The Fall of Reynolds

Existential Questions

2012-01-29T10:35:00.000-08:00

As I get older, I am more and more able and willing to explore some of the thorny questions about our existence. My examination of the arguments concerning evolution has left me utterly convinced that life was transplanted here on earth and did not magically germinate in the primordial ooze. Everyone grapples with existential questions. I want to make a list of some of the ones that baffle me. I trust that after this telestial phase of life is complete, I might have the opportunity to get more answers to questions like - "You can lead a horse to water, but why can you not make him float?"
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My cat has horrible, disgusting breath - it is somewhere between dead fish and dirty socks. He licks all of his fur almost every day. Why does his fur not smell bad?

The human anatomy is incredibly complex. To most people it can also be extremely appealing. A friend of mine once commented that she could not imagine any type of improvement that could be made on this already perfect design. When was this anthropomorphic configuration first conceived? Were there gods around beforehand, and did they do the original design? Did they have earlier prototypes that did not work so well and needed to be scrapped? Is there any truth to doctors' assertions that organs like the appendix and tonsils are merely vestigial artifacts of the evolutionary process and that they are pointless and useless?

When the human form was being developed, how did the Creators program in the visual/physical attraction component? Why do different people feel attracted to different sorts of humans? Do these visual stimuli ("cute butt", "sexy abs") persist in the hereafter? If our Heavenly Father increases His posterity through sexual reproduction, then surely erotic arousal must be part of the equation, right?

If our Heavenly Father has a significant number of eternal wives, does He have to play tricks with time so that each one doesn't feel like He is always gone from her with someone else? Is there even such a concept as "time" for the Gods?

If all of the souls on this earth are the spirit children of our Heavenly Father (and His various wives), why did some of them tun out to be such DIRTBAGS !!!!!? I guess I can only assume that He didn't have control over what He was given to work with. I suppose that wickedness is just an inherent aspect of many of the intelligences in this universe.

If there are other planets like ours (occupied by humans), why were they placed so darn' far away from us? Would it be bad for us to intermarry?

Why is the universe constantly expanding? Will this make my daily commute take longer?

If there are more dimensions to our existence than the TIME and SPACE we are all so familiar with, then how can we access those dimensions? Is the empty, vacuous space between the stars and planets actually a different type of matter? Is there even such a thing as matter when the atoms are nothing but clusters of energy orbits?

We are taught that all creatures were made spiritually first, so, after this life will I once again meet my pet cocker spaniel and my smelly-breath cat? Will they be able to talk to me, or will it just the same "meow" and "woof-woof"?

Do my "guardian angels" watch me when I am in the bathroom?

If Cain and John the Revelator and the Three Nephites are still walking the earth today, where do they live, and will they come and visit me?

Do Terrestrial (translated) beings eat farm produce? Will we need lungs when we are no longer burning oxygen?

Is it more difficult to resurrect people who have been cremated?

If the universe is a finite size, is there a brick wall at the periphery, and, if so, what then is on the other side of that brick wall?

If the universe is unbounded and infinite, how can our God be confident that there aren't some pretty malevolent aliens (Klingons, Romulans, Cardashians etc.) stalking the as-yet-undiscovered galaxies out there (and lying in wait to attack us)?

What the heck is consciousness, and why does it persist beyond death? Why is my consciousness mine and mine alone (I have tried to get into other people's thoughts but it only made me nauseated)?

Do the Gods have a means of transportation which allows them to travel great distances in very little time?

Is it possible to say or do anything that is NOT a product of self-interest?

If some people do not become Gods, what do they do, and where do they live for the rest of eternity with their resurrected bodies?

If God knows "all things which are to come" (Words of Mormon v. 9), then does He already know all of the dirty tricks Satan is going to pull? Does Satan have knowledge of my thoughts and plans?

Is it cruel that God allows His children of only the 20th and 21st centuries to have cool stuff like cars, cell-phones, computers and Thai food restaurants? How did our ancestors get by without them, I wonder?

