The Human Battle

Dear friends on the right: No, half the country is NOT suddenly OK with you and fellow Americans being carted off to gulags.

Dear friends on the left: No, half this country is NOT suddenly irredeemably racist, white supremacist and full of bigoted hate.

We are all being lied to. All of us, on both sides.  This is why we can’t have conversations anymore. Both sides are having their ears whispered into with horrible lies about people on the other side. People who are family, on the other side. People who used to be best friends, on the other side. Long time business associates, classmates, acquaintances, your hairdresser – on the other side.

Forget the fantastical lies you are hearing about them. What do you KNOW about them? Forget that they are a Trump supporter or a Biden voter. Who are they beyond that? That’s not all they are. Is that all YOU are?

Don’t say you must have never really known them. You did. You are just being gaslit. You need to get back to reality and back to listening without screaming. We all do. None of this is real. It all started in 2020 sometime and continues, unfortunately. But we need to get off this ride NOW.

We’ve all seen how toxic social media and the 24 hour news cycle has become. It is a never ending vortex of click bait and attention hounding, exponentially feeding into itself until it becomes a panic ridden frenzy of fear, rage and horror in your soul, haunting you 24/7 for months and months until you feel there is no getting out alive…

I have heard many times that this is a spiritual battle and that is 100% correct. It is a battle for your spirit and for the spirit of the American people, but also for the human spirit of the world. For this is not a uniquely American battle. It is the same battle that has been fought spiritually throughout the ages. It is the human battle. And yes, it is a political one, but maybe not in the way you think.

This battle is bigger than Trump or Biden or Republican or Democrat. This is the age old battle over power. This is the battle for The Ring. Freedom v Authority. Power v The People. Big v Small. Evil v The Underdog. But the battlefield is messy. Which side you align with politically largely dictates who you perceive the good or bad players to be. But we ALL think we’re the good guy. We all want to be on the side of good. Most of us anyway. We are all the protagonist in our own story. That’s true for everyone, including your former best friend. Your estranged brother. They have their reasons for feeling the way they do. So do you. Give them grace. They’ve been lied to. So have you. We all need to rediscover truth together, without all the noise.

I’ve long felt that much of the Bible and of prophecy is allegory and trying to make sense of the world in spiritual terms where absolute terms make no sense. Who can fully understand the mind and motivations of every actor on the stage shaping world events? Taken as a whole, human behavior develops patterns. It’s been said that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. That’s because human nature is a real thing. People behave in semi-predictable ways when we look at macros, at big pictures. Maybe that’s why prophecy works…

Maybe the prophecy of the anti-christ and of tribulation and mark of the beast and authoritarian control is just… another thing that rhymes. What if it has happened many times? And will happen many more times… Can you imagine living through WWII and the holocaust and that NOT being the End Times? It was the end for a lot of people. For 6 million Jews….

What if we have imagined the great rapture as being taken up to glory in the clouds by a triumphant Jesus returning to save us all…. When in reality, Jesus took his faithful home in the clouds of the crematoriums? And in the killing fields of Cambodia? And in the gulags of Russia? Et cetera, et cetera… Is that depressing? Or hopeful in some way? Maybe its both.

But how could Hitler NOT be an anti-christ and a beast?

I would submit that he was. He was not the first and he will not be the last for he is merely a product of human nature when it lusts for power, is filled with hate and gets its wish. And how many blood-thirsty dictators and emperors has history seen fulfill this prophecy? Are you waiting for someone worse than Caligula? Vlad the Impaler? Bloody Mary? Caesar? Genghis Khan? Napoleon Bonapart? Lenin? Stalin? Pol Pot? Maybe the truth is there is an antichrist for every time and place in history. We will have ours, and perhaps we should be prepared that maybe the next democide, like the last, IS the rapture, for us…

A horrifying thought for someone like me raised on Christian fairytales… but maybe. History is full of people misinterpreting prophecy because they didn’t like what they saw in it…

But haven’t we seen the mark of the beast over and over in currency with the king’s face on it? You cannot do commerce without it… Now credit cards and bank accounts. Regulated by the empire’s government and when you lose access to the system, you starve. How is that not the mark of the beast? What more are we waiting for? It is all here, and has been here over and over again throughout time.

