained they weren’t getting married until at least his graduation in order to milk the charity benefits of being a “single mother” for as long as possible.
Frankly, seeing as how the largest risk factor of becoming a single parent is being born to one, the biggest thing crisis pregnancy centers accomplish is making sure they’ll never go out of business.
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I have literally seen one saying that Stalin was right-wing, all the slaughter was caused by right-wingers infiltrating and taking over pure Communist regimes. Without even hesitating about the way they kept allowing them to.
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Stalin was “right wing” compared to Trotsky. If Trotsky had beaten Stalin to the top spot, it would have been much more difficult to win WWII – because there wouldn’t have been much resistance to Hitler’s army after Trotsky killed more than half of the Russian population with fanatic devotion to completely impractical ideas. The best thing Stalin ever did was to exile Trotsky and then send an axe murderer after him.
Remember what calling Stalin “right wing” reveals about the person saying it – that they think the most insane branch of Communism is the center.
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Don’t you know? All monsters and mass murderers are ‘right-wing’. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim, Honecker…all of them were ‘Right-Wing Extremists’, just like today’s ‘Extreme MAGA Republicans’! Just like Trump is Literally Hitler!
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When Eric Swalwell farted on camera, it was the most intelligent thing heard from a Democrat all day.
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“We sat outside a soup kitchen, but didn’t have the courage to go in.”
So just as a random thing, I read a book on hunger in America and it had a woman who had, after a horrible divorce, become poor in a less-visible way. She had to keep up certain appearances lest she lose custody of the kids, and she was ashamed of not being able to buy sufficient groceries.
She started volunteering at a soup kitchen, because while she was ashamed of going to one, they do feed the volunteers and give them the odds and ends as well. So while she was technically not a client, she still got the benefit of being one.
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Didn’t occur to us and we had a kid in tow. But we felt like we weren’t poor enough FOR THAT.
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You had airspeed. The flight path was crap, but you were still SOMEHOW aloft. And then you did that critical thing: YOU FLEW THE PLANE. Maybe you expected you’d fly it all the way to the crash site, but YOU FLEW THE PLANE.
The Big Thing? FLY. THE. PLANE. To HELL with the radio. FLY. THE. PLANE.
As long there is altitude and airspeed… you can fly. It ain’t always easy, and it can be harrowing. But the Bad Things happen when you STOP flying the plane.
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That woman was a success story. She was avoiding taking handouts, she was working for them, even if it was only as a “volunteer”. My hat’s off to her.
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Envy is a cardinal sin for a reason. The root cause isn’t that people are poor, it’s that other people are richer, and a lot of people can’t handle the comparison.
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This is why when they tell me inequality is the problem, they’ve said everything.
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That’s why multiple of The Ten Commandments warn against it.
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“The poor you will always have with you.” Well, yes, especially if you define poverty as ” below X% of Y dollar amount.” No kidding, half the whatevers will be below average, too. What about buying power? What about cost of living?
Several years ago, probably 2019, a local do-gooder tried to be impoverished and homeless/jobless around here. It was hard because so many people offered basic jobs, meal coupons, rides to a shelter where he could get housing … It takes more work to grift and really work the system than to find a job and then build up from there. [NOTE: This is not counting the catch-22 of government where if you are getting aid and work TOO hard, you are penalized to the point that you can’t survive unless you go back to being dependent on the .gov.]
The folks who think they’re superior because they milk the system and are parasites while “fools” have jobs? Here’s the back of my hand and the toe of my boot. I’ll apply them where appropriate.
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Don’t use the toe. Knife-edge kick is much more effective.
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Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
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Steel-toe work boots count as a weapon in Real Life (TM). Keep it below the knee. Very hard to walk on a broken shin.
Chairs are better. Use the chair, Luke. ~:D
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“Steel-toe work boots count as a weapon in Real Life (TM).”
Do they, now? I’d better get some.
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There is/was (2020 pretty much has killed it), a show where millionaire’s go to a town they do not know with limited ($10/$100?) resources. The task is to build a business that is valued at $1 million, after X time. The first season was one guy doing it. The business was valued at $700k. He made up the rest to build the business up to the $1 million. The next season he challenged 3 other millionaires to do the same each in a different city that he picked out. Since he picked their location they got $100 and a used vehicle to start. In all cases the businesses built by the participants awarded money or money and percentage of the business, to people that, one way or another assisted the person to achieve their goal. The people rewarded had no clue who the participant was, or what they were doing, other than the help and tasks completed/worked at.
Could google the series name, but it has been a long day. Bits, the cat, surgery went great today. Veterinarian said she got the entire tumor and some extra tissue around it. Does not look like the mast cell extended beyond her skin. No muscle involved. She doesn’t think it is aggressive cancer but pathology (5 to 7 days) will tell for sure.
The bad news for the day, is saw the neighbor who we got Bits from come home while I was leaving with Bits to take her to her surgery appointment. Turns out one of Bits littermates had just that morning had to have been put down because of lung cancer. Was told the symptoms, none of which Bits exhibited. Neighbors are very upset at their loss. Hugged her (what else can I do?) Let the veterinarian staff know this on Bits intake. As it turns out, the vet who performed Bits surgery is the vet who assisted the sibling to the Rainbow Bridge (did not know the neighbors used the same clinic). Very good news because the vet is very knowledgeable of the circumstances.
