Man, did the MS Society screw up big this time. After firing a 90-year-old volunteer who asked “what pronouns meant,” then doubling down on the firing, then realizing people were willing to move their donation money elsewhere, they issued a non-apology that said they had “the best of intentions.”
Plenty of people are calling for more than an apology, and I agree with them. It’s not enough to apologize. The fact that nobody was fired is always telling. Real apologies don’t contain excuses, they simply apologize and do right by the victim.
The leftist craziness that has taken over corporations and other organizations only stops when someone pushes back. Hard. Remember Target?
That drop in stock price was well understood. While Target is still a fairly woke store, it certainly has become far more restrained.
Budweiser too. And Harvard, Yale and Penn. And now the MS Society, because there are plenty of places to donate towards MS research. I guess MS Society might have to lay off some of the 118 employees that make over 100K a year, according to comments at Legal Insurrection.
Face it, the crazy left-wing folks want you to keep donating and buying their products while they wish you would die. I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. Stop donating to them. Don’t feel bad about donating to other causes. You can find better beer than Budweiser, better stores than Target, better colleges than Harvard, and better charities than MS Society. Walk away without looking back. Don’t fund the craziness.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
Not a week goes by without someone remarking that I must be lucky to have military medical insurance. A few years ago I would agree that military health care, despite the ups and downs, was actually not too bad. I’ve had surgery, preventative and acute care, and almost all the time it was decent.
The Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) makes her way through the Panama Canal to cross into the Pacific Ocean on June 3, 2009. The Comfort is participating in Continuing Promise 2009, a four-month humanitarian and civic assistance mission providing medical and other services in seven countries throughout Latin America. DoD photo by the U.S. Navy. (Released)
That’s not true anymore. It’s now taking months to schedule an appointment. I called in January and was given first availability in April. The visits I have had recently are rushed, and I notice more doctors being borrowed between facilities to make appointments happen. Increasingly, I have to seek care at facilities more than an hour’s drive from my home.
What happened? Well, to put it bluntly, the military decided that health care is an expense, not an investment. Last year the services combined all military health records and scheduling into one system called MHS Genesis. This in itself is a good thing, since it means if I seek care at an Air Force hospital, they can get my records electronically without me having to bring physical records along from a Navy hospital
But someone used the merger to lay off thousands of employees. From the perspective of a twidget sitting behind a desk, heath care is an expense. You do everything in your power to minimize expenses, including firing people, shuttering facilities and offering less services in the pursuit of “finding efficiencies.” I’m sure it padded someone’s pockets, but it’s now resulting in less and less health care.
I’ll use myself as an example. I need a routine surgery. Normally it takes 2-4 weeks to schedule. Right now I’m looking at summer time at the earliest, because the USNS COMFORT is deploying, and when she deploys, they empty the nearby Naval hospitals of doctors to go underway. Great for Central America, terrible for our own military members.
Gee, the US government caring more about foreign citizens than their own people? Where have I seen that before?
If you need mental health appointments, better schedule a month out. While there are lots of suicide resources available on the spot, they are almost all over the phone and haven’t made a dent in suicide rates:
“Active Component suicide rates have gradually increased since 2011. While the 2022 Active Component rate is slightly higher (3%) than 2021, both years remain lower than 2020.” -Department of Defense Releases Annual Report on Suicide in the Military: Calendar Year 2022
Surprising no one, the military’s solution to lack of care is…bring more dependents into military health care?
Hicks laid out a plan to grow the number of patients who receive care in a military treatment facility by 7% by the end of 2026, compared to the number of beneficiaries in December 2022. That would mean 3.3 million people would be using the MTFs in three years, according to Military Times calculations.
So let me get this straight. You can’t see patients in a timely fashion now. You “right sized” health care so that it barely gets by. You prioritized treating foreign citizens over your own. You did one thing right, which was move dependents out into civilian care so they can get treated and not suffer. And instead of hiring more people, or changing how you man the USNS COMFORT, or any number of ways to address the inability to provide health care, you want to bring on MORE patients into an already stressed system?
