The Children Of The Good Times

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt
I hope you little maniacs are happy. I’ve changed the illustration now.

You’ll forgive me if I say this, but all of you who were born and raised in America are the children of the good times.

This is not a disparagement. As I have said before, there is a lot of nonsense — for that matter a lot of what appears to me to be a lot of imbibed third hand ROMAN nonsense — about the whole “good times make weak men.” (They don’t. Not if the children are properly raised. The defect is in the good times the parents pursuing things other than properly raising their children, not the good times themselves. And bad times have other pathologies that have nothing to with making people strong.) It’s an observation.

Most of us in most of the world, now and throughout history, were “born owing money.” Life was hard, and we knew our parents had made significant sacrifices for us. So we felt we had to justify our existence. The level of justifying varied. But justifying happened. Some of us, at the beginning of our sixth decade, will catch ourselves, late at night, cataloguing everything we did that day, to justify being alive.

Most of us, in most of the world, now and throughout history, knew that surviving childhood left you injured, often maimed. Because there was a never end of childhood diseases, and that scar that you have from when you tore your leg open. It was worse (still is in the third world) before the twentieth century, where even in your twenties, you might not have full mobility of balance, because of the foot the cow trod on, when you were minding the cow at four or five.

These are not badges of honor. They’re ways people arrived at adulthood maimed and broken, and knew they would never reach their full potential already, even when at the height of their strength and mental power.

Children of the good times are different. They were born because they were wanted. They might be neglected in childhood, which brings on its own issues, and more on that later, but they don’t know what it is to go hungry, or not to be sure where the next meal is going to come from.

They might be sick, now and then. Ear infections, maybe bad colds. But very few children of the good times were ever in doubt they’d survive, or had to submit to dubious medical treatment in hope of surviving.

Physically they are stronger, taller, clean-limbed, bright eyed.

The problem is psychological. And to an extent it’s not even a problem.

Growing up unaware that you are immensely fortunate because everyone around you is similarly fortunate is not a problem. Wanting the best for yourself and your children is not a problem. Reaching and working for the best is not the problem.

The problem is not being aware that there are limits. That the world is broken at a very fundamental level. That the very realm of physical existence imposes its own limits, its own deficiencies. That you might be the best you could be, but the human genetics, too, have limits. As does the span of our life. The wisdom of our heart. The reach of our minds.

Now, this might be complicated in our days because for three generations now, the children of previous good times (no, trust me, historically speaking, not knowing a famine or a war in our land is good times) plunged into the pursuit of the perfect life, and didn’t pay much attention to their children. Or at least not the attention children of the good times need to understand the limits of life.

I don’t know. I know that in our post-religious (yes, a lot of us are religious, but society at large isn’t) post civics-religion (no longer taught, even in America, that idea you owe a duty to the family and country that spawned you) world most people spend their lives crying for a perfection that can’t exist, and feeling cheated they don’t get it.

Yes, some of us know we need to “work on ourselves” and we do. But the reason for that is not that we expect to be perfect but that we owe a duty to those around us not to live our lives locked in a permanent scream of “But I don’t want it” or to fall into depressions we don’t even understand. Also, we are all too aware we can’t do our work while being crazy.

But we don’t have religion or philosophy to tell us neither us nor others will be perfect, nor that there is a limit to “fairness.”

Look, I was a child of good times enough that in my teen years, in a very traditional society, I rebelled against the idea that, as a woman, my aspiration should be to have children, and the females among them would aspire to have children. It seemed silly.

Throughout most of the human race’s tenure on Earth having children and bringing them safely to adulthood and their own children was aspirational. Something to dream of and strive for. But even I, to an extent, was a child of the good times. I wanted perfection, and emotional satisfaction.

Which is part of it. When you are a child of the good times, physically, you see your psychological injuries much larger. And you think yourself more unfortunate than most, when in fact you are a pampered princeling in relation to most of humanity living and ead.

Now, everyone who can sniff the air, and yes, myself, knows that there’s turmoil ahead.

I’m perhaps among the very few who thinks it will be brief, and the good times will continue

And with them, the children of the good times.

As such, I must tell you that part of the “raise your children well” is both paying attention to them, so you know how their minds tick and making them aware how very fortunate they are.

On top of this you must layer a sense of duty; a sense of living for something. I can’t tell you what. I’m not you. I don’t know your kids.

I know for my kids, I tried to imbue along with our religion, the idea they owed a duty to their country; that they, inheritors of liberty, should protect it for future generations. And I tried to pass along a duty to “labor truly in the position appointed to them.” (Or, us being American, the one they aspire to reaching. And labor for that too.)

Look, it’s not just for the children. Raise yourself, too, no matter what age you are. Raise yourself to understanding you’ll never be perfect. In fact you might be so broken that achieving a little thing every day is a feat.

But you must try. You must try to work on yourself so you’re not a burden to others around you; you must try to “labor truly” either at your job, or that other thing you do, so you’re a net positive on the world; and you must understand things will never be perfect.

Things were never perfect. They never will be.

Compared to most of the world and history, you already live in paradise. That doesn’t mean you can be “like onto gods.” But that you have it very, very good. And you should strive to enjoy it, work on it, and pass it on to others as good as you found it or better.

That’s all.

193 thoughts on “The Children Of The Good Times”

  1. Hell, they even want war to be Perfect. They (the ones that want Israel to win, anyway) want the Israelis to ‘stop’ Ham-Ass without actually killing ‘too many’ of them, and definitely without killing so much as one ‘civilian’.

    Got news for ya, dumbasses, terrorists are civilians.

    How are they not? They’re not part of a formal government or military. They are, under the international laws of war, illegal combatants, subject to summary execution when caught.

    And the others? When you shelter a serial killer in your house, and don’t tell the police, even when they come to your door and ask, you are an accessory to the crimes. A co-conspirator. You can be sentenced to hang from the next gibbet — and should be.
    ———————————
    The Democrats trust violent criminals and terrorists with guns more than they trust you.

    1. I disagree.

      In times of war, enemy civilians have always been killed. Not because the military deliberately targets enemy civilians but because there are enemy civilians “near military targets”.

      For example, plenty of Japanese and Germans were killed during WW2 bombing missions. We didn’t deliberately target them but they were near military targets.

      Of course, enemy civilians get killed when armies attempt to capture enemy cities when the enemy military attempts to defend those cities.

      And in the case of Hamas, it deliberately uses “innocent” civilians as shields.

      Hamas locates its strongholds and armories in areas where there is plenty of civilians.

      So it’s a combination of “War Is Hell” and “Hamas wanting their “civilians” to be killed”.

      1. Well…

        The RAF flew bombing missions over German cities. At night. Which meant it was dark, and the bombers couldn’t see what they were dropping bombs on.