There were two permutational possibilities for existence: either - 1.) That there would always have simply been nothing; or - 2.) That there has always been stuff, something, existence, a universe. Now that you know that you exist, can you even wrap your mind around the hypothetical concept of permanent nothingness?

When an atheist dies, and his consciousness is utterly extinguished, does he wake up unwittingly with the consciousness of a newborn baby somewhere else?

Migraines

2012-01-05T22:39:00.000-08:00

I have a very big pet peeve. As a teenager, I would occasionally get migraines - BIG migraines - go-to-the-emergency-room migraines. The visual disturbances (gaps in vision and squiggly, flashing shapes) would start and last a half hour. Then the headache would start. The headache was always unbearable. After a couple of hours of blinding, unrelenting headache, then came the vomiting. Generally, this was a 10-hour ordeal, followed by two days of sensitivity to light and noise, and a very sore cranium. I would DREAD the next migraine, but they would typically not recur until five or six weeks had passed. I never put two-and-two together that the cause may have been the large amounts of chicken bouillon my mother incorporated into the Sunday dinner gravy. Thankfully, after I moved out, the migraines stopped.

When I had my first big migraine again at 30, a friend asked me if I ever ate Monosodium Glutamate (MSG). I didn't know what that was, but I soon learned. I had been unwittingly adding it to my scrambled eggs occasionally (it is sold under the brand name "Accent"). This discovery was a huge blessing. MSG is added to a large number of food products - Ranch Dressing, Bouillon, Schilling gravy mixes, Cream of Chicken/Mushroom soups, Doritos, flavored potato chips, many types of Asian food, etc. It is a synthetic chemical manufactured by a Japanese company and sold in the U.S. by the ton. Some people are fooled into thinking it is a "preservative". HARDLY !!! MSG is a "flavor enhancer" (which is also a deception). In truth, MSG does not enhance a food's flavor, it simply flares the little taste buds on your tongue - which causes the experience of tasting food to be intensified. It also flares the blood vessels in your head. MSG does not really have a flavor of its own, but it adds a certain spark or tang to the food. What's more, I think it sends a message to the brain that the affected food is REALLY YUMMY! That can serve as an inducement to buy it again and often.

Clearly, a certain percentage of the population is bothered by MSG. The rest seems not to care. Those whom MSG irritates must go to great lengths to avoid it. So what is the connection between MSG and headaches? I am no biochemist, so you can take the following information with a grain of salt. MSG is poisonous. If you put poisons in your body, eventually your liver will have to process them. The liver has a certain capacity to get rid of toxic garbage. If you overload it, it will eventually stop cooperating. The process involves what are called "conjugate molecules". Whether it is alcohol, gasoline or paint fumes, or artificial flavor enhancers, the body does a miraculous job of creating conjugate molecules - molecules whose sole purpose is to "wrap" around a poison molecule and transport it to the liver, where it can be dismantled and broken into smaller components which can be turned into fuel or excreted as waste. The body cannot, however, produce an unlimited supply of conjugate molecules.

When the liver reaches its maximum ability to dispose of the accumulation of these contaminants, it basically gives out and "refluxes" the poisons back into the bloodstream. This is when the crisis starts. When the blood is now carrying a higher poison load, it must also circulate through the brain. Since the brain does not want to die from pollution, its first response is to dilate certain blood vessels around the eyes and temples (this causes the weird vision symptoms). After about 30 minutes, and after this has resolved nothing, the brain decides then to constrict those blood vessels - thus triggering a MASSIVE headache. If this is followed by vomiting, it is the body making a frantic effort to rid itself of those poison chemicals in the most efficient way it can find. This may not be the mechanism in EVERY migraine, but I believe that MOST migraines can be prevented if we simply refrain from consuming MSG. I can NEVER eat even a few Doritos chips without getting a 12-hour headache.