In other news, end of day 5 for Pepper. She is doing really good. Does not want to poop when she gets the urge which means if not watching her closely results in accidents. She has the control she needs she just has to get over the fear of pooping. Still hurts and is uncomfortable. Will take time.
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A lot of people don’t know that pets are often the first detectors of environmental problems in the area. A good vet keeps track of illnesses and locations of pets; and has connections to public health offices.
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The CDC found it could better track the flu by tracking drugstore sales of tissues and cough medicine than by doctors’ reports.
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What is weird, environment wise, is the cat who had lung cancer, other than before when the kittens were trapped, she had never roamed outside. She and her other sibling, they kept, were 100% confined to the house or a catico cage off the living room. Owners do not smoke or have pet dangerous items or plants.
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“This is not counting the catch-22 of government where if you are getting aid and work TOO hard, you are penalized to the point that you can’t survive unless you go back to being dependent on the .gov.”
The fact that it’s a hard line and not a gradient is the worst design element… if they want it to work.
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Been there. Back in the bad old days, trying to support wife & kid while going to school, I got a 50 cents/hour raise and suddenly lost the ability to buy groceries. That wasn’t a good day, to say the least.
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100%
There are people who refuse hours beyond certain # because it loses them benefits they can’t afford to replace if they are working full time. They know to the penny how much they can work.
Used to be sliding scale say for daycare costs help, until didn’t need that benefit. Comes and goes. One might wonder why it goes. I’m guess because it works.
Know of at least two couples, both with two kids (they’re not quite 40).
One couple lives with his parents. Word was they were working on getting a mobile home setup but hasn’t happened (2020, etc., was part of the problem, and still might be?).
The other couple have their own apartment only because they can’t afford to move in with either set of parents or they’d lose benefits related to her disability (still allows him to work better than minimum, but not high paying professional, wage job). Both sets of parents and the church assist in other ways that does not show up on the household income sheet.
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On the contrary, I for my part suspect that it works just fine. Just about the way it was designed to, by somebody in a panelled office, probably envisioning himself to be that Government which is Here To Help You.
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The most useless statement of all time, “There but for the grace of god’. Only if God was actually a work ethic and honesty. If you are willing to work, all things are possible. No one ever said it would be easy. The good thing is everything Liberals touch turns to feces, the bad news is we have to wade through their self made feces. Oh and not to fear, Absolutely everything, and I do Mean Everything, Joe Biden touches turns to feces faster than you can blink an eye. It is almost as if he is a feces failure machine. The bad news is the feces he is producing will be tough to wade through for the rest of us. No one ever said it would be easy. Sigh….
P.S.
I have even been told by liberals that because the feral vermin weren’t raised with a work ethic or morals that was in itself a disability. They wouldn’t even broach the idea of training them to be honest, or how to learn a work ethic. Some liberals truly are insane and
I am quite happy they live with the vermin they have created.
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Sadly, they Do Not Live with the vermin that they created.
They live in the Better Neighborhoods and the rest of us live with (or near) the vermin they created. :mad:
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Not true, the vermin are starting to spread to the better areas because that is where the money and easy guilt ridden Liberal targets are. Look at downtown S.F. or Chicago’s loop. It is starting to impact them, not just the honest poor who are trying hard to do the best they can.
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See the downtown businesses leaving in droves from San Fran. When the Hilton and Westfield (mall company) walk away from mortgages, it’s baaaad. (The Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose is doing all right. So far.)
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Yeah, the recall effort against DA Gascon in Los Angeles got a big boost when the (iirc) mother-in-law of a Netflix exec was murdered in her home by a burgler. She lived in the much nicer part of the county, the place where things like that aren’t supposed to happen. That shocked more than a few people.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to actually get the recall onto the ballot. But there’s good reason to believe that there were some shenanigans both by the county (which suddenly became very strict about which signatures were valid; there’s a lawsuit about that, last I heard), and by the company hired to collect signatures (which iirc was also used by those Republicans in Michigan(?) who had problems with far too many of the signatures that had been collected to get them onto the ballots in their local races).
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Make big bucks by screwing over the people who hired you. Hmm.
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Or possibly, given it’s conservative causes that reportedly keep getting hurt by these guys, make big bucks by screwing over the political enemies who hired you.
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Well, I didn’t say who was paying the big bucks. /sigh
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Toronto is beginning to experience the fun of having the rich and fabulous walk through the filth and danger left by the drug addicts and criminals they voted for.
There’s really nothing like reading an op-ed by some pencil-necked hipster complaining about how he got car-jacked for his Ferrari.
mmm, popcorn….
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We went through Toronto years ago. I wanted to visit a market, but my beloved wanted out. Fast. So we left. Driving through/around the city pulling a trailer was a nightmare.
Had a lot of fun at Upper Canada Village, though.
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My condolences on the trailer thing.
With my local knowledge of every tree and rock in town, I might try something like that but only as a ploy to troll for goblins. Slap some American plates on there and go looking for trouble.
That’s my humble opinion of what Toronto has become since 2020. This is all new and very shocking, but very real. And it feels to me like they’re doing it on purpose.
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Friend of a cousin had an attempted carjacking just outside Detroit. He was in a Lambo iirc, and the “Poor Souls” who tried to jack him were part of a ring that made each quite well off (Vettes and Caddys were the cheapest thing they stole), though they had no legal income other than Gov’t assistance. Oh, and they no longer are in the line of business because unlike laws in Toronto, Friend was a CCW holder, and perforated the perps. There was some whinging about one of the perps being “unarmed” (his pistol was empty), but that didn’t last long.
