SHREVEPORT – I miss the days when I could get my grocery list at one store.
I am one of those people who go to the grocery store several times a week; I plan a meal and then I go get what I need. I avoid canned vegetables when I can and buy fresh whenever possible. For the most part, I buy meat when it’s on sale and stock the freezer. I seldom keep milk (unless I’m on a rare cereal binge) but we always have eggs.
So, I’m in a grocery store several times a week depending on what is going on in my kitchen. As threats of food shortages loom, I am one of those people that will have to readjust my shopping habits. And you know, the strangest things end up being absent from the shelves. There is no rhyme or reason to it, as a rule.
Is this regional? Nationwide? I mean, are saltines missing all over the country, or just where I am? A couple of weeks ago it was pasta; no egg noodles were to be found at any store in town. For the longest time I couldn’t get Powerade. It’s just weird. And not that I buy them, but my store is always out of Ramen noodles. Huge bare gaps in the shelves where Ramen used to be plentiful.
Now I am hearing about an egg shortage, and it makes me wish I kept chickens.
Not really.
I don’t want chickens.
But again: changing shopping habits. As this weird shortage thing continues, we may even have to change eating habits, too.
Food prices are also changing how we all shop. I’ve never been a coupon clipper; I tried it years ago. I would hear about women that saved 75% of their grocery bill using coupons and taking advantage of rebates, but I could never achieve that. I would forget my coupons, or I would resent having to purchase three bottles of ketchup to save twenty-five cents and so I’d just buy one bottle when I needed it. Coupon clipping never worked for me.
That being said, I do find myself checking the sale papers now and when things I actually use are on sale I will stock up and buy extra. I’ve never done that before and I don’t have a lot of storage room in my kitchen.
I say all of this not because anyone on the planet cares about my shopping habits, but I do have concern about where all of this shortage business will end, and I worry about how prices will go. Reportedly, food prices will rise at least another ten percent in coming days. I don’t know how struggling families will manage these higher fuel and food prices.
I’m no economist by any means but even I can see that it is the working middle class that is getting hammered. Those people who don’t qualify for SNAP benefits and who are working multiple jobs just to hang on – these are the people that are suffering.
Obviously.
I have set out a couple of tomato plants and I wish I had room for a full-blown garden. Maybe we all need to go back to neighborhood Victory gardens
Back in September I warned that military recruiting would nose dive over the next few years, complicated with a rise in early retirements and people leaving after their first enlistment. Given the trend starting in 2018 when the Blended Retirement fully replaced the old retirement system, my estimate was that in 2024 we would reach maximum recruiting pain, where people would be leaving and we couldn’t keep up.
A flurry of recent stories seems to indicate that this prediction is still valid.
Camarillo said the Army’s end strength, or total number of forces, would go from 485,000 soldiers currently to 476,000 in fiscal year 2022, which ends in September, and further down to 473,000 in fiscal year 2023.
He said the Army decided on reducing its recruitment goals instead of lowering standards.
Breitbart
But maybe this is just an Army problem? Or maybe the Army was told to shrink and this is a face saving measure? While that’s possible, let’s look at the Air Force.
The Air Force recruitment goal is 27,452 new airmen by Sept. 30. Halfway into the fiscal year, 9,920 new recruits are in uniform and 5,314 have signed contracts, according to Air Force data.
“We will struggle to meet our recruiting goal for fiscal year 2022,” Thomas said. “This is really the hardest recruiting environment since about 1999.”
The Navy is offering up to $50,000 bonuses for someone to enlist for six years. That’s unheard of in the Navy unless you happen to be a nuclear trained Sailor. The only reason you throw lots of money at a human resource problem is because you can’t get the talent with your current method.
And the Marines? They do a better job hiding it, calling it “Becoming pickier” about who they recruit, but its still right in first paragraph: “…as the Corps looks to recruit fewer and better Marines…”
Recruiting is getting tougher. That point is pretty clear. But why is it getting tougher? Well, if you trust the Army and Air Force, they say its because Americans are fatter and mentally less fit.
“The biggest disqualifying factors are obesity, fitness and mental health issues. This should not come as a surprise. Obesity in America, including among youth, continues to increase. More and more youth are being treated for mental health issues and being prescribed psychotropic drugs for treatment. Current numbers coming out of the Pentagon are that the percentage of individuals qualified to enlist without a waiver has dropped from 29% in 2016 to less than 25% in 2022.”