The food producers have found a clever dodge - they know that MANY people have figured out the MSG scam - a way to make people think otherwise bland food is worth eating. So now they have developed some alternatives. If you read the labels on the packages, you may notice some products (e.g. Campbell's soups) that boast: "All natural", "Reduced Sodium", "No MSG". You will probably find the following two ingredients: Disodium Inosinate and Disodium Guanylate. Both of these chemicals are "flavor enhancers" which act just like MSG. Clever, huh? Both of them give me the same sick headaches, so now I have to read the labels even more carefully. I must give praise to LAY'S brand potato chips - they recently introduced several new chips flavors with no flavor enhancers - Garden Tomato and Basil, Tangy Carolina Barbeque, Sour Cream and Cheddar, and more.

When eating at Chinese restaurants, I always ask if they use MSG. Problem is - many Asian waiters have no idea what MSG is. I learned that Chinese for MSG is "WAY-JIN". They will tell you they don't use WAY-JIN, but they often don't realize that the bulk chicken broth crystals they use when making soups and sauces have MSG as the #1 ingredient. Diner beware !!!!

I was at an all-you-can-eat restaurant recently and ran into a friendly heart surgeon who was as disgusted as I was at the "sugar-free" vanilla pudding. He commented that the two biggest causes of all the cardiovascular problems he sees are MSG and the chlorine in our tap water.

Sadly, all of the people who feel unaffected by MSG are still just as poisoned by it as I am - they just consume it blithely and obliviously, unaware of the toxicity it inflicts on their bodies.

Spread the word, you may save someone a lot of suffering.
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All is not lost, however. A few years ago, I decided to try a homeopathic product made by Natra-Bio. here is a photo of the package:

You can purchase it here (very inexpensive). The little tablets are flavorless, and you just melt two or three of them under your tongue when the migraine starts. If you do this immediately, the visual symptoms do their usual thing for 30 minutes, but then you don't get the ferocious headache. My guess is that the product provides extra conjugate molecules to the bloodstream and helps the liver do its job. I have tried this product on several other people, and all of them swear by it. Another important key is to drink at least a quart of water also, so that the poisons can rinse out of your system faster.

Sanctorum

2012-01-05T18:20:00.000-08:00

Rick Santorum appears to be at least momentarily impacting the political landscape. Santorum virtually tied Mitt Romney in the Iowa Republican primary. Santorum had crisscrossed the state, courting evangelical Christian conservatives who resonated with his "social conservatism". Social conservatism generally involves a pro-life and anti-gay-marriage stance.

Today, Santorum gave a speech at a New England college. He was heckled by students who disagreed with his position on gay marriage. He repeated his usual argument that people should be allowed to "do" whatever they want, but that the government should not be required to grant marriage licenses to gay couples. He asked a student if states should grant a marriage license to "three guys". Clearly, legalized polygamy would cause the complete destruction of the United States . . . . . . . .

Santorum's position (on gay marriage) is utterly indefensible. The resistance to gay marriage is rooted in public revulsion over homosexuality, and religious reluctance to accord it official sanction. The problem is once again the confusion over the difference between marriage and marriage. There is the church-dispensed sacrament of holy matrimony, and there is the state-issued marriage license. Are we so stupid that we cannot tell the difference between the two?

Churches have every right to decide whom to wed and whom not to wed. Since America became a corporation (in the 1860's), religion has been accorded no place in the political process. God has been expelled from government. This was not what the Framers had in mind, but it is simply the way it is, folks. If religion has no place in our government, you cannot use religious and doctrinal precepts to manage the state licensing process. States issue licenses to pairs of people who want a government-run marriage contract. Some government benefits and privileges go along with that contract. None of those benefits has anything to do with religion. Telling gay people that they cannot get a state marriage license is as ridiculous as telling a black man that he cannot get a firearms license. You might harbor resentment towards black people for theological or cultural reasons, but that is no basis for denying them access to a secular government benefit.