        So…

        That was as far as it got, though. Every other Commonwealth military arm made a pointed effort to focus on military targets.

        And the Germans started blindly bombing British cities before Britain returned the favor.

          1. Note, I’m not blaming them for those deaths, I’m saying that the deaths still happened.

          2. My point basically being that the target of the RAF raids wasn’t, say, “Schweinfurt Ballbearing Factory”, unlike what the USAAF was doing. It was the city as a whole. So while the British weren’t specifically targeting the residential neighborhoods, they also weren’t specifically targeting factories and the like. The British just tried to put the bombs within the city limits, and hoped they hit something of value.

            1. Even the USAAF did not do that in Japan.

              We set out to burn down the country. We built Japanese structures in the desert and optimized incendiaries to burn them.

              That’s why I can’t find the usage of nuclear weapons on Japan that disturbing in context. Hell, we had to spare cities as we worked down the list by population to have ones worth nuking.

              That’s why total war is not good. That three nations set out to create a great power war (Germany, Japan, and the USSR…WW2 starts eventually due to Stalin if Hitler hadn’t invaded Poland) after the horrors of WW1 and the technology growth after still boggles my mind.

              1. Stalin and Hitler jointly invaded Poland. They agreed to pool their resources and divide the conquest between them. The Reich and the Soviet were Bes Friends Forever, at least until Hitler decided to conquer the Soviet Union as well.

                  1. Hadn’t thought of it before, but it really fits:
                    “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal”

        2. I recently read an article claiming that Dresden was bombed because, while it was difficult-to-impossible to destroy factories by bombing, it was possible to degrade and/or destroy manufacturing by taking out the workers. The same article (linked from Insty, if memory serves) said that Tokyo was bombed extensively for much the same reason. (I don’t have the link.)

          (Elsewhere, I’ve read about wartime expedient measures to keep a factory running, some with machinery set up in the open because the roof had been bombed, and others in tunnels. As memory serves, the V2 rocket manufacturing was one of the latter.)

          So not always collateral damage, sometimes by purpose. That and the fact that daylight bombing in much of Europe was incredibly risky, especially before escort fighters were in use. Precision in nighttime attacks wasn’t going to happen.

          1. Japanese cities were bombed the way that they were because the manufacturing was much more dispersed among the general population.joae

            1. Maybe.

              I think we underestimated the desire to punish Japan after Pearl. Old family letters show people expressing anger with fighting in Europe because it was the Japs who attacked us.

              1. WWII Dayton had areas of town with factories and machine shops, which were separate from areas with hospitals and schools. Inbetween there were residential neighborhoods, but in general, zoning existed. If only because factories were on electrical lines with more power.

                WWII Tokyo had hundreds of machine shops that were basically in garages next to residences, or even were the bottom floor of residences. There were some large factories; but most airplane and automobile parts were made in machine shops, by a small crew, and then shipped to the factory.

                Japanese machinists were usually working with crud metal, and therefore had to basically handmake each and every part slightly differently in order to keep them in spec.

                There is a manga about this, of course, where a barely postwar-when-starting, now-geezer machinist gets isekai’d. The manga talks about this as indicating the machinists’ skills, but it seems like the metal was wasting their skills.

                Anyway… The point is that vital war materiel machine shops were scattered among houses.

                1. It doesn’t show the machine shop super-well, but you can see that it is next door to a house with a satellite dish and TV antenna.

                  Whereas in most US towns, machine shops are next to machine shops, junkyards, storage units, offices for pest control and furnace repair, and so on. Industrial/commercial zoning.

          2. Dresden was a major road junction forvthe Eastern Front. Flattening it aided the Soviet advance.

          3. by taking out the workers

            Not quite.

            For all of the many delusions that the bomber factions had, they were well aware by that point that even deliberately targeting civilians in terror bombings didn’t actually kill very many of them. They had after all just experienced it from the receiving end.

            Instead the goal in Germany was to unhouse the workers. Causing a constant and worsening logistical drain on the reich from trying to handle the internal refugees.

            1. My dad would probably not agree with that….but Dad didn’t agree with what his superiors ordered fairly often, I expect. He was contrary and probably an Odd.
              (His favorite B-17 story was being ordered to dump his load in the ocean, saying, “Hll no!” and finding a handy cement plant to drop it on. Turned out the “cement plant,” was an ammo dump the Allies had been hunting for months. It made a *very satisfying explosion.)

              1. A cement plant was a valid military target. The Reich used a lot of cement – as concrete – for bunkers, fortifications, and even to build machine tools. Germany also normally used concrete for road building instead of asphalt.

                Plus all the higher Party officials wanted their own underground bunkers like the Fuhrer had, and were willing to divert cement intended for war production for their own purposes. There was a shortage of cement during most of the 12-year span of the Third Reich.

        3. In Japan during WW2, the cities were very “walkable” and so the military targets were interspersed in with residential buildings. That made it unavoidable to hit civilians while attacking the military targets. The same could be said for Hamas, since they co-locate their military targets in and around civilian infrastructure.

      2. Civilian casualties collateral to military action are a tragedy of war. Targeting civilians is a war crime.

        There are laws of war covering what organized forces must do to be accorded the protections of being classified as lawful enemy combatants, such as no summary executions (with narrow exceptions) and treatment as a PW (medical treatment, food clothing, shelter, no use for propaganda, access for inspections by the Red Cross, etc.).

        There are other laws of war covering never targeting civilians as a primary target, and avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties as collateral damage to attacks on legitimate military targets, plus what “unnecessary” specifically means in this context.

        Ham-Ass broke ALL of these, while the IDF has not, especially making significant efforts to minimize civilian casualties of Gazans while being actively opposed in these efforts by Ham-Ass.

        Ham-Ass invading Israel specifically to torture, rape, and kill civilians is a war crime.

        Ham-Ass firing rockets indiscriminately at civilian areas is a war crime.

        Ham-Ass using human shields, both to deter attacks and exploit those human shields’ deaths and injuries for propaganda purposes, is a war crime.

        Ham-Ass firing on Gazan civilians to keep them from evacuating is a war crime.

        I could keep going for quite a while.

        On the other hand, Israel declining to supply their enemy in their declared war with electricity and fuel is not a war crime. No siege is a war crime as long as the objective of the siege is not specifically to increase civilian casualties.

        Israel attacking Ham-Ass positions where human shields are being held if, in the evaluation of Israel, the military objective outweighs the collateral cost in Gazan civilian lives, is not a war crime.

        Bombing a Ham-Ass military target which also damages civilian buildings, if the Israelis determine the military value of that targets’ destruction outweighs the civilian damage, is not a war crime.

        And to specifically address Al Jazeera, the BBC, and much of the U.S. media, the definition of a war crime is not “Anything Israel Does.”

