Day: September 5, 2019

Screw The Elderly!

Closing Thought–05Sep19

When I was forced to retire I was fortunate that I had a good pension and Medicare but too many seniors must depend on others for some of the necessities like FOOD.

When I was working for the State I saw just how good such programs as Meals On Wheels were….but that successful program has run into monetary problems thanx to the GOP and their cuts to programs like Meals On Wheels……to the point that many seniors are going hungry.

And government relief falls short. One of the main federal programs helping seniors is starved for money. The Older Americans Act — passed more than half a century ago as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms — was amended in 1972 to provide for home-delivered and group meals, along with other services, for anyone 60 and older. But its funding has lagged far behind senior population growth, as well as economic inflation.

The biggest chunk of the act’s budget, nutrition services, dropped by 8% over the past 18 years when adjusted for inflation, an AARP report found in February. Home-delivered and group meals have decreased by nearly 21 million since 2005. Only a fraction of those facing food insecurity get any meal services under the act; a U.S. Government Accountability Office report examining 2013 data found 83% got none.

https://truthout.org/articles/meals-on-wheels-is-starved-for-cash-leaving-many-seniors-hungry/

This should be unacceptable to ALL Americans.

I feel certain that somewhere some mental midget will try and blame this on immigrants…..as they always do to hide their racism……but this would not be a problem if diverted funds were used where they were needed……a wall is not that spot.

By the way….China built a wall to stop “immigrants” and it stopped nothing…..money pissed away just as the US is doing today.

Learn Stuff!

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Not Weary, Apathetic

Just recently I wrote a post that got a good conversation started…..https://lobotero.com/2019/07/23/are-we-war-weary/

When I returned to civilian life after Vietnam I was amazed it just how little people knew of the country that were bombing into the stone age.  They knew there was a war that the country was fighting but had NO idea where it was or why were fighting other than some moronic slogan.

After I wrote my post I read another one that is accurate as well……

In May 2019, retired general and former national security advisor H.R. McMaster lamented that a narrative of war-weariness is hurting America. “A young student stood up and said ‘all I’ve known my whole life is war,’” said McMaster, referring to a recent town hall he watched. “Now, he’s never been to war, but he’s been subjected, I think, to this narrative of war-weariness.” Of course, one student is not necessarily representative of an entire population. And while McMaster isn’t wrong, the focus on war-weariness obscures the more general and arguably more pernicious fact that the American population is broadly disengaged from American foreign policy and the places it takes soldiers like myself. In fact, during CNN’s series of hour-long town hall events with five leading 2020 Democratic candidates in April, only three questions were asked about foreign policy. None of them were about America’s nearly two-decade-long post-9/11 wars.

When I told my family and close friends that I would be deploying to Syria, the common reaction was confusion. “Wait,” one civilian friend asked me, “we have troops in Syria?” Indeed, when President Donald Trump announced that he would be withdrawing American forces from the country last year, the few posts I saw from friends on Facebook conveyed surprise—not at the president’s sudden policy reversal, but at the fact America had invested blood and treasure there in the first place. These are neither uneducated nor politically disengaged citizens. On the contrary, many are college-educated, civically aware people who are as likely to share a think piece from the Atlantic as they are the latest Game of Thrones meme. Their attention was just focused elsewhere—immigration, healthcare, and the latest speculation about the Mueller investigation.

https://mwi.usma.edu/americans-arent-war-weary-theyre-war-apathetic/

It is a shame that a young soldier can go on a deployment into a war zone and the population could care less.

They care when they are told to care but on their own they could care less…..more people care what happens to those on “Naked and Afraid” than what happens to a soldier.

Makes me ashamed.

I may have left the military and laid my weapon aside in exchange for pen and paper and I fight on.

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Is Bolton Out?

I have made NO secret that I do not like the policies and the ideas of Trump’s adviser John Bolton.

I have disliked this man for decades when I first became acquainted with him and his war hawk ideas…..I shuddered when he became ambassador to the United Nations under GW.

