“Hear me, proud members of the Carrion Church, We are the saviors of the dead. Through us they live again, with us they travel, and thusly they are eaten again when we ourselves fall. We are, all of us, moving and living mausoleums where the walker and the flyer are remembered with our every action. Revel, for the dead rejoice within you.”
Charles Freger photographed and travelled through 19 countries to collect this stunning collection of photos of European Pagan Rituals surviving to this day.
I know I’ve posted numerous times about how welfare fraud is in fact very, very rare and welfare programs have lower fraud loss rates than things like businesses. Which is true, but it’s also true that most actual technical welfare fraud doesn’t look much like the stereotype either. Pretty much the only people who “get rich” off fraud are service end things like stores, hospitals, etc. Nobody else really gets rich from lying on their food stamp paperwork.
Welfare fraud looks less like “cadillac and mansion” and more like:
a disabled person lies about their level of mobility because medicaid will often only cover wheelchairs if you need them in the house, not if you need them to go out or do anything outside of the house
a poor woman claims her boyfriend lives separately from her because the amount he contributes to her and their kids counts against her less if it’s listed as childsupport instead of part of the household income and that small difference can be enough to keep the children from going hungry
a poor person sells part of their food stamps and lives on things like instant ramen because almost nobody gets cash assistance anymore and they need things like toilet paper or tooth paste
a disabled person who could not hold down a regular job sells $100 a month in homemade crafts and doesn’t report it because they might have to spend months or even years re-fighting their social security case if they reported it
a homeless person makes more than $20 a month begging but lists their income as zero because that’s less confusing
other things like that
A lot of that is just survival. It’s not a system set up in a way that makes it easy to even live unless you “cheat”. People aren’t doing it to get rich, they do it to cling to the very basics and just manage to live. I don’t blame people who violate the laws to keep their heads above water, I blame the people who set up a horrific system like this and who benefit from harming and exploiting poor people.
Dr. Willie Parker, who is trained as a gynecologist and OBGYN, is a hero for the pro-choice movement because he’s honest about the undiscussed aspects of getting (or not getting) an abortion. Watch how he gives a consultation.
That last statement about regret is so important, because so many people don’t understand what it is or what causes it. Anti-choicers exploit this by manipulating pregnant people and creating doubt, which only increases the likelihood of regret, no matter what decision the pregnant person makes. You know what is best for you, even if it takes some time to figure it out.