        1. They fire bombed the cities because dead people can’t make weapons to kill your troops. They were at war with nations, not just governments, nations supported by their people. The men flying those bombers had brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters that those weapons would be used against. So ya, they bombed them on purpose because strategic bombing was a failure. It’s called total war. They did it because in the end that is the only thing that works. You want to defeat a nation you must break its will first.

          1. Probably more useful as an alternate history consideration than a counterpoint, but Calum Douglas makes a decent case that German fuel production, and aviation fuel specifically, were very concentrated in the west near coal, and thus vulnerable to a strategic bombing campaign.

            The Strategic Oil Bombing Campaign

      3. Of course civilians have always been killed. As Hillary Clinton said, women are the primay victims of war.

        Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.

        Apparently dying in combat is not nearly as harsh as surviving the deaths of family.

        (source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-victims-of-war/)

        In a less sarcastic manner, one of the realities of European and European descended cultures, since 1648 has been an increasing effort to limit the deaths of civilians during war. That we even discuss it instead of using it as a tactic is something new, and still isolated, in human history.

          1. No, it wasn’t. People still claim it is a lie or taken out of context.

            But it was so blatant even Snopes could find a way to do anything but rate it true.

            I do wonder if that had something to do with 2016, passed around on the downlow.

        2. I’ve got an early attempt to lay out the idea of a lawful target/combatant!

          Second Lateran Council– Canon 11 —
          11. We also prescribe that priests, clerics, monks, pilgrims, merchants and peasants, in their coming and going and their work on the land, and the animals with which they plough and carry seeds to the fields, and their sheep {10} , be left in peace at all times.
          https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum10.htm

          (also banned jousting and ‘the murderous art of crossbowmen and archers’– tactic of blanket-firing into opposing forces so that folks would get wounded, not killed, and thus remove two folks from battle)

          1. Interesting.

            I find #12 an even more interesting rule of warfare: war is only to be fought Monday through Wednesday. I would assume war against non-believers was exempted, at least defense actions.

            Also, is #11 just about war? Seems it would cover other things as well. I wonder if it was also meant to address things such as abusive tax collections.

            1. Anything non-believer was exempted– because they didn’t have any authority over non-believers. (which is why most of the thing is a kind of grab-bag of church meetings type issues)

              If I remember the writings from around the time– the idea of “warfare” vs “organized bandits” vs “just fighting with the neighboring lords” was very…squishy, it hadn’t developed to a modern level any more than the idea of evidence in a court of law had, but it’s best translated into modern understanding as enemy action.

                1. It’s freakin’ weird to realize that stuff like “this is what war is” and “courts need evidence” and such had to be invented.

                  1. It is, and how recent. Modern concepts of war arguably are still less than 500 years old, dating to the Treaty of Westphalia and the birth of the modern state and even then that’s limited to Europe for 1-2 centuries.

                    Evidence is even weirder. I know things have been allowed, disallowed, and then allowed is cycles. I can’t even map them but I know they are crazy.

                    1. Heck, the idea that cops won’t loot the bodies wasn’t around for Jack the Ripper.

                      This radically changes a lot of the theories I heard as a kid!

  2. That is one creepy AI generated picture there. The misshapen right hand on the boy and the two (count ‘em two)right hands on the girl. Along with an extra knee from somebody.

  3. “…you should strive to enjoy it, work on it, and pass it on to others as good as you found it or better.”

    Beg pardon, but this is news? I’m a disciple of Smith, Heinlein, and Pournelle, all three of whom were hard-nosed when it came to duty. But they merely passed on what they had learned – that part of being a man is to take what you have inherited, tend it, grow it, and pass it forward to your heirs (both physical and moral).

    “Duty then is the sublimest word in the English language. You should do your duty in all things. You can never do more, you should never wish to do less.” – Lee.

    1. The purpose of life is to grow and reproduce. Normally it does a real good job of that. And then that weird mutation often called “intelligence” came on the scene.

  4. I will add that each generation faces their own unique threats. Two or three centuries ago, disease and injury dominated (and if you get into medieval history, you’ll be shocked at how many people died in their thirties and forties). Today, the threats are more moral and ethical…with a dollop of random violence thrown in for good measure.

    The kids are not nearly as bad as we oldsters like to think.

    1. shocked at how many people died in their thirties and forties
      ………………

      Interestingly enough my gg-great-grandparents took 12 children on the Oregon Trail in 1843. Technically didn’t lose anyone on the trail itself. Made it to Oregon City with 11. Lost an uncle, a nephew, and one child, on a raft on the Columbia. They then had 3 more children after homesteading. But, they then ended up raising many grandchildren, and other area children, because “consumption” swept through the area taking a number of the parents in their 30’s. The surviving parents (mostly the fathers, because the women were hit hardest) contributed financially, and other ways, but the grandparents raised the children.

  5. For the most part, not everywhere:

    When else in history did one have the option to not work themselves into the grave? Or option to choose to continue to work, past certain ages?

    When else in history did one have the option to not follow the family business? Or depending on social status: One to inherit, One to soldier, One to the priesthood (female was either marry, spinster or religious vocation, i.e. nun)?

    When else in history were children not put to work, to support the family, not to earn “their” spending money, as young, sometimes younger, than 8 or 10? There is a reason why there are laws on the books on ages when children can work outside of family businesses before a certain age, what they can work at, the days, the limited time of the day hours, and the maximum hours per day, and per week, they can work. (Note, cousins start working in their parents business when they could reach the machinery controls. Male cousin at age 10. Female cousin at age 14 – she’s height challenged. But my son, great-nephew to cousins parents, could not go to work on the farm until he was 16, except by then, no farm.)

    When else in history were (some societies) children not named until they’d survived a year or two? Even then with no guaranty of surviving to adulthood? There is a reason historically why some families have huge gaps between children ages, and it wasn’t birth control, abortion, or the inability to conceive. That is supposing “mom” survived having a child every year, to couple of years.

    Some of these changes have evolved over the 20th century. Both sets of grandparents were contributing to the family income while still in primary school. If only by working the family truck garden, milking family cows, dealing with the family turkeys/chickens, fishing and hunting for meat on the family table. At least they weren’t pulled from primary school like many before. My paternal grandfather was mobile crippled (still walked) from childhood polio. Paternal great-uncle, had part of a heel missing from a farming accident before he was 10. Grandparents were born between 1895 and 1915 (1895, 1908, 1913, 1915). By the time I was born (’56), the odds of my knowing another child dying while growing up dropped to almost 0%. Other than from accident, cancer, or birth defect. Even now the causes of the people I know who have died as children are in those 3 categories.

    Privileged times? 100%

    FYI, FWIW: All questions rhetorical.