Now, obesity is on the rise. Whether or not you trust the CDCs numbers, there are plenty of other graphs showing Americans, on average, being more overweight and more grossly overweight. There is also a rise in mental health issues, but I think its a problem of classifying darn near everything as a mental health issue and prescribing drugs for it. Its also not nearly as big an issue as one might think: by the CDCs data, its affecting somewhere around 6% of children.
I’d like to offer a different view here, and that is that even if the populace got healthier overnight, the military would struggle to recruit anyway, because the public no longer trusts the military.
There are plenty of pollsters that track trust in the military, often as part of a larger poll looking at trust in government institutions. If you look at Gallup, you’ll see a slight decline in trust, although Gallup lumps “a great deal” and “quite a lot” into the same category of trust when reporting numbers. It’s still a decline though, and when you look at a more in-depth breakout, we see the percentage of people responding “a great deal” declining while the “some” and “very little” crowd slowly grows.
Other polls also show this. This poll from the Reagan Foundation shows a massive drop in people who trust the military “a great deal,” and a large rise in people who don’t trust it “much at all.” Now, given its the Reagan Foundation, I was skeptical as to who they selected for the poll, but scrolling down to the bottom showed a pretty even split between Republicans, Democrats and Independent voters, so I’d like to think this is fairly representative of all Americans.
This lack of trust manifests itself in a lot of ways, from voting in politicians who actively campaign to cut defense spending to parents suggesting alternatives to their children desiring to join the military. When nearly half of parents would actively push their kids away from joining the military, that’s a pretty stark indicator that parents lack trust in the military. These actions make it much harder to recruit new members.
Take the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. While almost no Americans (except the CEOs at Northrup Grumman and BAE) supported staying in Afghanistan, most Americans wanted an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan, similar to the US withdrawal from Iraq that left an intact government (no, not the Obama withdrawal, the Trump one). Did we get that? Nope. Not by a longshot. Afghanistan was at a stalemate, and the number of deaths and injuries had dropped to nearly zero. An orderly withdrawal over a year or two would likely have left a functioning government and a decent US and NATO victory in the region. Instead, we got a cowardly retreat.
What about the military’s COVID-19 vaccine policy? The military chose to die on this hill and forced out hundreds, likely soon to be thousands, of members over the COVID vaccine. Religious waivers were denied out of hand, to the shock of many. The military really said the quiet part out loud: they wanted compliance, and they would crush people as needed to get it.
What about the military’s increasingly woke pandering, alluded to in the Army article? The recent push to be more “inclusive,” along with extremism training, has really irked plenty of service members. While its hard to get numbers on this, many service members are voting with their feet. It is starting to show in retention numbers. The military has always been a triangle, with lots of junior people on the bottom and less on the top. But that relies on the bottom people staying past their first enlistment. And well, they aren’t. The trend is slow, but with the Navy numbers here, you can see that there are less E4 and E5 Sailors staying around. The E6 and above numbers are steady, but as those members reach 20 years, many will choose to retire, and the new retirement system doesn’t incentivize staying in the military long term, so the young people joining today will be leaving in droves after a 4-6 year enlistment.
Let’s also look at one more statistic that is pretty shocking: the military’s use of non-judicial punishment. Most people don’t realize that if the military suspects a service member committed a crime, they really can violated the rights that citizens normally have in terms of due process. The process of punishing a service member through non-judicial punishment (called NJP) involves gathering some evidence and declaring that there is a “preponderance of evidence” to find them guilty. This legal standard means that the judge (in most cases, a military officer not trained in the law) finds there to be enough evidence that he or she is convinced by at least 50% that the service member committed a crime. Contrast this with “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which requires members to be convinced that there is essentially no real doubt that a member committed a crime.
If this sounds like it can be abused, you better believe it is. It’s hard to get data, but the Air Force released some information on the number of NJP cases per thousand airmen. If I add up the numbers, I get a rate of 45.32 cases per thousand in 2019, or 4,532 cases per 100 thousand. That seems really high, especially given that crime overall is falling in the US. Comparing it to total property crime rates in the US (1,953 per 100 thousand) and total violent crimes (398 per 100 thousand), it seems really high. Are Airmen engaging in more criminal behavior then their civilian counterparts? What kind of people are we recruiting that we get this high number? Or perhaps the system is grinding on otherwise innocent people in the disguise of “maintaining good order and discipline.” If that’s the case, how long will service members want to stay in a system like this?
