Posts Tagged ‘NG36B’

Declining birth rates have nothing to do with taxes and everything to do with society

Posted: February 10, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in abortion, catholic
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There, I said the quiet part out loud.

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.

The future is cheap drones

Posted: February 3, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncategorized
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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.

First aid vs fighting back

Posted: January 13, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Blame Biden Administration, official oppression, vaccine mandates
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To nobody’s huge surprise, “Dr” Fauci revealed that the 6 foot “social distancing” rule was basically made up.

Lest anyone forget, there were plenty of 6-foot Nazis that screamed at you for getting inside the 6 foot distance…unless it was at a BLM riot. People were doing all sorts of logical backflips to justify riots while shutting down church services. I remember having to open church doors and stream service using a cell phone, laptop and projector so the people outside could still attend.

What frickin’ rubbish.

But that’s not the point of this article. During this time thousands of service members were dismissed from service for refusing the vaccine, which we are finding doesn’t work well, and that COVID is going to essentially be like the flu: annoying, even temporarily incapacitating, but not really a threat to young and healthy that (at least now) make up our military force. Most of these were General Discharges, which can negate the amount of VA benefits you receive. Worse still, this was done as businesses were recovering from the shutdown, so many servicemembers and their families suffered through unemployment and underemployment.

Plenty of Republican lawmakers are making it easy for those members to return to service, and most are…not taking it. These same lawmakers are proposing legislation to open VA benefits to these servicemembers and discharge upgrades. I don’t have an issue with any of this, except that this is first aid, and in reality people should be fighting back.

First aid helps people that have been hurt. In this case, servicemembers got screwed out of good jobs, retirement benefits, VA benefits, and all the other things they were promised if they raised their hand to defend our country. Restoring those things will help in the near term, but its not going to repair the long term damage done. Look at how poorly our recruiting efforts are going. More than a few young people watched how a loved one was poorly treated and said “Gee, I’m not signing up for that!”

First aid isn’t enough. People need to fight back.

Every official that pushed this nonsense needs to be punished.

  • Send Fauci to jail. Sounds extreme? The man admitted to spending US money in CHINA developing bioweapons. I see people getting angry over retired service members caught helping the Chinese learn how to land on aircraft carriers. How is this any different?
  • Court martial flag officers that pushed for General Discharges. At least the Navy had the good sense to use Honorable Discharges for most of its folks. Every flag officer that used a General Discharge knew they were screwing people out of benefits, and even late in the game they continued to push for it. Court martial every, single one of them. For the ones already retired, bring them back and charge them, which is still legal (although perhaps bringing back a few admirals and generals will get this thrown out).
  • Fire the civilian leaders that pushed this nonsense. Their zeal and glee in punishing people needs to be matched with stiff fines and jail time.

First aid doesn’t save you when you’re being assaulted. Only fighting back will.

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.

A Navy desperate to keep…everybody!

Posted: January 6, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Afghanistan war, Blame Biden Administration, opinion/news
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Over the holiday period I didn’t bother checking the latest NAVADMINs, because spending time with my family was for more important. So when I looked this week, I saw I missed a doozy: the Navy’s message concerning retention boards.

In December the Navy announces its promotion boards, which are in January (for Captains), Feb-March (for Commanders), and April-May (for Lieutenant Commanders). Some years ago the Navy began convening the retention board immediately after these boards to decide the fates of anyone not selected for promotion. The overarching policy of retention boards is a direct measure of the health of the service, and well, the Naval Service is not healthy.

Take a look at NAVADMIN 291/23. I’ll break it down below:

Paragraph 2 states that any Captain (O-6) that has certain AQDs (basically, special training or expertise in a specific area) that relate to Acquistion can stay until 33 years of service. Normally Captains have to retire at 30 years of service. This isn’t a huge surprise, the Navy is in dire need of Acquisition Workforce personnel, so it’ll keep anyone that it can.

LCDRs (O-4s) that twice failed to select for CDR (O-5) will simply be kept until 20 years, when they can retire. They won’t even be considered for retention…it’s assumed. In the past the retention board could be used to shape manpower by removing the bottom performing LCDRs. That is not happening at all now, essentially if you have a pulse and made O-4, you can stay till 20 years.