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The only good carjackers are dead one.
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Totally off topic, every car emergency kit should include a tarp and an e-tool.
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“If you are willing to work, all things are possible”.
If only it were that simple. Getting a job and doing a job are sometimes two different skills. Looking good on paper to an employer, if you have a spotty job record, or worse, a criminal record is one of the more difficult life skills. Your work ethic or honesty, assuming you still have or have somehow acquired both, doesn’t show well on an application form. Finding a good paying job without an employer is another and entirely different set of skills. Breaking into a new career gets harder every year past your teens, and if you’ve already tried three or four which didn’t suit, each one after that is not an indicator of versatility, but incompetence. Maintaining a “can do” attitude when life is busy trying to teach you that you can’t do is harder than you might think.
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No one ever said it would be easy, most of the self made millionaires did so after they failed multiple times. Failure is not meant to crush you, but show you what not to do. Life is hard, it’s harder when you’re stupid or you give up.
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Like beauty, stupid is in the eye of the beholder. A certain teacher reputed for his wisdom advised those who undertook large endeavors to count the cost before they began. Sometimes, it takes more than one failure to acquire sufficient skill at estimating the cost, or to recognize that sunk costs are sunk and anticipated returns do not justify continued investment. “Know when to walk away. Know when to run”, as the Gambler advised.
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100% Even when I was (more or less) desperate for a job, there were some where I go interviews, and decided “nope, not going to”. Interview is not all about the employer sussing out the prospective employee, but the job seeker sussing out the prospective employer.
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This made me think of Ben Carson’s story? Didn’t he learn how to bootstrap himself from reading biographies at the library, that his Mom assigned him?
I figure he was able to pull himself out of poverty because of three factors.
His Mom, who made him read. And also ran a tight ship at home.
His seeing himself in the rags to riches biographies he read in the library. Many of those biographies were of non black people (though not all), so he could see himself in people that were not exactly like himself. Some thing the wokesters want to teach people not to do, so they can’t learn from others that are different from themselves.
His Mom, was an active Seventh Day Adventist. I’m sure the Church community helped.
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as in they are getting what the monkey-brain, which was trained for the paleolithic identifies as “More than enough.”
This appears to be the reasoning of men who’ve dropped out of the dating and relationship scene. Much of the reason why men try to do well is to either impress a woman, or to support a family. Men who decide to drop out of that for whatever reason tend to recede back to “enough for a roof over my head, cheap food on the table, video games, and porn.” Once they have enough for that, they don’t work any harder.
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True, true, true. Wish these got even wider coverage. Have you considered selecting and publishing them in a book?
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yes. working on it. But might not be possible, because they’re on the blog. Amazon doesn’t like that.
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How much editing would you need to do to make them “not-same” for Amazon’s algorithms? Add new material, subtract dated material, pat every paragraph and sentence back into shape, and pretty soon you’ve got a new essay, at least to an AI bean counter.
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A lot more than is possible and still have them be recognizable.
We’re going to try. Watch this space, but it goes WAY beyond editing. Because people do scam books that steal stuff from various blogs. So….
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Include the better remarks and worse ones. That might make them different enough.
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Last I checked, Amazon didn’t give a damn if a book contained reprints from the author’s blog. It can, however, make a book ineligible for the Kindle Lending Library, since the content is not exclusive.
In my puny collections of essays, I have always included a chapter or two of new material along with the reprints, and Amazon has never made a fuss. You might look into that.
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see Mad Mike’s “Wisdom From My Internet”
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If you enroll in Kindle Unlimited/Kindle Lending Library, with the higher “royalties,” the the rule of thumb seems to be no more than 10% of the content can be elsewhere (blogs). If you “go wide,” then as you say, adding a little additional material sweetens things and there are no challenges from Amazon [thus far. Touch wood.]
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c4c
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Nomination time:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/22546272-july-2023—-military-sf
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Socialism and its more concentrated evil, Communism, are increasingly seeming to me not a proposed solution to the difficulties of life, but rather a long-running scam to concentrate wealth in the hands of the unworthy.
The alleged study of poverty and its parasitic academic structure are such a tissue of lies, it is impossible to take any of it seriously.
A related subject, gun control, reveals an interesting truth that shines through no matter how deep the lying becomes.
First, every effort by federal, state or local US governments to control, curtail, combat or otherwise cease the ownership of firearms by the general public is accompanied by an -increase- the number of people who get shot, all else being held equal. Study after study, legitimate or not, that’s what you see. (Screaming Leftists are welcome to go check. I’m not linking jack for you, the time of measured, reasonable discourse ended in 2016.)
Less guns (theoretically) and MORE shootings.
Second, when states pass shall-issue concealed carry permits, there is a -decrease- in the number of people who get shot. More than a 10% drop, and it has happened every single time.
More guns, more people carrying guns, LESS shootings.
That’s how the numbers shake out. Anybody who tells you different is a lying Leftist.
If you are a pin-headed Leftist who thinks, as Sarah mentions above, that everything has a physical cause, you think what I said -must- be a lie. Less guns must mean less people get shot, because guns cause shootings. You can’t have a shooting without a gun, right?