The point here is that the military has become a hostile work environment, which is motivating people to seek employment elsewhere. Blaming obesity and mental health is a cop-out, because its something external to the organization that allow you to throw up your hands and say “People are fat and mentally unstable, thus I cannot reach my recruiting goals!” The SEALs and Marines have had tough standards for years, yet they always made numbers, largely due to people trusting those organizations and wanting to be there. That trust is gone due to actions the military took. Between losing wars, eliminating benefits and promoting an justice system that is broken and corrupt, the military has only itself to blame for creating a workplace that nobody wants to work in anymore.
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. That should be obvious, since those organizations will tell you everything is just fine with them. If you liked this article, please consider donating to Da Blog and purchasing a book by the author for you or your friends.
As it’s April fools day and I can’t think of a bigger joke than our current movement and media (plus I need to get my taxes done today) I will leave you with this Monty Python skit about Hungarian Phrasebooks
and we’ll finish off with this April Fools joke from the Yes Minister special that was the lead in to Yes Prime Minister. I think it’s one of the funniest scenes in the entire series
I have a horrible feeling that this is actually how most candidates for high office are chosen.
I have always been most proud of the fact that I am truly a unique individual. I have never fit in anywhere and never wanted to. The people who know me say that I am way, way out there in my own little universe. I don’t march to the beat of a different drum, I wander aimlessly to music that only I can hear in my head.
From the beginning of this great nation, individuality was most highly prized. Rugged individualism was one of the cornerstones that the United States was built upon. The Constitution was written specifically to protect the God-given natural rights of every single individual in the United States.
Classical Liberalism, which is the precise opposite of modern liberalism, is the philosophy that was closely held by the founding fathers of the United States. They infused that philosophy into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution so thoroughly that it is the lifeblood of the United States.
Libertarianism is the modern equivalent of Classical Liberalism. That is the philosophy that is at the very core of my being because no philosophy is more individualistic. According to Libertarianism and Classical Liberalism, each and every individual is free to do whatever they want to as long as they do not hurt any individual or interfere with the rights of any other individual.
In a true Classically Liberal society, such as the United States was meant to be, each and every individual is free to live their lives as they wish, as long as do not hurt anyone or interfere with the rights of anyone. As long as we do not hurt others or interfere with the rights of others, the government at all levels must leave us alone to live our lives as we wish, neither restraining or helping us in any way.
Today the United States is as far away from being a Classically Liberal society as can possibly be because this nation has been infected by various forms of collectivist philosophies, in ever increasing amounts, for more than 100 years. Collectivism is the very opposite of individualism. Those utopian philosophies, when instituted, turn any society into a hell where any individual, or group of individuals, can be sacrificed by any government, for any reason. This is most often done in the name of the “greater good.”
The Democratic Party has been completely taken over by collectivists of a socialist variety. Since the installation of Joe Biden, thanks to the stolen 2020 presidential election, the Democrats have nearly completed their transformation of the United States into collectivist hell hole.
Rather than individualism, collectivist mob rule by brain washed masses is now the predominant culture of United States.
In primitive environments, the herd instinct serves as a means of survival. If some sense danger and rush to safety, all follow. But how does such a conformity impulse work in a high-tech society like ours? It doesn’t really.
Sure, a certain level of conformity is normal for a society to function. But an unchecked conformity impulse in a technological society like ours acts more like slow-motion suicide than a survival mechanism. We think we’re saving ourselves by conforming, but in the long run the opposite is true.
In fact, our instinct to conform has become a weapon tyrants use to control us by threatening social isolation for those who don’t obey. This is especially the case when a monopoly of tech overlords can broadcast propaganda to the herd, instantly and globally. In such cases there is no “wisdom of crowds.” When the masses obey the propaganda to avoid social punishment, they only prop up propaganda and thereby spread social turmoil.
The lack of resistance to the liberty destroying mandates and lockdowns imposed to combat the Wuhan Flu here in the United States was rather appalling to me. This lack of resistance was brought about by decades of collectivist indoctrination and the destruction of our true history.
If we were still a nation of nonconforming nonconformists like me, the Wuhan Flu restrictions, mandates, lockdowns, and other nonsense would have ended rather quickly. Unfortunately for all of us, the United States is now a nation of conforming sheeple.
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