    1. One of my male ancestors had five wives, the last four being widows. Mom spent three weeks in Kentucky, and I don’t know how much correspondence, untangling his family. He had between 18 and 21 children live to adulthood, and at least 5 that didn’t.

      (The 3 question marks are because the family Bibles had disappeared some time over the years, and their birth dates were uncertain enough that they could have been his – or the progeny of the deceased husbands of widows two, four, and five. People, whether men or women, in that place and era didn’t waste a single bit of time finding a new spouse.)

      2. “One of my male ancestors had five wives, the last four being widows.”

        Sorry, had to read that sentence 3 times. How did he manage to have at least 3 wives while he was in the grave? Then it finally dawned on me. The first husband of each of the last 4 had died before he married them. Sometimes my brain unintentionally amuses myself. LOL

        1. “One of my male ancestors had five wives, the last four being widows.”
          …………………

          I read it only once. But then my great-uncle, married a WW2 widow who was 8 years older than him, who already had one child. They did not have any more children.

          The way to bet, historically, is one man serially having multiple wives, having a few children, losing wife to probable childbirth death, marring again, because need a mother for his children, with subsequent wife bringing more children, repeat. Marring serial 4 widows? Depends on when. Wars leave a lot of widows, generally with children.

          1. It wasn’t uncommon for women to also have multiple husbands. A scenario: Married at 18, H1 dies in an industrial accident before any children are born but she raises his 2 from his first marriage. She has 1 child with 2 before he dies in a mine accident. It was his third marriage, she raises his 4 children. She has 5 children with H3, first marriage for him, she dies in childbirth and he raises the 12 children, 4 of whom survive to adulthood, including 1 of his. Of course he marries again.

            This is not unusual. There were serious risks on both sides. Most people died in childhood, a huge percentage of those in infancy. Those who survived their forties often saw their 2nd century.

            1. This is not unusual. There were serious risks on both sides.
              …………………………

              Yes. A man couldn’t raise his children without help. For most this meant remarrying. A woman couldn’t support her children without help. For most this meant remarrying. All children who came to the marriage, regardless of “whose”, were siblings. True meaning of His, hers, theirs, and not theirs, in the final combination. No matter that some of the children are not biologically related to either.

              Didn’t happen, but some of my family (including my son) are dark enough that a joke was that there were so many children on the Applegate Train west that the natives could have slipped in a infant, toddler, or young child, and no one would have noticed. Just one more. (Truthfully the dark complexion and hair comes from great-uncle-M who emigrated from Scotland, combined with grandpa L, who dad, dad’s youngest brother, and son, are spitting images of, complexion wise. No doubt of linage.)

      3. GG-great-grandparents the kids they were parenting had intermix of generations. Because the older children, a lot of whom lost their lives fairly young, were having children as the last few were being born to their parents. Thus the younger children, and grandchildren were intermixed ages. Trend has followed down the generations but less difficult to separate out because not as many children, and grandparents weren’t raising their grandchildren. Even my generation. I have uncles the same age or younger than my husband’s siblings. Hubby is barely younger than my youngest uncle. Our son is 12 years younger than the youngest niece of hubby’s siblings children, and 18 years younger than the oldest two. (If we’d been able to have children sooner after getting married the differences wouldn’t have been that much with son’s cousins on dad’s size. But greater power had other plans.)

      1. I have been told, I was really, really, sick with measles, both kinds. As well as Rubella. Too young to remember. Obviously survived. I barely remember chicken pox. Remember the mumps. That was a breeze for me and the youngest sibling. Middle sister had mumps a lot more severe. I remember vaccination clinic days in school.

        1. I got the mumps in 6th grade, with a strep infection as a parting gift. I think I was out of school (but trying to keep up at home) for two weeks, and had to work a bit harder at learning long division. No lasting ill effects, though as a kid, I managed to catch most anything that was going around. One reason I love rural life; it’s rare that I get sick…

          An uncle got the mumps in his mid 20s. No permanent damage, but his testicles were afflicted for the duration.

          1. “Young men who don’t get mumps as a child, get mumps as an adult, don’t have kids.” Not guarantied. But common enough that there is a saying.

            I got really (105 F fever sick) at 19. Strep and tonsillitis. It was two weeks before I was allowed to go back to work, and another week before released for field work (had just enough seasonal vacation, and accumulated sick leave to cover days lost). Hospital kept me overnight (only because mom didn’t get there until the next morning), wanted to keep me for at least 5 days. Mom convinced them otherwise (for good reasons, wasn’t sure their insurance would pay, and I didn’t have any. Insurance did pay, eventually.)

          2. When my brother got scarlet fever, we had to boil all his eating utensils, and Mom and I both got strep anyway.

      2. Born 1945. Had tonsillitis every winter from about 3 until tonsillectomy at 6. Had 2 kinds of measels, each once. Had chicken pox once (about 10?). Exposed to mumps multiple times; never got it. Was vaccinated for smallpox 3 times; none scarred. I was told that meant I was naturally immune; good if correct; natural immunity is a blessing, especially if the idiots have actually kept viable strains “for research”. 😡

        1. There is still smallpox to be found in other places, too. I heard that some Canadians got smallpox back in the 60’s or 70’s from digging in the wrong place and finding bodies buried some 200 years before. Smallpox is not ‘extinct’, it’s just extremely rare these days. Stop vaccinating and it’ll be back in a generation.

          Did you have a lot of contact with cows? Cowpox is related to smallpox, can stimulate immunity to smallpox, but has mild to no symptoms in humans. That was how early doctors figured out vaccination, by investigating why milkmaids rarely got smallpox.

          1. Nope; no contact with cows until I was in my mid-teens. No cowpox, and I’d already had one vaccination that didn’t “take”. I assumed, given the ubiquity of smallpox in Europe for the past 1500 years or so, that I’m the beneficiary of that; the same for mumps. Or maybe I received immunity to smallpox through my mother, who was immunized; I understand that’s not unknown. And thanks for the info, but I was aware of Jenner’s work developing smallpox vaccine, and the “milkmaid connection”. Still interesting, and a helluva lot more scientific than the latest boondoggle from the pharma “Big Three”. 😦

            1. Some Canadians got smallpox back in the 60’s or 70’s from digging in the wrong place and finding bodies buried some 200 years before.
              ………………………….

              There is fiction out there that take that this as a fear. I have the book (finding which one in 1893 ebooks, so not happening) under suspense/archeology, where researchers attempting to research a particular area are regularly murdered by a ghost. Nope, just a single family survivor whose family historically is set the task that the dead were not to be disturbed for any reason. This family had been guarding the graveyard for centuries. Why? Because it is a graveyard of super virulent small pox. Concept a bit out there. But does not take away from the fact that small pox survives in graveyards across Europe, and other locations, from when small pox victims and their belongings were not both burned. Belongings may have been burned, but the victims buried. Then once the graves are disturbed, of coarse now there is a small pox outbreak, which is not linked, immediately, to the disturbance, but obviously a terror attack, because small pox is extinct outside of the lab locations.