Conversely, how can more guns reduce the number of shootings? Aren’t all those concealed carry permit holders stopping crimes by shooting people?
And doesn’t teaching martial arts lead to more fighting? That’s what they really think.
This phenomenon remains a vexatious mystery to the Left, who persist in the belief that inanimate objects -cause- human beings to act .
This is why we mock you.
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A college paper had an editorial worrying that if concealed carry became a thing in Flat State, how would criminals know who might be carrying? I was tempted to write a letter inquiring how many criminals in the state carried openly vs. concealed. I refrained. (Yes, the state went CC several years later. I suspect the rate of students-of-age who were assaulted dropped rather abruptly. (Not counting the drunk ones who got their wallets and phones lifted as they sloshed home. That was a separate problem.)
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“…how would criminals know who might be carrying?”
That sounds right. They’re concerned the poor criminal might make a mistake, skip the optimist with just a rape whistle and try to rob/rape/murder the pessimist with the .45 automatic.
I’ve learned, to my cost, that you cannot argue with that. The mental malfunction extends far beyond the issue under discussion. Their fundamental notions about the nature of Reality and their place in it are rotted.
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After Dade County, Florida issued 300,000 concealed carry permits, the crooks solved that problem by robbing tourists in rental cars.
They could be pretty sure the tourists weren’t armed.
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The Democrats trust violent criminals and terrorists with guns more than they trust you.
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There haven’t been any school shootings in Utah lately.
School employees in Utah are allowed to carry guns. So are some college students.
Leftroids would have you believe those two facts are completely unrelated.
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If you call 9-1-1 and tell them that somebody with a gun is breaking into your house, they will send two cops in 10 or 15 minutes. If you tell them that somebody is breaking into your house and YOU have a gun, they will send 10 or 15 cops in two minutes.
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I saw an article yesterday in the Toronto Sun to the effect that Toronto police response time TO A GUN CALL WITH SHOTS FIRED is twenty minutes. Response time to a rape/robbery/stabbing is 30-40 minutes. Anything else, two hours to two days.
So if you are a wealthy CBC reporter, and some random addict/scumbag/fruitcake starts laying into you with an ugly stick, he will have gotten tired of beating you and wandered off before the cops show up.
But if you damage the weirdo before the cops come, when they finally get there -you- will go to jail. That’s not hyperbole or rhetorical flourish either. If you f- the guy up with a lucky elbow strike, you’ll be charged. For sure.
Solution? Don’t call them. Coming soon to a town near me, I have no doubt.
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the leftoids forget the Police are not there to protect the public, really. They’re there to protect the criminals. When I lived there, NOLA’s cops had many flaws, but had decent response time. Algiers (west bank NOLA) Fischer Project dweller got mad at baby mama and tossed 2yr old from second story (kid had broken bones but otherwise came out lucky) and the rest of the locals nearly had him beat to death by the time the NOLA Cops got there. Fast response was all that saved him.
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To Serve (the political masters) and Protect (the status quo)
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In California, it used to be up to the local counties to determine whether or not teachers could carry a gun at school. Unfortunately, word got around about this after the Coral Springs fiasco, and the state legislatures banned it.
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The May 27 2021 incident that shows up on a search of ‘Coral Springs shooting’ does not appear to have anything to do with armed teachers. How did that put a hair up the politicians’ asses?
Of course, it’s not like it takes much.
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There is no situation so f*ked up that the ‘Experts’ can’t f*k it up even more.
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Because after Coral Springs, people started talking about how armed teachers can be effective against school shooters. Then anti-gunners started shrieking their usual pablum about how students would get shot. Others countered that it was already done in some locales, and started to discuss locations where it was legal. The California law was noted (particularly since it was in California, where the state government constantly attempts to ban guns), the state government realized that the more rural areas allowed teachers to be armed at school, and the practice was promptly banned.
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Any bets on whether the rural areas complied? Or that there are more than teachers, as adults, involved in school settings?
In order:
I doubt it.
Janitors, Lunch Staff, etc., still can CC.
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A couple of things –
First, it’s concealed carry. When done right, no one knows. And afaik teacher carry laws generally require concealed carry with severe penalties if your gun is seen by students.
Second, if the state were to find out that a county is looking the other way on this, I have no doubt that state troopers would show up almost immediately to arrest everyone involved.
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“I have no doubt that state troopers would show up almost immediately to arrest everyone involved.”
Which is why no one will dare to actually use the gun.
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Just remember leftists always lie. They want their neighbors to be disarmed so they can do things to their neighbors like stealing, adultery, and physical assault of women, who are typically unable to resist assault by men, ect.
I wish I had downloaded the pew study of crime before and after gun confiscation in Australia.
I remember there were two crime categories that jumped. Home invasions of the homes of the elderly, which often lead to murder. And violent rape of women.
And no, criminals are not so stupid that they can’t do risk/benefit analysis and decide not to commit a crime, if the risk is an armed law abiding citizen.
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That, and criminals that don’t do the risk analysis eventually get shot, and suddenly can’t commit crimes anymore.
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There was an article a while back that posited that shootings went up after the passing of Concealed Carry laws, and that there was Proof! Proof! And sure enough, data showed that in the year or two after the adoption of CCL there was a slight uptick in shootings. What they did not show was that if you extend the postt-CCL adoption timeline out to five-, seven-, or ten-year frame shootings fell off a cliff. This makes sense, because it takes a while for the fact to sink into the goblins’ consciousness that the prey are now able to fight back effectively and that a safer mode of behavior may be advisable. Of course, goblins gotta gobble, so there is usually a concurrent increase in ‘property’ crimes. It also makes sense that the hoplophobes would focus their data to illustrate their point, as portaying the big picture would completely dismantle the Narrative.