Sanctorum is charging towards a philosophical buzz-saw. The argument is 'un-winnable'. He is almost saying, "No, gay couples, you cannot get legally married, because these religious evangelical supporters of mine simply don't want to allow it." If we cannot place a religious emblem on public property, we certainly cannot hope to impose ecclesiastical rules on government policies regarding civil marriage contracts. Even dimwit Canada has figured that out.

Sanctorum is hoping to carry his "socially conservative" message now to New Hampshire where nobody will listen. Good luck!

Right of Right

2012-01-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

I got a call the other day from a polling organization. The caller asked me if I am a Democrat or a Republican. I told her I am a Libertarian. That felt a little silly because I don't vote. Voting nowadays is an admission of servitude. I guess I have made several of those admissions (certificates of live birth, certificates of title, social security card, etc.) but I have a special aversion to the modern political farce.

I read a little of Ron Paul's writings the other day. He insists that our usual oscillation between a Democratic president and a Republican president every few years is a pointless and fruitless dance. Congressmen argue over budget issues worth billions of dollars while utterly ignoring the trillions wasted annually. I would LOVE to see someone like Ron Paul in the White House - I might even break my voting boycott! Trouble is - I am even more right-wing Libertarian than the Paul family is. I am probably to the right of Alex Jones and Eustace Mullins. People cringe over Ron Paul's ideas because he thinks we shouldn't have soldiers in 130 countries, and that we should stop being the primary source of Israel's funding.

We have to go back to the understanding that the nation we live in is a CORPORATION. It quit being a republic with the fraudulent adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865. The incorporation of the UNITED STATES was necessary to facilitate the borrowing - the indebtedness. At the end of the war of independence, the British did not surrender. They kept the title to the land of America. The creation of a Constitution for the 13 states was partly a bankruptcy filing (hence "Chapter 13"). The states owed 17 million Lira in war debt to the French banks. There have been two more bankruptcies since then - one in 1933 (along with that of the other Western nations), and one in 1989. The politicians MUST do the bidding of the creditors who print our phony money. Ron Paul is not wrong - we must audit, then dissolve the Federal Reserve. The media are not wrong when they say that Ron Paul cannot win the Republican nomination, and that he cannot win the presidency. God has other plans.

Stop looking to the modern American electoral process to remedy the problem. This land has been plundered and confiscated by the Venetian Nobility since its inception. The banking apparatus will make ABSOLUTELY sure that Ron Paul will not become president.

Whom should we blame? Should we blame the Idumeans? Should we blame our Shemitic selves? Should we blame Satan, or God? Truth is - this is a Telestial world. Wicked, devilish people were not placed on this earth by accident. The wheat must co-exist with the tares for a while. Can you get your head around the notion that in every world the pattern will be the same? Our Heavenly Father must be a real stud to have the grit and courage to send 12 billion of His spirit children down on this planet to vex each other with usury and terror for 6,000 years. The question is - will some of them figure out the truth and the hard realities? Will someone figure out who the tares are?

The real remedy comes by way of the Savior's 1,000-year Millennial reign (coming soon). Everybody gets to get his body back (at some point). Everybody gets to learn the truth. The bad guys will be restrained for almost the entire time, and the right will be proved right. We are given such immense freedom to create and improvise that we forget that the nature of the universe is static and absolute. A mere glance at our cosmic surroundings reveals that our existence is the result or evidence of immutable laws. Atheism, Darwinism and Relativism are merely the vain rebellion of people who don't like the rules and who don't care enough about earning the big rewards.

Right is still right (as Nehor and Korihor both learned).
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Brown

2012-01-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one who noticed this?

The Fall of Reynolds

2012-01-01T14:47:00.000-08:00

I thought it would be interesting to Google the name of my blog. When I did so today, I happened upon the following page in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Reynolds_death_2.jpg

It includes the following image:

No relation . . . .

Apocalips

2011-12-31T22:56:00.000-08:00

A stream of consummate insanity continues to flow from Warren Apocalips Jeffs. Faithful FLDS congregants are being admonished to refrain from sex and to swear complete allegiance to Jeffs by the end of 2011, lest they suffer divine wrath and destruction.