          2. Oh, and I forgot to mention… regarding the continued availability of smallpox from a century or two ago (hardy little buggers…), I believe that smallpox vaccinations have already been discontinued, at least in the US. Stupidity (or is it willful blindness?) reigns supreme…

            1. Neither.

              Smallpox vaccination is dangerous. My husband is one of the roughly one in three hundred that had a serious reaction requiring hospitalization, and that’s limited to a population that is in good health to start with. (Military members.) He was in ship’s medical, unable to get up, for most of a week.

              Permanent disability, or death, is not unheard of– and, again, that is in a population that starts out in very good health, with good care, and able to isolate to avoid shedding and infecting anyone who are more likely to die from the vaccine than from a disease that is “may pop up from digging up corpses that happened to die of it.”

              1. How many people are exposed to smallpox every year?

                We don’t know. They’ve been vaccinated, so they don’t get sick.

                If vaccinations stop, if the general population is left even more susceptible to smallpox than they were 100 years ago, and there is ONE case, unrecognized because nobody has ever seen an actual case of smallpox in living memory? Sounds like a recipe for an instant epidemic in which 1 in 3, not 1 in 300, are likely to die.

                Not discounting vaccination risk, just pointing out that stopping carries a risk of much greater import.
                ———————————
                A well-written Zombie Apocalypse novel is at least as believable as anything we’ve heard out of the ‘Publick Health Authoriteez’ over the last three years.

                1. Already have stopped vaccinating Smallpox as a childhood vaccination in late ’70s. I think it was still available to military or special request into the ’80s. But now there isn’t enough vaccines available should there be a breakout caused by exposure to smallpox regardless of the source.

                  1. It was added back to the Military deployment rotation when I deployed in ’07-’08. But that was right around the “We’re missing a sample of small pox and al Qaida may have gotten their hands on it via Russia” time frame. So there are sporadic fits of folk vaccinated. I think they’ve removed it again since but I got out in early ’09.

                    1. Not surprised. I’ve heard, like from people like you, that military have gotten the smallpox vaccine off and on, depending on whatever, at the time. Proving there is still vaccines. Just the stockpile is, lets say, limited. How long to ramp up given a general wide emergency? Who knows, I don’t. Bit unsettling to know general vaccination ended in 1972, and that it is only good for 5 to 6 years. I knew vaccinations had stopped well before my son (’89) and any of his cousins (’89 and later), or even younger cousins once removed (’77 and later), would have been vaccinated. Just not aware it was that far back, or that it wasn’t “once and done”.

                    2. Based on my recollection, I got it as a child (part of “standard vaccinations”. AIUI), then again when I was 11 and going to Europe to visit relatives in Marseilles, then again as part of Marine boot camp regimen. None took; no scars. And FWIW, I heard of no one having problems from it of the sort Fox noted. Maybe it changed between 1963 and now…

                2. How many people are exposed to smallpox every year?
                  We don’t know. They’ve been vaccinated, so they don’t get sick.

                  Not if they’re under 55 and not military or first responders prioritized during Enduring Freedom, they haven’t. It was phased out in 1972.

                  And smallpox vaccination isn’t a one-and-done, it’s expected to be effective (if it takes) for three to five years before you need to consider a booster. For that period, it’s about 95% effective.

                  Famously, “Smallpox’s Final Victim” was a photographer in the UK, who is believed to have caught it via bad lab practices in the next room over, through a shared air vent. Janet Parker.

    3. “When else in history did one have the option to not follow the family business? ”

      When one was utterly unsuited to the family business, kept making a complete hash of it, and got farmed out to learn someone else’s family business for which one was more suited.

      2. one was utterly unsuited to the family business, kept making a complete hash of it, and got farmed out to learn someone else’s family business for which one was more suited.
        …………………

        Apprenticeships were a thing. Whether to the family you were born into, somewhere else, even soldiering was considered an apprenticeship. Point is, below a certain economic social level, choosing what you wanted to do was not an option.

      3. When you had brothers and the business wasn’t enough to support two.

        Ultimogeniture is widely practiced among peasant families when the farm can’t support two. Your youngest son can marry and support the parents alongside his oldest children.

  6. I suppose that yes, I am a child of the good times, having good clear memory of the 1950s and early 60’s – but I was raised by parents and grandparents who remembered the hard times very clearly, and spoke of those hard times now and again. I am just old enough to recall children somewhat older than myself, who walked with heavy braces, or were in wheelchairs because of having contracted polio. And also how happy my grandparents were, that my brothers and sister and I were inoculated against that scourge. Three of my grandparents also left school at 14, to begin a life of work.
    But we also had family friends who were refugees from hard times, bad times, savage times in other places: a girl in my grade school class had her family flee Indonesia because of what amounted to a civil war there. Older brothers of other friends were drafted to fight in Vietnam… others were refugees from Soviet Russia, or survivors of Nazi Germany … so yes, it is one thing to be a child of good times and unthinking of that good fortune … and another to be very aware of just how fortunate one is.

      1. Yep. And as I said earlier, I’m pretty sure Dad was a depression-era Odd. I remember him telling me that people from different countries don’t think like we do, and it’s dangerous to assume they do.

    2. Three of my grandparents also left school at 14, to begin a life of work.
      ………………………

      All 4 of maternal grandfather’s older sisters ganged up on their parents to ensure that he went to HS. As the youngest, he was expected to stay home on the homestead, and take care of them, instead of moving to town to attend HS. His sister’s escaped by marrying. Then after HS he continued to live with one of his sisters’ in town while he went to apprentice in the machine mechanic shop of a local mine. Which is how he met grandma who stayed with the family while she taught at the local primary school. Also staying there was his sister’s BIL (same age), for similar reasons. Grandma dated both.

      1. Victorian British boys often left school to start earning money because they could out-earn their mothers — and their fathers — thus beginning the grueling labor that would leave them unable to out-earn their own sons.

        One son was fortunate enough to get the job of monitor at school, and remembered the anxious family conference where they finally decided that they would leave him there for education even though he could bring in more in other jobs.

    3. Been there, done that.

      Actually I’ve some memories (As I stop to think about it, a lot of memories.) of the ’40s as well as the ’50s and ’60s. Good times? Yes and no, as in my opinion, are most (Another parenthetical aside; actually All!) times. Bad times? Know of many, in many ways, far worst.

      I kind think good decisions, bad decisions, not the times, make the people, while readily admitting the preponderance of said decisions, good, bad or indifferent, mark the times.

