On Drug Testing and the Coming Welfare Card By Bruce Bennett

     Here is an update on the laws that will make drug testing mandatory for all politicians, sorry, people on welfare, like me. As well, things are well advanced for a cashless debit card, part of the coming cashless society, that will constrain your welfare money and prevent you spending it on booze and drugs. Does that sound like a good idea? Is it fair given how the rest of the population runs on booze and drugs? Well, let me put the opposing view.
  https://www.dss.gov.au/families-and-children/programmes-services/welfare-conditionality/cashless-debit-card-overview
  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-09/farm-household-allowance-on-cashless-welfare-cards-no-problem/11492590
  https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/drug-testing-on-agenda-as-parliament-meets/news-story/18920c2d771f76d22e2436a07941ec35
  https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/expanded-cashless-welfare-card-trial-set-to-pass-parliament-in-days-20190908-p52p5y.html
  https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/scott-morrison-eyes-long-term-cashless-debit-card-roll-out-20190907-p52oxb.html
  https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/scott-morrison-says-he-s-puzzled-by-opposition-to-plans-to-drug-test-welfare-recipients-20190909-p52pn1.html
  https://www.humanservices.gov.au/individuals/services/centrelink/cashless-debit-card
  https://unemployedworkersunion.com/say-no-cashless-welfare/

     At present, as part of the Great Replacement, white men like me are docking themselves in record numbers. Even the New York Times, who would never consider such a thing as a Great, or even small, replacement, has addressed the suicide/drug crisis as a deep spiritual crisis of the times:
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/opinion/sunday/the-age-of-american-despair.html

“The working shorthand for this crisis is “deaths of despair,” a resonant phrase conjured by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to describe the sudden rise in deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug abuse since the turn of the millennium. Now a new report from the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee charts the scale of this increase — a doubling from 22.7 deaths of despair per 100,000 American in 2000 to 45.8 per 100,000 in 2017, easily eclipsing all prior 20th-century highs. This conclusion fits with an earlier argument from The Washington Free Beacon’s Charles Fain Lehman that we should subdivide the “despair” problem into distinct categories: A drug crisis driven by the spread of heroin and fentanyl which requires a drug policy solution; a surge in suicides and depression and heavy drinking among middle-aged working-class whites to which economic policy might offer answers; and an increase in depression and suicide generally, and among young people especially, that has more mysterious causes (social media? secularization?) and might only yield to a psychological and spiritual response. As advice to policymakers this disaggregation makes a lot of sense, not least because the next president is more likely to improve drug policy than to ban iPhones or usher in religious renewal. But at the same time the simultaneity of the different self-destroying trends is a brute fact of American life. And that simultaneity does not feel like just a coincidence, just correlation without entanglement — especially when you include other indicators, collapsing birthrates and declining marriage rates and decaying social trust, that all suggest a society suffering a meaning deficit, a loss of purpose and optimism and direction, a gently dehumanizing drift. So if we’re going to answer whatever is killing tens of thousands of our countrymen, it’s as important to pay attention to the would-be cultural healers — from the old churches to the New Agers, the online Nietzscheans to the neo-pagans, Jordan Peterson to Marianne Williamson — as it is to have the policy conversations about what’s possible in the next presidential term. Despair as a sociological phenomenon is rarely permanent: Some force, or forces, will supply new forms of meaning eventually. And it matters not only that this happens, but which forces those will be.”

     Here is the link to the report mentioned above:
  https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/analysis/?id=B29A7E54-0E13-4C4D-83AA-6A49105F0F43

     The short of the long is that this is all part of a cultural-spiritual death roll, as the West gets transformed, chewed up, minced, and traditional values, those embraced by men, are turned upside down and shredded, by both ideology and technology. No band aid “solution” addresses this, and indeed, it seems that all the welfare card system will do is save a few dollars for the government, by knocking some people off welfare, who need a few beers to cope, as they slide into the abyss. As well, I imagine that robberies of booze stores will increase.
  https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/are-the-kids-altright/