This makes no sense except in one case: financial. In the FY2024 request for funding, there is this section:
Controlling Health Care Costs DOD’s budget request noted that private sector care accounted for 65% of the total care delivered to beneficiaries and that it “will continue to represent an important part of the overall health system in [FY2024] and beyond.” DOD did not state a long-term strategy to control these health care costs while sustaining military medical readiness requirements and other health-related program investments.
So well over half of military health care is delivered by the private sector. Literally, the military couldn’t make it work if it tried. But that’s expensive, and in typical fashion, the military thinks it can do it cheaper, despite not having a great track record in doing so.
Treating health care as an expense, rather than a mission enabler, means we’ll never get the surge capacity needed to deal with wartime injuries and never get appointment scheduling to a reasonable level. This limits the use of Tricare as a recruiting and retention tool, and will exacerbate an already difficult recruiting problem. It’ll force more people, including myself, to pay out of pocket for care we were promised when we first signed up. And for some reason, the military wants to shoot itself in the foot over this.
I don’t recommend it…I heard gunshot wounds take 4-6 weeks to schedule an initial appointment.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
People are finally beginning to pay attention to declining birth rates, since it will send Social Security into a death spiral, and there are plenty of efforts in Congress to provide tax cuts to promote people having more children. These efforts are doomed to fail, because more tax dollars motivates exactly zero people to have more children.
I have five kids at home, and in honor of them today, I’ll give you the top five reasons people don’t have more kids.
Number 5: Our public schools suck
I live in a fairly nice community, and my oldest daughter goes to a high school “academy” which has a specialized track for medicine. You have to apply to get in, so you would think it would be a fairly rigorous education. Sadly, you’d be wrong. There are kids that have failed classes in multiple semesters still hanging out, and just like how not prosecuting criminals brings more crime, not punishing poor performance brings more poor performance.
The older families at our church say “Well just homeschool,” but that is NOT cheap if you use a co-op, online curriculum, or anything other than doing it yourself…which takes a lot of time. Worse still, the child-hating Democrats in my state shot down bills that let homeschoolers participate in sports or get tax credits for expenses, so you get punished socially and financially for choosing homeschool. Worse still, the price of private education has skyrocketed, so if you’re a one-income family with mom or dad at home with lots of kids (like my family is), you better be loaded with money or else it’s a non-starter.
The fact is most large families have to rely on public school, and because they suck so bad, parents spend more time than they did in the past to supervise them, which takes away time from their own activities. You either tolerate loser teachers that don’t understand history, homeschool your kids or pay out the nose for education. Not exactly desirable. And speaking of the time suck…
Number 4: Most after school activities are run by inconsiderate people with no children
My son was in rec league baseball for a while. Good fun, but he would be out at games until 9 pm some nights…on school days, when he’s in middle school. When I was growing up, 9 pm was considered late as a middle schooler. You might be awake at home, but certainly not doing regular activities.
Not anymore. I regularly have kids in activities until 9 or even 11 pm at night! Ballet dance competitions and late night sports are by far the biggest offenders, but it’s everywhere now. These involve driving at night, getting home late, and then (for you as the parent anyway) waking up early to drive the 30-60 minutes to get to work (or more if you live in a big city). Talk about wearing you down! Worse still, half of these places have no pauses for dinner, so if you have a big family with small kids, pray you can pack enough food and that your little ones aren’t tired and cranky.
I particularly hate people that plan meetings or activities over dinner or lunch…pet peeve of mine.
All of this means most of my friends with two kids can manage a grueling rec softball season, but I have to balance five kids desires against my desire to get some sort of sleep. All at the expense of any hobbies I might want. Which brings up the next point…
Number 3: Society constantly tells you to not have kids
Now, I won’t begrudge people their hobbies, just like I don’t begrudge people that make more money than me. Everyone makes choices, and having more kids is a choice. But I’d be a rich man if I had a nickel everytime someone offered me advice along the lines of “You know how birth control works right” ***insert snicker here***.