      Whatever. I gotta admit I’m quite delighted to have been there then and to be here now.

    4. I know a Vietnamese refugee whose family fled by fishing boat when he was 5. His grandmother did not survive the trip, deliberately starving herself so the younger generations would have food.

      He has Opinions about Brandon. And they are very much “Let’s Go.”

  7. Toronto, November 6th, 2023.

    Lest there be any further question about civilians. There aren’t any. On either side. Just so you know.

    The term ”civilian” is a nicety of war established among European nations after the thousand years of them warring against each other incessantly.

    We are not at war with Europeans. We, like it or not, are in a holy war. One side decided they want a war. We will not be allowed to say no.

      1. Two things occur to me.

        First, I am 100% sure that any individual or mid-sized group that showed up to one of these Hamas rallies with Israeli flags or even Canadian flags would be immediately arrested by Metro Toronto Police. ‘For their own safety’ of course. I’m sure because I’ve seen it done already.

        Second, it is going to be Remembrance Day in a couple more days, November 11th. That’s when all the Xtians come out to mourn their dead and pray in public. Probably won’t be Hamas flags up for long on the 11th, too many bad tempered old White men out walking around. I guess we’ll see.

        1. Seen what’s going on over in the UK?

          Sailors, the usual suspects…and at least one “young Asian” fellow came out to protect some of the memorials, in a counter-protest.

          Andy Ngo is, predictably, actually reporting on stuff like arrests.

          1. Yeah, I’ve been hearing about that. The “protestors” have been desecrating the memorials by removing the red poppies and replacing them with Palestinian flags.

            Everything must be a bout “ME! ME! ME! MY CAUSE! MY CAUSE! MY CAUSE!” It’s temper tantrums at their finest, but unfortunately performed by physical adults, who would likely be quite happy to attack and kill you if you stood up to them.

            It doesn’t help that the Mayor of London is supporting them.

            1. In the UK, they’re also ripping down posters of missing Israelis put up to bring attention to the fact there’s still a couple hundred missing and probably kidnapped from the initial Hamas attack. All of the poster-rippers are Arabic except for maybe one or two old liberal wine moms.

              So the World Jewish Congress put out a TV ad saying “don’t rip them down.” Except the poster-rippers in the ad? Blonde college-age coeds. Not “Palestinians.” Blonde college-age girls.

                1. You mean like almost all “peaceful protesters” over the past few years? Color me unsurprised… 😡

              2. Except the poster-rippers in the ad? Blonde college-age coeds. Not “Palestinians.”

                Because not even the Jewish World Council can break themselves out of the “only northern Europeans can be anti-Semitic” mindset?

                Way to slander people who may have been inclined to support you, dumbasses.

            2. Much like the counter-protests in Seattle, that they’re not unopposed in their looking-for-a-fight is startling. In a good way.

          2. I’ve been watching him. He brings the number of honest (so far) reporters I’ve encountered to… four. (One is dead, one is now a physical therapist.)

              1. They’ve tried; he was hospitalized with a skull fracture after a beating in Portland. Attackers walked.

                1. That one they tried to cover with “it’s just a milkshake.”

                  …which is slang for the Portland Cement mixture which can cause chemical burns.

      2. They’d freeze the bank accounts of Christians praying in the streets in milliseconds. Trudeau is a bastard tyrant.

  8. the idea they owed a duty to their country; that they, inheritors of liberty, should protect it for future generations

    This is the one I don’t agree with and I do not like the fact that I don’t.

    I will move heaven and earth including taking them to Mexico myself (not Canada, when TPTB get the war they want, Canada will send draft dodgers back to the US and/or prison). This not despite my service and those in my line before me but because of it.

    What I’ve learned since 2016 has reached the point where I think the last war that wasn’t a lie was maybe World War 2.

    Yes, I think the entire Cold War was a fraud (and our hostess has a minor role in that…her and Ayn Rand have convinced me we could have ended it by not bailing out the Soviets no latter than 5 years after the death of Stalin).

    The Cold War is all of the service of my father, my uncle, and myself. It was roughly half of my grandfather’s 32 year career (yes, 32…and even then a couple of admirals tried to stop his forced retirement at a little younger than I am now).

    Duty to country, like all duties, needs to be bidirectional. Increasingly it is obvious at least at the Federal level there is no sense of duty to the populace. I’m not sure if there used to be in my lifetime or it’s just the masks have fallen.

    And I don’t like this. The only thing that would be more devastating to my worldview than having to face the truth about the US government would be a time machine that allowed me to see Christ was a low grade con artist.

    1. I don’t mean military service, necessarily, though I’m required to point out that I think a vast number of our officaldom was duped, not corrupted about the cold war. we can’t judge people outside their time. If Heinlein, who was smarter than most politicians believed Russian superiority in war, why wouldn’t politicians.

      1. I get you don’t mean just military, hence the paragraph about bidirectional. The Federal government exists to farm us for our wealth and can’t even have the decency to keep the fox out of the hen house as it harvests the eggs. Soon it will begin cutting us open for them.

        As for Heinlein, he seems by the mid-60s to the 70s at the latest to decide the USSR was mostly a paper tiger, but one with nukes, the same as Reagan and Thatcher clearly had as well. They, reasonably, assumed they’d keep the nukes ready to go and that’s the only tiny bit that keeps me from thinking the Cold War was 100% a lie, only about 90%.

        We now suspect that isn’t true in the present. I wonder if it was in the past.

        1. The U.S. had overwhelming nuclear superiority in the 1950s, but didn’t know it until the U-2 overflights revealed how hollow the Soviet threat was at the time. The ’60s? Both sides were building missiles…and lying through their teeth about reliability of both missiles and warheads.

          On the other hand, the Soviet conventional threat was quite real. You may thank Dr. Pournelle, among others, for solving that. The Strategy of Technology was about fielding a new generation of weapons (and associated training) that leveraged the new microprocessor technology and delivered a huge qualitative advantage.

          Let’s just say that DESERT STORM was a shock. Not only to the Iraqis, but to the West. Kind of like the kid who got picked on starting to work out, hitting someone…and discovering that the “150 lbs” he’d been bench-pressing was actually 150 kg.

          1. The Soviet conventional threat was real to who? To the US Mainland? To Alaska? To Hawaii?

            The US built up to fight that threat and placed US cities under nuclear danger for the most ungrateful people on the planet who, for the most part, wanted the ancestors of the American citizens offered up for incineration gone from their presence. Even today they indulge the ugly American while wondering where the US is on Ukraine and keeping them safe from Russia or on the Middle East and protecting their supply of oil to a large degree.

            Again, I’m really struggling to understand why so many American lives were risked to stop the Soviet Union if we were the only thing keeping it functioning to begin with?