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There is a deeper and more fundamental force at work too.
Goblins are in it for the easy money and the kink. If it isn’t easy and they don’t feel safely in control, they won’t do it. But that’s only the top layer.
The deeper layer is that if the government MUST issue Joe Citizen a concealed carry permit, then Joe Citizen is experiencing a whole new freedom that he didn’t have before. Joe likes freedom. It makes him feel happy, and -empowered-. As in, goblins can’t come along, stab him and take his car.
Goblins can SEE that. It’s a visual effect. Do coyotes attack the slavering Rottweiler or the towering wolfhound? No, they do not. It isn’t a sure thing anymore, not like the toy poodle.
The most powerful thing here is that it is all POSITIVE. No threats, no shootings, no brandishing of weapons, no punishments, nothing. They just stop and slink off into the woodwork.
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Plus, of course, the ones that didn’t figure it out ceased to be a problem. Fewer criminals, less crime. Such a simple equation, you’d think even a Leftroid could get it.
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‘Progressives’ believe everybody else is even stupider than they are. This explains a lot.
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I know that I could probably qualify for CalFRESH during the Crow Flu and now, our local version of food stamps, but in all fairness, I need the money more than the food.
Hell, I need a job more than the money, because I know that leaving me around not doing anything will drive me crazy.
(I wouldn’t turn down the money.)
There are so many issues with the poor, and it’s not just a lack of jobs or a lack of reasonably well-paying jobs. Somebody did a study and figured that most people in the low-to-mid-level drug trade would make more money working at McDonalds than what they’re doing, even once you count taxes (or lack thereof) in.
But, to those communities, criminality is acceptable. In a lot of places with multi-generational poor, criminality is “respectable,” while trying to do anything else is seen as wrong at best, being a traitor to your community at worse. The language and the words may change, but not the mentality.
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Cultural imperatives are imperative. What we call respectable work brands you a loser and a scumbag in those places. Not survivable.
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The only way to survive if you do become “respectable” in those places is to either leave the area, or become so dangerous that going after you is tantamount to suicide.
Possibly both.
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Nobody is allowed to climb out of the crab bucket.
If you do manage to climb out, the ‘compassionate’ Leftroids doing so much to ‘help the Poor’ will throw you back in.
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When somebody tries to throw you back in the crab bucket, bite their fingers off. Get to their genitals and tear.
Because those that would throw you into the crab bucket would crack your shell for the meat when they’re ready.
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You’re much more valuable to them in the bucket. If we did manage to end poverty, their grift would go with it. The more ‘Poor’ there are for them to ‘help’ the more money and power they get.
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Welfare is pay without work. In order to provide pay without work for some, others have to work without pay. We used to call that slavery. Now they call it socialism.
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There was a commenter on Insty, or one of the other news aggregate blogs who commented that basically, the poor, or the homeless, or the vibrant urban communities are basically being farmed. They are a crop, which brings in money to those who control the communities, or the services provided as a means of ‘tending to the crop.’ The people-farmers don’t really give a damn for those who are the crop – they just want the money lavished on those who tend the crop. And without a good sized crop to farm, there wouldn’t be any money. It’s in the people-farmer’s best interest to keep the size of the crop steady or increasing.
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There used to be a thing in NYC called the Irish Vote along with a set of officials and politicians who ate off that vote. After the war, the Irish mostly left NYC for the various suburbs and the Irish vote in NYC is is no more and neither are those politicians.
in Boston there is still an Irish vote because there are still substantial numbers of a Irish in the ghetto there who still vote to keep those grifters in place.
I know they know this, It’s all just game theory,
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That, finally, makes sense.
Bureaucracies in Canada are under threat because all the paying jobs either went to China or involve yucky petroleum, evile logging, or disgusting mining. (Farmers never made money, still don’t, and are now declared yucky by government. They are being eyed for a hearty purging.)
The formerly vibrant economy is hollowed out. The only people making money work for the government, and the only big money they make is flipping houses. The only companies making money are government contractors or are government subsidized.
So the cities, provinces and feds are f-ed. There’s no private sector to pillage anymore, and there’s nothing to export. They’re going to lose their jobs.
What to do? Create an urban crisis.
I finally get it. That’s how you make money by destroying a city. The missing piece.
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They’re cannibals, reaching the point where the only thing left to eat is them.
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Its hard to understand, because there is no one person deciding this crap. They’re literally called “mandarins” in the Canadian civil service. High level bureaucrats who make policy.
They are a closed group. You don’t get into their club unless you come from the right family, went to the right school, know all the right people, and signal all the fashionable virtue of the day.
I don’t know any of them, its possible I went to school with one or two as a small child.
But what I still have difficulty coming to terms with is that they must have knowingly chosen this path for their own benefit, and continue to choose it regardless of the disastrous fallout.
They know gun control will get people killed, for example. Its not a mystery, it is quite obvious. But they do it anyway, because they also know that -they- will not die.
Its a level of uncaring evil that I can’t wrap my brain around. They are like Goebbels, but less famous and more competent. Generation after generation of the same thing since WWI.