For many years I have pondered on the nature of the relationship between the FLDS people and their leaders. Some say that the critical "fork in the road" occurred in the early 1980's. There was a dispute at that time over whether or not each member of the council of the the twelve held the same authority as the president, such that at the passing of the president, the senior member automatically assumed the position of president. Apparently, some leaders abandoned this formula and dismissed the pivotal revelation given to Wilford Woodruff in 1880 on this very topic. This caused the ideological split. This was the genesis of the "One Man Rule" leadership model - the seedbed for a hierarchy utterly controlled by a monolithic dictator - a Jeffs.

I have struggled at length with other caring observers to figure out where to point the finger of blame for the current crazed state of affairs. Is Warren Jeffs truly to blame? Jeffs is culpable for his own integrity lapses. He is guilty of a litany of abuses. He is the epitome of a terrorist. He takes wicked delight in toying with his victims. He is a true psychopath. He is like some of the hater-harpies - he is blithely complacent about destroying families. More importantly, however, he would not be able to get away with any of his perverse manipulations if it were not for several thousand people who think that simply by virtue of the fact that he occupies the station of church president, he is somehow imbued with divine investiture - the steward of God on earth - the "PROPHET".

Brigham Young spoke often and adamantly about the importance of not abdicating one's free agency to some corruptible mortal church leader person. This was one of the fundamental tenets of Mormonism. I shudder to think that modern adherents, mainstream and FLDS alike, have undergone such an ideological metamorphosis that their religion is no longer akin to the gospels restored through Joseph Smith. In one short generation, thousands of honorable saints have turned into lemmings, merely as a result of a doctrinal diversion.

Warren Jeffs is doomed to suffer long and greatly. He has caused untold pain to many honest, decent people. What, however, is the fate of the obsequious sycophants who have been trained from birth to do whatever they are told to do by their megalomaniac, lunatic leader? I hearken back to the idea that God Himself is partly complicit. He knew perfectly well before He put those pre-mortal spirits into those Short Creek FLDS embryos that they would be raised in a unique and ultimately bizarre environment. This was part of the plan - the moral test. These good, honorable souls are faced with a crucial choice - choose true principle or a false doctrine and its false prophet. As the lunacy crescendos, each one must weigh the options and measure the pressures against the promptings of the Spirit and the bedrock teachings in revealed scriptures. Like it or not, the inevitable train-wreck of this community is just around the corner. One can only hope that the latest in Jeffs' wacky antics will trigger an awakening - a personal epiphany for many. Surely many, many of the people are scratching their heads and wondering why things are getting so strange - why they have to part with their pets and tricycles and now their children. Even now, people are vanishing. Maybe, when the Apocalypse fails to occur a half an hour from now (midnight 12/31/2011), some will wonder if the prophet is false after all.

I'm sure cult experts have written volumes on how difficult it is to break free from the tyrannical psychological clutches of a religious dictator. To my way of thinking, the hardest part would be facing up to the realization that virtually your whole life has been based on a religious distortion, and that you let yourself get slowly sucked in because your were afraid to lose your job or your home or your wives and kids. This was the wizardry of the Jeffs incumbency - he kept you in the dark - people were told only the bare minimum of what they needed to know. Jeffs controls access to information. He threatens you with the forfeiture of your salvation (not even doctrinally feasible). He even controls the local police. He conspires with his brothers to execute his dictates. His control is political, financial and religious - a dangerous combination.

No matter where you ascribe the culpability, many of these townsfolk are innocent. They are just trying to survive and please God. When this sick house of cards comes crashing down, there will be an immense humanitarian crisis. Tonia Tool (Holding Out Hostages) is all over the news, clamoring for the castaways to come into her lairs. The crisis will not so much be one of food and lodging, moreso a crisis of faith - one that the hater-hags cannot remedy.