            Why didn’t we cut off aid such as grain sales within half a decade of Stalin dying. Khrushchev wanted to be Gorby (at least Gorby thought so) and while I can see how Stalin was a threat, period, I cannot see why we wasted so much on his predecessors beyond vanity and skimming off the top under the guise of patriotism.

            What evidence do we have that when Biden was first elected in the 70s the feds were no less corrupt than they are under his “leadership”.

            And if that is what it always has been what other lies have we been living under.

            Was the Cold War the longest COVID like scam in the past century? I don’t want to believe that but more and more I’m finding it hard not to.

            Speaking of Dr. Pournelle, I’m starting to think his buggy whip principle should be applied not to just politicians but to trust. Only trust people you can reach with a buggy whip.

            And the modern, technological world can function that way but more and more I’m learning we can’t trust people outside that range.

    3. Interesting Tweet from the Army and responses re: duty to country.

      Yes, I know it is Twitter which isn’t the real world, but I suspect the observation that suddenly, with war on the horizon, recruiting is focusing male and white, is fairly common as is the expression of cultural debt at least as bad as post Vietnam in the 70s if not worse.

    4. > convinced me we could have ended it by not bailing out the Soviets no latter than 5 years after the death of Stalin).

      John Stormer wrote a book called “None Dare Call It Treason” in 1964, detailing the massive amount of economic aid that the USA was giving to the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries. Rivaling what the Fed was dumping into Europe.

      This was on top of the unlimited “anything they want” access to American technology during WWII; they Soviets were given things we didn’t share even with Britain.

      None of it was particularly hidden; he cites newspaper and magazine articles ad tedium.

  10. Anyone who is nostalgic for “the good old days” should go tour a cemetery that predates WWII. The number of graves of children that died before the age of 5 is astonishing to someone who doesn’t know their history. The notion that the death of a child while the parents are still alive is a rare and special tragedy only dates to when antibiotics were released to the general public after they were no longer needed on WWII battlefields.

    1. number of graves of children that died before the age of 5 is astonishing to someone who doesn’t know their history
      …………….

      Surprisingly enough our historical local family graveyard (western version, not eastern which is a lot older and bigger) has only 2 graves with children. Both age 12. Both cousins. One birth defect complications (’68 – ’80). The other vehicle homicide (’87 – ’00, sorry can’t call it an accident).

      One of the scenes that gets me every re-read in Outlander, (I think Snow & Ashes) series is when Jamie is wondering why his daughter is really freaked after the adults bury a family who died from illness (forget what kind). Then Jamie in turn is shocked when Claire tells him that this was the first time his daughter, born and raised in the future, had faced death of anyone from illness, let alone children. At age 25 (or older?). Something to Jamie, was absolutely unheard of.

        1. My paternal grandfather had a sister die as an infant. She wouldn’t be buried in the “family graveyard”, grandpa didn’t become eligible until he married grandma (through her to her grandfather and his parents). Pretty sure maternal grandmother had miscarriages, but don’t know of any stillbirths or infant deaths between aunt and uncle (10 year gap).

          Also not saying that the extended family hasn’t had any infant or young children deaths in the last 180-ish years. Just they aren’t buried at the family cemetery. Until recently the location hasn’t been particularly popular except for a small subset of a subset. More recently there have been inquiries of “what are the qualifications”. Simple. Be a descendant, or married to a descendant, of Jesse Applegate. (One current ex-wife is a gray area, but she plans on being cremated and interned in her daughter’s casket; one of the two children buried there (2000).)

          What people are finding out is: Yes, the grave site is free. Still have to have a legal entity prepare the grave site with a proper purchased containment box, which includes the *digging, and final internment of the casket or ashes, not to leave out the headstone and placement. Guess what? Turns out the grave site (which, generally, not only includes the plot, but plot prep and containment box) is the least expensive part of being buried. If being cremated, being put at the graveyard in a container above ground is not an option because of the designation as a Historical Graveyard.

          ((*)) Didn’t use to be true, up until about 50 years ago. Great-Uncle was the last person interned that family was allowed to dig (shovels, by hand) the grave by his nephews (from stories, a lot of tears, laughter, stories, and alcohol, was involved). The funeral home still had to install the containment box, and later the interment after the funeral. We were able to dig (backhoe, not by hand) dad’s grave for his box of ashes, no grave containment box was used. That recently has been changed to limit ground disturbance caving of graves (a problem with the older interments).

      3. In the cemetery where many of my ancestors are buried, there is a row of headstones of my twice great grandfather’s 12 children who died before the age of 5, and their father was a physician. This was in the late 1800s.

        1. The Oregon Trail is rumored (most unmarked) to be paved with graves. Most children. In historical 20/20 hindsight it is remarkable that the Applegate Cow Wagon Train of 1843, made it all the way to the headwaters of the *Columbia, without any deaths, let alone losing any of the (minimum, of the 3 families that we know of) 30 children, or pregnancies. Especially as the older children were helping with the livestock, and wagon horses. Not to mention the natural trail hazards of steep slopes and river crossings. There is are reasons for this. The “Cow Train” was one part of two wagon trains that combined were the second wagon trains of emigrants heading to the Oregon country. This means the rivers weren’t (as) polluted from previous travelers (extra ordinary precautions for drinkable water wasn’t required). The natives were under the impression that a little grass and trade were a fair price to pay to let the travelers through peacefully. Finally, at least the “Cow Train” side was never in any hurry. Word from the beginning was “we move every day, and everyone moves, no one left behind, no excuses” to beat the snow in the mountains.

          ((*)) Did not get off 100% free of deaths to Oregon City. A small raft carrying two oldest boys, age 14, and their great-uncle, was overturned by a whirlpool, and drowned. But technically this is after the wagon trains completed that part of the journey. (One boy and the uncle were found and buried along the Columbia. The other boy was never found.)

    2. When Abe Lincoln left Springfield IL for the last time in 1861, after his election as president, he gave a well known farewell speech in which he said “here I have gone from a young to an old (age 52 at the time) man… Here my children have been born, and one is buried.” Eventually 3 of his 4 sons (only one made it past age 18) would also be buried in the Lincoln Tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery — and that was NOT unusual for that era. In fact, a local historian says that about HALF the burials in that cemetery the first year it was used (late 1850s) were of children under age 10.

      1. Todd Lincoln died when the family lived in the White House. His death devastated his parents and his mother never fully recovered from his death. Then her husband was assassinated right next to her.

