Some days ago, Buck T. at Ace of Spades HQ linked to this essay regarding the great Satanic Day Care Abuse Panic, and how elements of that exercise in public/law enforcement/media insanity duplicates many of the features of the current Trans-Kids! Eleventy!!! panic. Which it does, in some respects, especially in how the establishment news media elevated the panic …because that’s what the media do: Scare the ever-living-snot out of the reading/viewing public because that is what sells issues and page views. Once the panic-train gets going, every cynical exploiter of the panic wants to leap aboard the current trend.
From Sacrificing FOR Freedom to Choosing the Sacrifice OF Freedom
On June 6, 1944, thousands of young Americans went ashore or parachuted into enemy fire.
And in 2023, a survey found that 29% of young Americans (18-29) said they would favor the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.
Here is the survey detail. Note that the desire to exist in an Orwellian world is far stronger among those 18-40 than among those older. Interestingly, people who identify themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘moderate’ are more likely to desire perpetual surveillance than those who call themselves ‘conservative’, ‘very conservative, or ”very liberal.’
History Friday – A Visit to Fort Sam Houston
I had reason to visit Fort Sam Houston today to pick up a set of prescriptions, at the new and vastly expanded BX mall, going through that one back gate where Harry Wurzbach dead-ends, after wandering past the military cemetery, the golf course and the Towers at Park Lane. It’s been a familiar haunt to me for years, even if I was never assigned there, or had reason to go to any offices when I was active duty. It was an open post back then so wide-open that it was only embarrassment that kept the Fort Sam EM/NCO club from being listed as off-limits to Air Force personnel. (There was, according to scuttlebutt, a dissolute and faintly dangerous element which used to hang out at that club.) I used to take a short-cut through the post on North New Braunfels to circumvent traffic jams on the Pan-Am Highway, when I had to drive through to Lackland AFB from where I lived on the north-east side of town. I was basically familiar with the older part; the stately red-brick Victorian senior officer-housing mansions along the northern and western side of the monumental, L-shaped parade ground, and the series of enormous three-story neo-Spanish Colonial style tile-roofed administration buildings and barracks which lined the opposite side. The mansions along “colonel’s row” always looked well kept, but in the few years after I retired, some of the older buildings began looking pretty ragged, decrepit even. I sometimes wondered if the Army had given up on painting them altogether, trimming shrubbery and pulling up weeds in the lawns around. Part of the peace dividend, I guessed.
What Things Cost, Then and Now
When reading about earlier times, the costs of various items are often mentioned, as are wages for different kinds of work. To get any sense of meaning from these numbers, they need to be compared somehow with equivalent costs in our present currency. But the estimation of inflation is far from an exact science.
Here’s a site that looks at historical vs current costs from multiple angles: Measuring Worth. I haven’t studied it in any detail yet, but it looks interesting.
See also this: Prices and Wages by Decade, 1600s-2000s