The gospel dispensed to Joseph Smith was pure at its source. Despite his immense significance in the history of this planet, he was a mortal man. All of the gospel dispensations (except Enoch's) were doomed to crash and burn. Attributing perfection to a mortal is foolhardy. The restored fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the gospel of the Father are perfect in principle - they are the "baby" that must not be "thrown out with the" Jeffs "bathwater". That is the essence of the humanitarian crisis.

Are you in a position to offer the right kind of assistance?
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Why Bother?

2011-12-21T16:53:00.000-08:00

The Amicus (friend of the Court) George Macintosh was the attorney appointed by the provincial government of British Columbia to argue against Canada's (S.293) ridiculous anti-polygamy law. I received word today that Macintosh is declining to appeal the recent decision from Chief Justice Robert Bauman which upheld the law.

I guess I would be more upset if I thought there was good reason to appeal the stupid decision. Chances are that, if this case got to the B.C. Court of Appeals or to the Canadian Supreme Court, either would reverse Bauman and decriminalize Canada's polygamists. Truth is - Canada's polygamists are already decriminalized - appeal or no appeal. What would you like to bet me that no BC polygamist will be arrested?

Canada is playing the same game as the idiots in Utah. Last week, Utah's Attorney General deputy Jerrold Jenson told a Federal judge that the Utah County attorney, Jeff Buhman has not yet decided whether to arrest the Browns (and have them extradited from Vegas). I believe he has decided, but that he doesn't want to admit it. If he says he won't prosecute, the Browns have good cause to ask that the bigamy statute be stricken. If he says that he will prosecute, the Browns have good cause to complain that they are threatened by the law and thus have harm and standing with which to challenge it.

The politicians just want to preserve the status quo - one in which polygamists can be painted as outlaws and felons, and can be demonized by society as legal lepers.

Massacre

2011-12-21T16:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday and today saw the Syrian government massacre over 200 of its own people - defectors from the army, and residents of a village near the Turkish border. I am horrified at the brutality of the Assad regime - its willingness to murder its citizens in order to preserve dictatorial control. It does not appear that the U.S. has any interest in military intervention. I guess I'm okay with that. We had no business going into Iraq - other than to control its oil output. In Afghanistan, opium production has skyrocketed since our intervention began.

Some people may be sighing a sigh of relief that such massacres do not take place in our own country - except for the one in Waco in 1993 - - - oh, and the one where they deliberately demolished the Twin Towers to trigger a Middle East war. Good, white Christian folk just don't do that stuff, do they? Well, yes, the good, white folk of Hitler's third Reich did it. I guess it doesn't matter whether your skin is black, brown, red, yellow, olive or white, you are not immune from the tendency to massacre. Obama's FCC is trying to control cable stations, radio broadcasts - even the Internet. Massacres are just the last link in the chain of tyrannies required for curbing dissent and silencing protesters. In 1900, the Russian "Russ" made up the largest group of Christians (100 million) in the world. Stalin annihilated a significant portion of them.

Boy, a Telestial world can be a cruel place sometimes - and yet our universe is filled with them. I like to watch those Science channel shows that show the fabric of the universe. Our own galaxy has over 200 billion stars in it, and astronomers have detected at least 200 billion galaxies. Do the math!

I guess I can take solace only in the fact that this mortal probation is but a brief moment in our eternal journey - that those poor Syrian villagers passed on relatively swiftly, and that they are in a more rewarding place now. As a wise man recently noted, there is a set of scales in the divine control room, and when the oppression manifested by mankind surpasses the oppression required of God in the form of divine discipline, God can intervene. It remains to be seen whether the atrocities of the 21st century are greater than those of earlier times. I suspect they are. I look at Europe - a place from whence the best blood of Israel was to come. Europeans are under-reproducing. More than half the households are a single person. Russia is considering legalizing polygamy and banning abortion (the average Russian bride has had three abortions). Christianity in Europe is virtually dead. Religion is seen as a joke. The Mormon Church is shrinking in the British Isles - closing wards and chapels. The love of men is "waxing cold".