Only now we can see them doing it, unlike the old days, because they’re doing insane desperation plays like immigrating two million third-worlders in two years and not giving them anyplace to live. That’s going to show up like a problem this winter.
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Two years? It didn’t show up as a problem the first winter without housing? How’d that happen? I mean Canada is north of everywhere in the US that gets snow. A lot of snow. Granted, by signs, south of the US/Canada border, looks like Canada didn’t get as much snow as US. (Looking at Banff/Jasper/Waterton VS Glacier/Yellowstone/Tetons, and for Waterton and Glacier to have different snow fall patterns is unbelievable given they are the border mirror of each other – ish -. There are differences that does trigger some different weather patterns.)
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The government continues to admit hundreds of thousands of new refugees/immigrants every month. Since 2020. They ALL go to Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Last year they pretty much filled all available government facilities, so nobody froze in a snowbank that we know of. Maybe.
But they’re still doing it. More still coming. No housing. One bedroom apartment in Toronto, $3000/month. For real.
This winter? Right now there are tents in every park in downtown. Where are all those freaks, mental cases and brain-damaged drug burnouts going to go when it gets down to 10F in February? No shelters, kids! Full of immigrants from Whereverstan.
That’s just Toronto. Imagine Montreal. Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg. Cold. Like, you die in ten minutes, surface of Mars cold.
Or Barrie! How about little cottage-country town Barrie Ontario, huh? TENTS! EVERYWHERE! It gets damn cold in Barrie. Shelters? Nope. Nothing. I’ve got five bucks says they’ll be putting them in the high school gym -this- winter.
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I know it is cold in southern Canada. It boggles the mind that the problem hasn’t already hit. You answered it. Up till now TPTB have had the proper housing needed. They don’t now. Correct, it won’t be pretty come winter 2023/2024. Tents will not be adequate.
There is one difference we saw in Canadian National Parks VS US National Parks, is lack of homeless in the former. Only saw one. Even then someone taking a break said to the panhandler to look around. Plenty of help wanted signs. That she herself had 4 jobs during the week and would have no problems lining up another one or two if she really needed one or two. Indicating to the individual that there were plenty of jobs in Banff, or in this case, Jasper. Didn’t have any cash, spare or otherwise, to handout, regardless. (Only time I had any Canadian Cash at all was what I bought to pay for 3 loads to wash and dry dirty clothing. Didn’t even have to buy laundry soap, brought the soap pods from home.)
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“There is no war in Ba Sing Se.” There is no world outside the crab bucket, or the seraglio. :scowls:
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Because agoraphobia is the harem girl’s (and the proles’) best friend…
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I know a person that happened to. TL/DR version, person got help from their tribe to go to university and medical school. Graduated, did residence, returned to the tribal hospital. Worked for SIX MONTHS and was forced to leave. Driven out.
Now lives and works in a far-away state and pretty much never goes back home, or so I hear.
If they’d done me like that I’d have burned the place to the ground, but I’m a Scot. >:( We’re uncivilized.
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Having no wish to defame the good intentions of a community which made a good-faith effort to to employ the disabled, I will not recount my experience with its program. I will simply say that the community’s program and its assumptions, and my Oddness did not mesh well.
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I’ve heard variations on the same story, in the Russian, Chinese, and Tribal versions as well.
There’s a big racial hatred component as well for the Tribal variant (i.e. you’re “acting white”).
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“Apple”
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I’ve read similar with tribal schools. The pecking order of internal tribal politics came ahead of student learning and keeping good teachers and administrators. (Tribal politics occasionally combines the worst of a modern western bureaucracy with the worst of non-lethal* Native American traditions and clan conflicts. I’ve heard stories from outside-insiders. They watched but did not participate.)
Leaving out some of the lethal stuff. See the movie *PowWow Highway for examples.
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My foster sister dropped out of college after a young graduate (doctor) was hung for “rising above his place.”
It sends a message.
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I met a black man in Charleston a few years ago sweeping the street in front of a ritzy hotel. He saw my cross and he had to have SOMEONE to talk to. Basically, he was willing to work his way from that menial job and make a honest living (and look after his mom)…but his family was ripping him. More or less for making them look bad, plus being “stupid, ” for working rather than taking benefits.
Been praying for him for years.
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Also, last I’d heard (which admittedly was quite a while ago) people who work at fast food places generally get free food as a perk of the job. Sure, it might not be great food. But food is food.
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A tremendously long time ago (50+ years), when Ralston Purina owned Jack-in-the-Box, a friend who worked there told me they were on a strict budget as to what they could eat “for free”. Any excess had to be paid for in cash.
I worked one summer at MacD’s back then, and the normal meals had no particular restrictions. OTOH, come near closing time, the fry cooks might get creative; the Murphburger had cheese encapsulated in a couple of burger patties. Anything not sold by closing was considered fair game to take home. (BOH never showed up on our shift.) The deep freeze had a modest complement of frozen burgers… OTOH, I burned out on Big Macs the summer of ’69.
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” . . .cheese encapsulated in a couple of burger patties . . .”
Oh, a Juicy lucy!
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Most drug dealers live with their moms.
Drugs, like graduate school or Hollywood, hold out the dream that you can be one of the ones who hits the jackpot: become a drug kingpin, a tenured professor, a star.