What did Jesus say about Caesar’s currency? Did He say to shun it and starve? Go off grid? His attitude seemed to be to co-exist with Caesar as well as you can. But He, too, died a martyr, so we know Caesar will eventually come for us.

But there is hope for humanity as well.

If you really believe, as I do about central planning and the markets, you know the authoritarians are doomed to fail every time. EVERY time.

Austrian economics teaches that the market is so beautifully complex and mysterious that no one person and no central committee of planners can ever be smart enough to know what the price of a banana should be. Only the market as a whole can discover that.

This is the battle of humanity. The people who lust for and gain power will try to determine the price for that banana. They will try to control bananas and the humans who want to eat them. They will inevitably end up with warehouses full of rotting bananas and starving people, but starving people will find a way. The market will find a way.

The tragedy is bananas will indeed rot and people will indeed starve. People will die at the hands of dictatorial central planners, but not all of them. Humanity has ALWAYS found ways to throw off the bonds of the beasts that would starve them and find their way again.

It is divine and it is hopeful. We will be OK. Authoritarianism is once again breathing down our necks and we can expect to be bruised and battered. But we will not be extinguished. We will rise again and reclaim our human birthright.  And someday we will be raptured into freedom again.

This is the cycle humanity continually goes through. Tribulation to rapture to tribulation again. This is the constant of the human condition.

What should you then do?  You should try to talk to your brother again and tell him you love him. You should tell him that all this other nonsense doesn’t matter as much as the bond you have for each other. You should “render unto Caesar” and realize that beasts are gonna beast because that’s what they do, and while the beasts were beasting in Jesus’s day He said to love. Love God, love one another, but just love.

The good news is that is all it takes to achieve spiritual victory in this life.

The bad news is you can never vanquish over evil, only God can do that. People try, but usually only end up committing more evil. Ghandi and MLK, Jr understood that. It seems weak, but it is actually incredibly brave to not attempt to fight the violence of the state with more violence, but with peace and love. With vulnerability. Because the clickbait and the attention hounds become instantly on your side when you’re the vulnerable, peaceful one. And that is the way. It may be your way to heaven at the end of a spear, but. If that is what we are called to, that is what we must accept. And we can know that it is all part of the divine human battle.

Josh Duggar and Ashley Madison

So family values maven Josh Duggar has been outed by hacktivists self-righteously exposing data ripped from Ashley Madison, the married dating site. Yikes. I’m sure many more will come.

Why does society get so downright gleeful when someone like that is exposed as a fraud, a hypocrite? Someone who puts out a standard they try to live up to… What’s wrong with trying to be as “perfect” as you can? Why do we cheer when they fail?

Because their higher standard indicts us. The contrast makes us feel bad about ourselves – OR at least it is maybe supposed to. It’s that whole better-than-you kind of thing. Holier than thou.

And then you find out they molested their sisters and cheat on their wife.

Makes everyone else feel a little less lowly down here on the pedestal observatory.

I have mixed feelings about the hacktivists statements though. Like everyone on the site needs a scarlett A on their foreheads. Society is still doing that?

From my time spent hosting a former prostitute on her book tour, I learned all kinds of eye opening things about cheaters. There are all kinds of reasons men cheat. Dare I say, some even have compelling personal reasons to cheat? Spouse going through serious health or mental things, dementia or the like… still care about her, no interest at all in abandonment or divorce, but want a need met every now and then… Doesn’t come from ugliness or spite or carelessness, but actually seeing a prostitute helps them stay and be supportive in the ways their wife needs, while meeting a human need they have that the wife cannot handle at the moment. Or maybe ever again. There are situations like that…

Probably 90% of the men on Ashley Madison are just indulging in ugly, duplicitous behavior. The worst thing about what most of those men are doing is they are going against the agreed upon contract in the relationship. Their wives should have had the chance to know they are in an open relationship, but they likely don’t, until now.

Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure.

But most women find the idea of an open marriage sort of offensive. It negates the whole reason they got married and made a commitment in the first place. Men, however, some of them, never tire of the chase. They think they can give it up, then they hit middle age and wonder if they really did sow enough of those wild oats… Do they still got it….

If you can’t let your wife know she is in an open relationship, you are in the wrong relationship, obviously. But you are going to do it anyway, because you’re a selfish jerk. And you’re going to stay with her because you have kids, right?

Ashley Madison was society making that whole thing easy on you. And the hack is society coming in and tattooing an A on your face anyway.

Was it worth it?

Listen here: Full Frontal Liberty 5 – Scams!

Your elderly mother calls you and asks to borrow $50,000 and needs it tonight.  What do you do?  That happened to my guest whose mother ended up losing nearly $200,000 to a Jamaican lottery scam.

Keep listening after the podcast for a bonus feature: some actual voicemail messages from the scam artists!

Links for this episode:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/03/thousands-of-american-seniors-tricked-by-jamaican-lottery-scam/

http://www.dailytech.com/Woman+Succumbs+to+Greed+Loses+400K+USD+to+Nigerian+Scammers/article13442.htm

http://www.419eater.com/html/419faq.htm

http://m.jamaicaobserver.com/mobile/news/Bishop-slams-Gov-t-over-lottery-scam_13992950

 

Full Frontal Liberty 5 – Scams!

Your elderly mother calls you and asks to borrow $50,000 and needs it tonight.  What do you do?  That happened to my guest whose mother ended up losing nearly $200,000 to a Jamaican lottery scam.

Listen here:

Keep listening after the podcast for a bonus feature: some actual voicemail messages from the scam artists!

Links for this episode:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/03/thousands-of-american-seniors-tricked-by-jamaican-lottery-scam/

http://www.dailytech.com/Woman+Succumbs+to+Greed+Loses+400K+USD+to+Nigerian+Scammers/article13442.htm

http://www.419eater.com/html/419faq.htm

On Dealing with Toddler Tantrums

A few things help me deal patiently with my 2 year old when he is in (not so) rare form.  

Understanding Toddler Psychology
They want what they want when they want it.  They are not yet able to fully communicate what they want, but they want it BAD.  They have no impulse control yet.  They have not yet mastered patience and delaying gratification.  They are still learning their own biological signals.  All of this makes for a VERY frustrating experience.  They lose control of their emotions and this can actually frighten them, adding even more to the emotional upset.  Its like a feedback loop they can’t get out of.  What they need from you is strength.  They need to see that you are in control of your emotions, you are calm and eventually that will be calming.  They need to feel that you empathize, but you can have empathy without giving in.  

This Too Shall Pass
It can be incredibly frustrating to deal with at times, but it won’t be this way forever.  At least tantrums won’t always take this form.  But now they are still small enough to lift up and remove when all else fails.

You’re a good mom.

Full Frontal Liberty Podcast Episode 4 – Rachel Interviews Obama!

Full Frontal Liberty 4

Rachel calls in some favors and gets the big interview with Obama!  Be warned though: the president has a bit of a potty mouth.

Also, more on prison labor, Lockheed Martin and Wal-Mart.

And Rachel Reads the News

Links:

On Wal-Mart and Martori Farm

Lockheed Martin and Unicor Prison Labor

Book:  Three Felonies a Day

Mike Krauss: Prisons for Profit: The New Slave Labor

Explaining Obamacare Nicely to Donna Brazile

Maxine Waters on a 110% Job Loss from Sekwester

Full Frontal Liberty 3 – The State’s Slave Plantations

Intertwining issues in today’s podcast  (CLICK HERE TO LISTEN) are Sinead O’Connor’s discussion of her experience in the Magdalene Laundries, which used slave labor for the Catholic Church in Ireland and the laundries that exist in American prisons today.

http://www.correctionenterprises.com/services/laundry.php

Not only that but the modern plantations that the state operates with inmate labor

http://www.doc.state.nc.us/dop/prisons/Caledoni.htm

One of Bob Sloan’s great articles on this  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/07/1177065/–INSOURCING-Analysis-Prison-Labor-Competing-For-Your-Job

So is this why the state wants to imprison you for stupid reasons?