Let’s say you’re a LCDR that is a flight instructor, chaplain, cyber warfare engineer, foreign area officer, information professional, maritime space officer, medical corps, nurse corps or supply corps. What if you want to stay past 20 years? Well, you can!

URL 1310 aviators with primary AQDs of DIP or DA5/DA7/DB2/DB5/DB6/DD1/DH3/DL3/DS2 (TACAIR), CWE, FAO, IP, and SC officers selected for continuation will be continued for a period of 3 years to 23 YOAS.  CHC, MSO, MC, and NC officers selected for continuation will be continued until the last day of the month in which the officer 
completes 24 YOAS.

That right there is a bad sign. That means we are significantly short in all those areas, and we’re willing to keep people for an additional 3-4 years to cover the gaps.

What about Lieutenants (O-3s)? Typically LTs that are passed over twice for O-4 are sent home at the end of the next fiscal year. The only LTs I’ve seen the Navy hold onto are people that were prior enlisted and needed another year to reach mandatory officer retirement criteria. But now: 

Lieutenant (LT)  Aerospace Engineering Duty Officer (AEDO), CHC, CWE, Cryptologic Warfare (CW), Dental Corps (DC), FAO, Intelligence Officer (INTEL), IP, Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAGC), MC, Medical Service Corps (MSC), MSO, NC, and SC will follow the below as applicable:
    a.  2XFOS LTs covered in paragraph 4 with less than 18 YOAS and selected 
for continuation will be continued for a period of three years, but not 
beyond retirement eligibility at 20 YOAS.

FOS stands for “Failure of Selection.”

So now LTs can stay for 20 years until they can retire. I never thought I’d see that, but here we are. Granted, it’s not every officer, but it won’t surprise me if the retention board eligibility expands to include more officer specialties.

I want to remind everyone that this crisis was generated 100% by our own government:

  • We changed the retirement system way back in 2016-2018, which was the number one thing that kept good people in past 5-10 years of service. I predicted this would end badly, by the way.
  • Then we started losing wars, specifically Afghanistan. We drew out of Afghanistan in a horrible way, so everyone that lost limbs or part of their sanity fighting in that war felt betrayed. This in turn made them tell their kids to never join the military.
  • Oh, and we stayed around in Syria so more of our people could die needlessly. Because nothing says we love our Special Forces more than allowing them to die needlessly in a crappy country where we don’t have an exit strategy.
  • THEN, we kicked people out over the COVID vaccine. Instead of handling that crisis with care, we booted people with general discharges. But don’t worry, we’ll invite them back, I’m sure they’ll come in droves!
  • THEN, the Navy played politics and openly told Congress to go f*#! themselves and used OPTAR money to pay for abortion.

NOW, we are SHOCKED! SHOCKED! that we are in a huge recruiting. crisis. I made a prediction back in February that the Navy would use its “BINGO card” to keep people in:

  1. Not kicking people out for physical fitness test failures
  2. Waiving darn near everything, from age to non-violent felonies
  3. Asking people to pretty-please stay around a few more years
  4. Opening OCS and other admissions
  5. Raising bonuses
  6. Make life better for officers
  7. Reduce opportunities to leave early
  8. Op-Hold people

The Navy has in fact done all the things in bold. The only missing one is making life better. Maybe that’s a draw, since if you wanted free time and per diem off to go murder your unborn baby, you can now get it. The only prediction that hasn’t held was that the Navy would remove marijuana from its drug test, although it was totally an option in Congress.

My prediction for 2024: it only gets worse!

  • We’ll relax rules on marijuana, opioids and other drugs
  • Mental health rules will relax
  • Bonuses will be handed out just to get on the bus
  • We’ll create some new ribbon candy to congratulate people on passing boot camp
  • We’ll see Navy advertisements EVERYWHERE, especially on Reddit, YouTube, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms

None of it will work. When we spend more time focused on renaming the John C Stennis aircraft carrier, continue to allow flag officers to violate rules and get away with it (remember, you can sexually assault people and not go to jail, so long as you’re a 3-star in the Air Force), and continue to allow a broke acquisition system to churn out expensive weapons, we can’t recruit the best people. The best men and women want to join the Navy to fight for their country, with people and leaders they trust and on equipment that works. They want people held accountable for their actions, and they want others to hold them accountable because that’s how they become better.

We’re doing all the wrong things, and I expect 2024 to be another terrible year for military manning.

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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