McDonald’s? Franchise ownership. Now, more blacks became millionaires through owing franchises than any other means, but it’s not the jackpot in the same way.
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…I don’t want to be a drug dealer. The hours are terrible and the people you work with are worse.
But I do see that point of view-you have people that have driven themselves very far into the sunken cost fallacy that it’s not even funny. Especially in the academic worlds.
The problem is that there are no simple ways out. Franchise ownership/entrepreneurship requires certain types of skills and drive that a lot of people don’t have. And you have to wonder how many of those franchise owners fail at some point, as well.
What is needed is something along the lines of the classic middle-class dream of the ’50s and ’60s-a relatively stable job that pays enough bills to ensure that you can afford to be slightly aspirational in all respects. You might not have gone to college for a program that requires a degree, but your kids could. It’s a small two- or three-bedroom house, but it’s better than Council housing. You might be driving your cars for ten, fifteen years, but you bought them new.
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Impossible Tweet:
Today we celebrate the fact that we were one of the first countries in the world to abolish slavery within our borders, which we did more than 150 years ago. And we encourage our diplomats to continue working toward the abolition of slavery and forced labor everywhere in the world. Happy End of Slavery Day! Happy Juneteenth!
–Senator Buford T. Blowhard
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Why Juneteenth and not December 6, (The ratification date of the 13th amendment?) Never mind. I’m cynical and curmudgeonly enough as it is.
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June 19th, 1865 was when the slaves of Galveston, Texas learned of the Emancipation Proclamation.
June 19th (called Juneteenth) was celebrated among the former slaves in Galveston, Texas for years and spread to other black communities long before it became widely known among whites.
So when it was decided to have a Federal holiday about the end of slavery in the US, it seemed better to use the already existing Juneteenth (on June 19th) celebration rather than any other date.
It may be seen as pandering to the Black Community but I can see the reasoning even if I don’t completely agree with the reasoning.
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I think I’d be happier about the holiday if it weren’t for the current culture war. In theory I like it. But the current woke mess means that I’m horribly suspicious of it.
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AND there wasn’t a federal three-day-weekend in June yet. (Not that I’m cynical or anything.)
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You Cynical? Never! [Very Big Crazy Grin]
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Costco was open ….
Mom did run into problems with bank being closed.
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It certainly never occurred to the Federal pinheads that putting a three day weekend in the late middle of June might cause problems for all those proles who are trying to get their fiscal year end stuff processed in time.
After all, it doesn’t cause problems for the Federal fiscal year. (If they even recognize such a thing these days.)
… that said, I was rather glad to have an extra day off last weekend, even if I did absolutely nothing useful with it.
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Why? The federal agencies and others have no problems … /sarcasm off
Seriously there are three public fiscal years that I know of: Fiscal (June – May), Federal (October – September), and Calendar. Both Fiscal and Calendar have holidays in the last and first month of their years. Federal, it appears, only has this problem their last month of the year.
Trust me (have no idea about private entities) public entities do not get anywhere near their fiscal yearend processes done by fiscal end-of-month. Or for that matter, by the end of the first month of the new fiscal year. A few who regularly got the prior fiscal year tied up by the end of the new fiscal year first quarter. At least the ones we dealt with at my last job, and that was just specific departments rarely entire counties. (Wasn’t the software. If the data was there, the steps were there for finalizing and reporting.)
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And a year or so ago there was a big stink by the usual types about the 4th and how they weren’t going to celebrate it.
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I just heard on the radio this morning, the big city fireworks show is going to be on July 3. I wondered what that was about.
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It might be so the cops can zero in on the imbeciles shooting into the air.
In Phoenix you don’t go outside on the evening of Cinco De Mayo or 4th of July. Because what goes up may come down on you, a couple of miles away.
In Canada lately the punks just shoot the fireworks at each other.
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In college, the guy in the room next to mine had a handgun bullet go through his window. Missed people, but wasn’t much fun. Not sure which neighborhood it came from; we were on the east side of campus, and west was residential apartments + fraternities. Further west, the dive bars, but likely in range.
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Once upon a time in the mid 1990s I was at a party in a Columbia University dorm room in Manhattan. It was on the 9th floor.
The double-pane kitchen window had a nice, neat little 9mm bullet hole in one corner. The lower corner, so the bullet had to have been traveling flat or descending to make it over the sill. The crazy stuff you see sometimes…
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Fireworks on Monday, July 3rd? That doesn’t make sense. Now Sunday, July 2nd. That would make sense.
OTOH could be they neglected to lock in their Fireworks specialist until too late to have it happen on July 4th. We know one. He is extremely busy. He and the others like him can only been in one place each on July 4th. (He also throws an epic late summer potluck party with all the remaining and confiscated fireworks.)
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I saw a post on a Vast Right Wing Media site that says June 19th should be celebrated extensively. After all, it was the last day on Earth for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953.
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Ooh, a new “meme” about to be born?
Juneteenth – June 19th. The day Julius and Ethel Rosenberg became GOOD Communists!
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Babylon Bee noted that it commemorates the date that the Republicans freed the Democrats’ slaves.
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Don’t forget who was the first Democrat President.
Jefferson Davis.
Hey, I didn’t say he was President of the United States…
There should have been a loud heckler at Biden’s speech last year:
FICUS: “Do you want to be the side the side of Doctor King…or George Wallace?”
Heckler: “George Wallace was a Democrat!!”
FICUS: “Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis, or Bull Connor?”