He then became a hit man against Obama foreign policy on FOX where he fit in well with the spreading of crap news.

And then Trump installs this hawk into his inner circle of adviser as the NatSec Adviser……and every since he has not been on the same page as his president…..and now it looks like His Majesty may have had enough crap out of Bolton….

John Bolton doesn’t seem like a sidelines kind of guy—but the hard-talking national security adviser appears headed that way as he opposes his boss yet again, the Washington Post reports. Their latest conflict? Afghanistan, where President Trump is considering a reduction in US troops if the Taliban will cut ties with al-Qaeda and stop them from training, fundraising, recruiting, and so on. Bolton opposes the Taliban talks and wasn’t invited this month when Trump huddled with top officials to discuss Afghanistan at the president’s golf club. Officials say they feared Bolton and his aides would oppose the deal and leak details to the media. “His team has a reputation for losing and leaking,” says a top White House official.

Bolton later got into the meeting and did disagree with Trump. Bolton has also clashed with US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who’s leading the talks and apparently refused to let Bolton have a copy of the draft agreement with the Taliban. One official said Bolton was enraged. “I can’t think of another example where a national security adviser was sidelined like this,” says an international security expert. But Bolton has already disagreed with Trump on Iran and North Korea—playing the hawk to Trump’s quasi-dove—and maybe that helps. “I think Bolton loves it, and I think the president does too,” the head of a think tank told the New York Times in May. “It opens up some diplomatic space for him to go back and forth between a very hard-line position and holding talks.”

It is about time!

His departure cannot come soon enough to my way of thinking……now we need to work on that slug Pompeo who is in the same vane as Bolton….time for him to look to the exit door.

“Et Certa Apud Verbis”

We Dodged A Bullet

Closing Thought–03Sep19

By “We” I mean the country…..looks like Hurricane Dorian will spare the US this time from a direct hit…….a grazing blow is far better than a direct hit….says a survivor of Katrina.

cone graphic

I wish I could say that the Bahamas were as fortunate as we…..

Then there is the coverage of this storm by the MSM…..we should get very little interaction with this storm and yet the MSM in their disappointment still reports that there is little wind, sparse on rain and storm surge is negligible….but that all should be prepared for the rush of water that will precede the storm….these “reporters” seem to be making up anything that could go wrong and then would make them the star of the show.

Those brave people for the weather channel…where were they when the Bahamas got hit?

But the most disturbing story so far is the one of the American president…..

In what President Trump’s critics are calling “Sharpie-gate” the president delivered a Hurricane Dorian update Wednesday in front of a map that had been doctored to back up his claim that the storm had been expected to hit Alabama. The NOAA forecast map from Aug. 29 had been altered with a Sharpie to include a loop around the state, the BBC reports. When Trump was asked about the change later Wednesday, he said “I don’t know” three times, adding: “I know Alabama was in the original forecast, they thought it would get a piece of it.” White House deputy press secretary J. Hogan Gidley confirmed in a tweet that the map had been altered with a marker, but slammed the media for going “ballistic” over it, the Washington Post reports. White House photos show that Trump was presented with the correct map on Aug. 29.

It’s not clear whether the president himself altered the map, but whoever is responsible may have broken a law against knowingly issuing or publishing “any counterfeit weather forecast or warning of weather conditions falsely representing such forecast or warning to have been issued or published by the Weather Bureau, United States Signal Service, or other branch of the Government service,”which is punishable by up to 90 days in jail, Politico reports. Trump’s warning Sunday that Alabama was in Dorian’s path was quickly denied by the National Weather Service, but he has continued to insist, incorrectly, that the storm was widely forecast to hit the state. On Wednesday night, he tweeted an Aug. 28 forecast map that showed a few possible paths including Alabama, saying: “As you can see, almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama. I accept the Fake News apologies!

This from a person that continuously bitches about fake news….and is the greatest spreader of said news.

“Lego Ergo Scribo”