A more salty friend of mine once, in a group conversation, replied with “I do, and I know your wife does too!”, which was the most alpha-male verbal throat chop I’d seen in a while. But I digress.
It’s already hard enough to find alone time with your spouse as a Catholic who follows the Marquette Method. It sucks having doctors push birth control on you every. single. visit. It’s even more fun to have them tell you that NFP doesn’t work and that you’re stupid for doing it (their words, not mine). And it’s rare to have anyone respond to “I have five living kids” with “Wow, what a beautiful family,” when the more common response is one of disdain. Speaking of disdain…
Number 2: Companies making having kids hard
Car seats used to be thin. Now they are thrones. And you can’t fit three across without making a sacrifice to the car seat goddess. It’s so bad that it is a form of birth control. And before you chime in about “safety ratings,” I looked up the safety ratings of these thrones, and I found the changes between seats to be similar to how professors change chapters in a book to force students to buy new books. The ratings are getting a whole lot better compared to the real estate they consume.
Unless you can explain how adding 5 pounds of side force to an already high rating significantly affects the safety rating, I’m going to always say that car seat manufacturers hate large families. I’ve done the math, it doesn’t add up.
Try eating out now…even McDonalds (which I don’t visit) is expensive. Now multiply it by 7. Try finding a home with enough bedrooms and fighting off investors to buy it, and definitely don’t tell your friends that your kids have to share a bedroom, because you’ll get looked at like some sort of monster. Or try fighting the little old lady HOA President that drives around your neighborhood and issues you tickets for your kids bikes in the front lawn.
Screw that lady…so glad I don’t live in a HOA…
Companies in general appeal to DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids), and if they do appeal to kids, they like you to have two. Anymore and you better be loaded. Which brings me to the last point…
Number 1: Society values work, not your family
If you say “I’m a homemaker” as a woman, you get looked down upon. Even if you manage five kids, which involves feeding them, balancing a checkbook, driving them everywhere, answering school emails and helping out on homework…somehow that isn’t “real work.” But you could sit in an office, drink coffee, chit chat with your office mates, and put in a whole 3 hours of work a day, and that’s “real work.”
Don’t worry though, like the Bobs, work will value you up to the point you are told your services are no longer required!
Face it, we stopped valuing stay-at-home parents a while back. We think they are lesser for picking their family over full-time paid employment.
And that’s the rub right there. When you create a toxic environment for people that have or want large families, you will get smaller families. The societal pressure permeates everything, far more than any financial incentive. Even if you got paid $20,000 a year per child, you’d be called a welfare rat for taking the money. It goes farther than even children, because when the point of getting married isn’t to raise kids, it makes it easy to simply “shack up,” which is why the current marriage rate is less than half that in 1976.
Until our society treats raising kids as a noble goal and worthy of the respect it deserves, we will continue to have declining birth rates among the majority of people that feel societal pressure.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
With all the dumb headlines and conspiracy theories surrounding Taylor Swift, you could be forgiven for missing a far more important headline: that the Ukrainians sank the Russian corvette Ivanovets using unmanned surface vessels.
The Ukrainians continue to use cheap drones to hit Russian troops on land and now attack vessels at sea. When you lack the money and infrastructure to build high end tanks, aircraft and ships, and you have to counter such units, cheap drones are going to be the best selection.
Right now we’re seeing wave attacks of guided drones, which require a human in the loop. This will last until electronic weapons become good enough that having a command link to guide the drones becomes too big of a risk. At that point we’re going to start seeing autonomous drones launched on one-way missions that will strike targets without ever calling back to home.
This isn’t to say that drones make ships, aircraft and troops obsolete. Drones can’t occupy land (at least, not until Skynet has its way) and they can’t run airports and seaports. Drones will act as a way of denying the use of these facilities, sea lanes or land. The opposing side will have to develop cheap ways of responding, because its not economically feasible to use a million dollar missile to shoot down a $10K drone every time you are attacked. The United States would do well to develop these methods now before we have to develop them in a hurry in the Red Sea.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
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