Heckler: “Bull Connor was a Democrat!!”
FICUS: “Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln, or Jefferson Davis?”
Heckler: “Jefferson Davis was a Democrat!!”
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Haven’t you heard of Andrew Jackson? He formed the Democratic party and was the first Democrat President, three decades before the Civil War.
He was a slave-owner, a racist, and treated the Indians very badly. He also frustrated an effort by some British men to illegally immigrate into New Orleans in 1815. But he disagreed with Jefferson Davis on one important point – he was dead-set against southern separatism, and when South Carolina thought they could nullify a federal tax, he made it clear that if needed he’d send in the army bringing “sacked cities”, “desolated fields”, and “smoking ruins”.
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That was more of a proto-Democrat party. The Democrats we know from the Civil War and Jim Crow era formed in the 1850’s after Jackson’s death. I don’t think Jackson would have approved of them. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of FDR and LBJ!
Jackson opposed using ‘Federal money’ for state or local projects — a practice which has gotten completely out of control since his time. That is money the feral government has taken from us by force, then turned around and used as leverage against us.
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The one thing we need more of from the government is LESS!!
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c4c
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“Even for those of us who are broken and HAVE to do something sometimes it’s hard to make the effort”
Sarah, that’s not being “broken”; that’s proper installation of what used to be called the “Protestant Work Ethic”, and probably could be known as the “hard-working immigrant ethic.” It’s one of the major drivers of the American success story.
There are people who choose to break the law that I wouldn’t call criminals. Most drivers are law breakers; when was the last time you didn’t exceed the speed limit? There are some laws we deliberately and knowingly break because we know they’re bad laws, and in some cases do it as a form of civil disobedience. And there are, of course, the three felonies a day that we are likely to commit because there are just too damn many laws to remember to not break. But that’s not the category of people you’re referring to.
Most people who I’d categorize as criminals who engage in acts dispossessing others of their goods, their safety, or their lives without their consent I’d consider to be bullies and lacking of empathy for other people. To them, other people are things, marks deserving to be victimized, the great unwashed masses, the inhabitants of “fly-over country”, or at best, other criminals in a dog-eat-dog world that the winner is the one who eats first. Yes, that lack of empathy can be drug induced, or it can be from mental illness. It can also be pathological personalities that we all too often see in business-government leaders or politicians.
Oh, and TxRed hit the nail on the head over the government penalizing the successful back into government dependency.
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The “safety net” is more a spider web – sticky to prevent escape. Bureauspiders abound, they duz.
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That’s why I prefer the term Peaceful Citizens to Law-Abiding Citizens, especially when it comes to discussion of gun rights. If gun rights only applied to Law-Abiding citizens, it could get down to the point of, “Jaywalker? No guns for you! 57 in a 55 zone? No guns for you!”
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Yep. I don’t call myself a law-abiding citizen anymore; that’s just stepping into an ever-tightening net. I’m a peaceful man, and I’ll remain that way until I can’t anymore.
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“Mostly harmless.”
Mostly…
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One of my characters, when asked, describes herself as “an amazingly well-armed civilian.”
Her favorite saying is “So many @ssh0les, so little time. And limited ammunition.”
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I stopped at a bar & grill this weekend for lunch. There was some horrible thing on the TV where the hosts were, well, assholes. The entire show was premised on them being annoying to “regular people” and taking advantage of normal goodwill. I wanted to watch them be shot by one of their marks. Sadly, it didn’t happen.
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So, any talk show on TV, basically.
Remember when Candid Camera used to be funny? Good times…
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I long wondered how often Allen Funt was (nearly?) decked.
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Speaking of the homeless problem…. last night around 5 p.m. I went to the grocery store to pick up a few items. This grocery store is in the downtown area of a medium sized central Illinois city that has had a “homeless problem” for years.
There were, literally, NO shopping carts or baskets to be had that were not already in use by other customers. None in the store itself, but what was really weird was there were NONE anywhere in the parking lot carrels either — the first time I’ve seen that happen anywhere. There was also only one hand-held basket in the store, which someone else grabbed before I could. The store was not crowded, in fact there were a lot more free parking spaces than usual and the checkout lines were no more than 1 or 2 people. Fortunately I only had to buy 5 items that were relatively easy to carry on my own.
You can probably guess what happened to all the shopping carts. A store manager said that he had been told by one of the employees that homeless people were swiping the carts. The manager added “My heart goes out to those people, but something has got to be done about this.”
In the past I’ve seen other bloggers claim that laws against panhandling, vagrancy, etc. “punish the poor for being poor”. No, what they do is preserve a semblance of public order so that all people, rich and poor and in between, can go shopping or go for a walk or eat lunch in the park without being harassed, threatened, stepping in poop or garbage, etc. It does poor people no favors whatsoever to drive conveniently located stores out of business and ruin the few places they can afford to go for fun. I know because I was pretty close to being poor a few years back.
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*Local grocery stores carts have signs saying there are geolocators on their carts. Take them outside the parking lot boundaries and (supposedly) the carts squeal, loudly. IDK if true but there have been a lot more carts available recently.
IDK if city wide or not, but our part of town grocery stores have this setup.
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The carts at the store I use most often have a wheel that locks up if it’s stolen. Unfortunately, there is a calibration issue or something, because the wheels lock up near the edges of the parking lot, but still 10 feet inside the border.
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