  11. Thanks for this Sarah. Yes, there are emotional scars from growing up in any generation, but I never had to want for food. I was the first post-polio generation, but we still had measles and mumps and chickenpox. I also got to decide what I wanted to be and am now retired and living off the money I was able to save. I constantly have to remind myself, that no one else in history has ever lived as well as the ordinary citizens of the modern USA. And no, you idiot marxists, we didn’t do it by impoverishing the rest of the world. Instead we raised Norman Borlaug who showed the world how to feed everybody, except the marxists who insist on starving their own people like current Sri Lanka and eventually Europe. We raised Henry Ford who saved mankind’s cities from horse shit and increased mobility a hundred fold. We raised Samuel Kier (frank-hood.com/2022/09/24/to-warm-or-not-to-warm/) who saved the whales. We raised Thomas Edison, and George Westinghouse who gave us useful electricity, and those “robber barons” who made resources available to everyone. Yes, they got rich doing it. I don’t blame them for that.

    I just wanted to point out though (mostly to some of the commenters) that the “horrors” of the sweatshops were horrors to the (somebody should let them eat cake) upper class who wrote the books. No one had to shanghai kids to go work in factories. It was better than the hard work for an even more meager and tenuous living on the farm.

      2. Machines are predictable. Livestock? Not so much.
        ………………………

        We laugh at “Better be able to sprint across the field in 9 seconds because the bull can do it in 10.” But … when a Darwin award candidate actually attempts it? Result are not so funny.

        1. Kirk, I think it was, a few years back, related that he had experienced being trampled by sheep. He got up, brushed off the dirt, tended to a couple scratches and got on with things. He also saw the red smear that was the remains of a big cat that was trampled by cattle.

          2. An Air Force tech sergeant I was working with told the story of his buddy who raised chickens. One day he tripped checking a chicken house and got a splinter covered in chicken guano in his hand. Next morning, the red streaks were radiating up his forearm….long story short, his coworkers got him to the hospital just in time for massive doses of antibiotics to do any good. He had no clue.

      3. Well designed and well maintained machines are predictable. I’m not so sure either of those applies to the early days of the industrial revolution. When I first worked in a machine shop there was one machine in the shop that had been converted from line shaft to electric power. A room full of leather drive belts seems to me about as dangerous as a pen full of hogs. As recently as twenty-five years ago one of my coworkers smashed off the fingers of one hand in a forming press. The eye my grandfather lost was due to an accident with machinery, though I’m not sure if it was mining or farming as he did both. I’m not sure I could make a definitive call on whether farming or industrial work was more dangerous a couple of hundred years ago.

            1. Once they stopped insisting that people couldn’t figure out who was dead and actually went and looked at parish records?

              Yes, fairly accurate.

              Turns out that people dying horribly was just fine as long as the city people didn’t have to see the bodies, and that dead was less offensive than losing a finger or otherwise being unsightly.

              Call it the Walmart Effect, since part of why Walmart is so tacky is they’ll hire the disabled that aren’t photogenic.

              1. Cool, where do I find these records or some sort of analysis by someone who actually went through these records? Do parish records have such detailed accounts that you can compare rates of death or disabling injuries between farming and industrial work? I’ve never dug through archival records though I have worked both on farms (a little) and in modern factories (quite a lot).

                I’m generally skeptical of sweeping generalizations about relative safety of different working class occupations from a group of mostly academic, professional, and white collar types.

                1. Try “let me google that for you” dot com, since you want to play silly buggers even as you admit to having little knowledge of even current situations, much less historic ones.

                  You make it quite clear that you have a conclusion, and I do not feel like wasting my time trying to fill an ever higher demanded level of evidence for you.

        2. It is/was not that factories were “safe” as we think of safer.
          It is that, as bad they might have been, they were less insanely dangerous.

          And, yes, as with every new thing many lessons were learned the hardest way.

          1. :nods:

            They were definitely not working on that final 10% of improvement that takes 90% of the work, they were just competing against something that didn’t have enough give to do the modern safety improvements– for example, it’s standard, now, to cull cattle because they have A Bad Attitude. That’s dangerous, and we can get rid of even a beautiful bull or a very dependable cow because they might hurt someone.
            When that cow is all that’s between you and starving? You just risk the harm.

        3. > belt

          Some years ago I visited the machine shop at a defense contractor. They had a gigantic lathe, made some time in the 1800s, that had been converted from overhead belt drive to its own electric motor.

          Some time in the 1970s, one of the shop foremen had built a CNC system for it, from discrete components. They had to recompile the code every time they changed the program.

          It was in use at the time; slowly turning as it re-cut a rocket motor for the Space Shuttle.

      4. Such as the unlikelihood of encountering knee-deep snow and subzero temperatures inside those ‘Dark Satanic Mills’.

        Except — why would they be dark? Workers who can’t see what they’re doing wouldn’t be very productive. A well-lit workplace is far more profitable.

        If a worker is injured, you have to quickly find somebody to take his/her place, who probably won’t be as good at that job. A safe workplace is more profitable.

  12. In regards to “good times make weak men,” Bret Devereaux has a good series of posts at acoup.blog where he goes into where this idea came from and how the evidence contradicts it. Search for “Fremen mirage” on that site.

    1. Yeah. I have said in the past I don’t believe it. It’s all tied in with Russian propaganda that we’re “decadent” BECAUSE we have good things. In other words, it’s bs.

      1. The Krauts and the Nips thought we were soft and decadent too. Slight error in judgement.

      2. The Krauts and the Nips thought we were soft and decadent too. Slight error in judgement.

          1. As a former sailor I can honestly say that I didn’t miss the hard tack and salted horse, but I did occasionally enjoy the ice cream.

      3. “It is unwise to confuse restraint with weakness. For that mistake can result in the removal of the restraint and you will then discover the ferocity that had been being held back.” OR “Don’t anger the patient man.”

  13. Well, here’s a headline:

    “Nightmare scenario”: Legal scholars alarmed over Trump’s “plot to abuse his power” for revenge

    –
    You mean, like the Biden* Regime is doing? What are they smoking?

    Oh, wait, never, mind, it’s Salon. What aren’t they smoking?

  14. I hope you little maniacs are happy. I’ve changed the illustration now.

    –
    But now we can’t see any of their arms. They could be hiding anything! 😛

  16. Some of us, at the beginning of our sixth decade, will catch ourselves, late at night, cataloguing everything we did that day, to justify being alive.

    Or at the beginning of our third decade. I once read a webcomic set on a space station, where a throwaway background detail was a sign reading “Have you earned your air today?” Took me a disturbingly long time to realize it was supposed to be a joke.

    1. Sounds like a sign you’d see on Heinlein’s Luna City, where air was most definitely not free.

  18. This is a very depressing thread. For a more upbeat – and completely ridiculous – take on 1940+, I highly recommend the Richard Jackson saga. Any one of the myriad of things that he gets into could have happened, but he does everything.

    It’s a very fun read, unless you expect realistic fiction, in which case you will find it dreadful.

    I see book 16 is out. I’m not sure where I caught up to the author, but it was well before book 16.

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