More links:

http://correctionenterprises.com/services/food.php

Click to access Strategic_Plan_2012-2017.pdf

 

Show notes:

Two issues have caught my attention in the blogosphere that I see as somewhat related.

 

First, Sinead O’Connor has opened up about the abuses she witnessed during her time as a teenager in the Magdalene Laundries operated by the catholic church in Ireland.  These laundries utilized the slave labor of women imprisoned often for very petty crimes or no crimes at all.  These were places you could send your delinquents, your unwed mothers, etc.  Sinead was sent there for shoplifting and held for 18 months and forced to work in the laundry that served the church, hospitals and had lucrative private contracts as well.

 

People are shocked that this went on in Ireland until the last laundry closed in 1997, but what people don’t know is that this is happening right under our noses here at home.  Today.

 

In North Carolina, Correction Enterprises operates a massive laundry operation using inmate labor.  They process over 34 million pounds of laundry annually – and this is direct from their own website, linked in my blog entry on this.  Their clients are themselves, which you might expect, but also hospitals, and other state agencies.  34 million pounds.  7 laundry facilities are located across the state of North Carolina, including one in BroughtonHospital, which is a psychiatric hospital.

 

Laundry is not all we make the inmates do.  In the state which boasts the furniture capital of the world, High Point, inmates are making furniture.  For $1 a day.  There is also a frame shop for custom framing – I just spent a crap ton of money to have something custom framed, but the state has prisoners do that for them.  I wonder how my frame shop feels about that.  That there are inmates doing their job for $1 a day.  And They don’t even get to keep much of that dollar.  Much of it goes to restitution and court costs.  People, these are slaves.

 

Slaves you say?  Yes.  They even own and operate a plantation.  I will read right from the website of Caledonia Correctional Institution

 

About 5,500 acres of farmland are under cultivation at Caledonia. Correction Enterprises manages the farm which contains cattle, chickens and row crops such as corn, wheat, cotton and soybeans. In addition, the inmates farm 300 acres of vegetables like tomatoes, sweet corn, collard greens, sweet potatoes, squash, cucumbers and melons. During the off-season, fresh vegetables are grown in green houses.

Inmates also work in the prison’s cannery. The cannery processes and cans crops grown on the farm for distribution to prison kitchens across the state. It is 12,770 square feet and has the capability of canning about 500,000 gallons of commodities per year.

What does that sound like to you?  That’s a plantation.  Yes, folks, the State of NC has black men picking cotton today for little to no wages and they’re not allowed to leave.  They’re not even allowed to strike. In Georgia, which has a similar program, inmates tried a work stoppage and many were beaten within an inch of their lives, so much for voluntary.  And so much for all of this labor going back into feeding the prison population – in Georgia one of the grievances of the striking workers was poor quality of the food including lack of fruits and vegetables.  Where are all the vegetables going, if not to prisoners, as is claimed by the agency website?

 

As far as training and giving inmates skills for out in the workforce, Bob Sloan a journalist published in the Daily Kos on this issue finds that prisons highly favor lifers in their work programs, and those with long sentences.  The average sentence of laborers in California prisons is 15 years.  Maybe its not about training for the outside, but not wasting training on labor you’re just going to lose.

 

In North Carolina, Corrections Enterprises reports annual income of close to $100 million a year.  Right now they are only supposed to sell their services to other state agencies, but they have active plans to expand their market share through legislation.  They want to operate in other industries and increase their customer base.  In this economy, that especially means displacing civilian labor with sweat shop labor in prison.  Do you think they might also want to increase their labor pool?

 

Which brings me to the second story I wanted to address – HB34, a bill in NC to criminalize nipple exposure.  People are frustrated that the legislature is wasting time on this, that its frivolous and stupid and there are more important things for our lawmakers to be doing.  Maybe its more insidious and evil than that.  Maybe its just our legislators, at the prompting of powerful forces within the prison industrial complex, looking for more silly reasons to cage people.  Maybe law enforcement goes to that topless rally in Asheville every year and sees some women that would make good laundresses, or worse…  Maybe they like the idea of having attractive female inmates at their disposal.

 

HB 34 is scheduled for a vote in the NC legislature Tuesday the 26 of February.  It has 12 cosponsors that need to be asked if they are just looking for excuses to incarcerate more women to use as slaves.  It’s a $100 million industry.  It’s a pretty big deal.

 

And its also a BIG reason we won’t be getting rid of the drug war anytime soon.  You know that as soon as the police make a drug arrest the cash register starts ringing.  There are fines and fees, court costs, side industries like attorneys and bail bondsmen that start salivating, and of course asset forfeiture which means all your stuff belongs to the state to auction off well before you’re convicted of anything.  Then you get sent to prison.  If it’s a private prison, they’re getting paid $40,000 a year to house you.  And of course, what I’ve been talking about today – the value of your labor as a slave to the state.

 

Marijuana is the grass that feeds that cash cow.  Just so you know what we’re up against.

 

Alarmists scream that one day FEMA will operate work camps for American citizens.  People, we already do.  We already do.

 

 

 

 

Full Frontal Liberty Episode 2

On the Dehumanization of Military and Law Enforcement

Click here

Law Enforcement Targets, Inc and their controversial “No More Hesitation” series of cardboard targets features pregnant women, children and the elderly to help cops learn how to shoot at them without pesky compassion or horror at what they are doing getting in the way.  http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/19/is-your-local-police-department-using-pi

http://www.letargets.com/

Military suicides and the need for better mental healthcare access?  How about a less dehumanizing foreign policy…  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/parents-tie-mental-health-stigma-seal-suicide-article-1.1237877

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/22/dirty_wars_jeremy_scahill_and_rick

Of course the Drug War and accepting its premises enable the dehumanizing of law enforcement at home.  Accepting the justifications for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars allows our military to be dehumanized abroad.

New film exposes horrors of covert US Warfare

Dirty Wars Interview on Youtube

Premiering this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the new documentary “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield” follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill to Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen as he chases down the hidden truths behind America’s expanding covert wars. We’re joined by Scahill and the film’s director, Rick Rowley, an independent journalist with Big Noise Films. “We’re looking right now at a reality that President Obama has essentially extended the very policies that many of his supporters once opposed under President Bush,” says Scahill, author of the bestseller “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” and a forthcoming book named after his film. “One of the things that humbles both of us is that when you arrive in a village in Afghanistan and knock on someone’s door, you’re the first American they’ve seen since the Americans that kicked that door in and killed half their family,” Rowley says. “We promised them that we would do everything we could to make their stories be heard in the U.S. … Finally we’re able to keep those promises.”

Drivers behind the minimum wage hike?

I can’t believe I yammered on all that time on the podcast without mentioning the great big huge elephant in the workplace – UNIONS.  Very often union wages are tied to minimum wage, by multipliers or percentages above the min wage, so anytime there is an increase, these workers get a renegotiation or an automatic raise.  These are people making significantly more than minimum wage that get a huge boost from the government spending their employers’ money for them.  Big Labor has big influence in Washington, and this is not about poverty.  Please.

Isn’t pandering disgusting?

I would also like to emphasize again how beneficial it is – for everyone – when teenagers can hold jobs.  Keeps them out of trouble, allows them to start building work ethic and experience.  It’s good for EVERYONE.  But once you raise min wage, you up the stakes for employers and teenagers become too risky.  And then teenagers who would have benefited from legal employment are left with fewer options.  Many of them not so good.

I also left out the inflationary effects of min wage.  You can’t bump up the cost of inputs without also putting upward pressure on prices.  Doesn’t matter if everyone makes $40,000 a year if a loaf of bread is $20.  They’re still not wealthy.  The wage is just a number.  What matters is what you can buy with it.  No wonder Krugman loves a min wage increase – its inflationary.