I look at some of our politicians - Anthony Wiener, Rahm Emmanuel, Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Dick Cheney, Maxine Waters - the list goes on - and I think - "What would it take for them to call for a massacre, if it served their craven purposes enough?"

Are we really shielded from future holocausts? With only three days worth of food in the grocery stores, and the whole Western world on the brink of insolvency, are we really secure?

I have said it many times, but when the fat hits the shin, there will be only two types of people in this world:

1. The ones who would rather starve than kill a fellow human.
2. The ones who would rather kill a fellow human than starve.

Which one are you?

Dignified and Respectful

2011-12-09T10:50:00.000-08:00

The Air Force promised the families of 274 airmen killed while on duty that their remains would be disposed of in a dignified and respectful manner.

The remains were dumped in a landfill.
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Kool-Aid Time

2011-12-07T22:42:00.000-08:00

Rumors are bubbling out of the Creek that things are devolving rapidly. The nightly news is showing pictures of trampolines and tricycles stacked up ready for sale. Warren or his brother must be exacting ever more oppressive demands of the beleaguered congregants. No more toys, no more trampolines, no more 4-wheeling, and NO MORE SEX !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Young single girls must walk around with wedding bands to give off the pretense of being married. Families are being squeezed to cough up thousands more dollars for the "Prophet", for printing and mailing those asinine doomsday proclamations filled with gerunds (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars).

Warren wants the married adults to cease and desist from all marital conjugating. The Jeffs hench-elders are grilling the husbands and wives to see if they are of-a-consummating their relationships. God help anyone who conceives a child in this apocalyptic climate.

Under Jim (Warren [yes, 'Warren' really is his middle name !!!]) Jones in tragic Jonestown, Guyana, the vast majority of the followers stayed sucked in till the bitter end, glugging the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in a frenzied ritual of blind complying. What is there about the current events in the twin towns that is any different?

. . . . or will these fundamentally decent and intelligent people (who once had a benevolent king) wake up from the fog of obsequiousness and slavery, and remember that God's political structures always incorporated checks and balances, and separation of powers?

So, which will it be - hundreds of puffy bodies of men, women and children lying under the hot sun and swarms of flies, or a mass ideological epiphany? Word is - this suffocating, tyrannical cult dictatorship is squeezing so hard that it is squeezing the Creek's best and brightest out into the clean, fresh cathartic air of truth and reality. Warren is a deviant, crazed monster (with grammar of a new making). Do you have to be deprived of all your human dignities and possessions in order to accept that? Is it so hard to realize that you have been bamboozled by a cult (not colt) megalomaniac - to admit that your marriages were choreographed by a mad man? That's why we have a Savior, an atonement, a chance to repent and make amends. What? - it's not your fault, because you were born into this Matrix? That's no excuse.

Remember, you were chosen to come to this land at this time. You covenanted with your Heavenly Father to be born into the Everlasting Covenant, into the fullness of the Gospel at a time when there would be false prophets like Jeffs, Hinckley and Monson. These trials were crafted specifically for you. Are you going to stand on true principle or be tossed to and fro with every wind of dogma?

This Warren insanity is the exquisite test - a perfect gauge of your mettle - of your faithfulness to eternal truths and not to the corruptible arm of sick Jeffs flesh. Which will you drink? - the dews of heaven or the Kool-Aid of poisoning?

Direct European Bailout

2011-12-01T10:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Dow Jones jumped up 490 points - a huge boost. This was spurred largely by news that Europe may finally be figuring out how to calm the debt jitters over Greece and the other countries on the brink of default.

Today as the dust settles, observers are noticing that the plan under consideration proposes to allow Germany to dictate the day-to-day financial operations of the struggling European nations - in exchange for Germany providing the bailout. Apparently, some of those countries are realizing that they don't want their financial affairs to be regulated by Germany.

If Germany fails to make the necessary loans available to the failing nations, then a widespread collapse would be inevitable -

UNLESS . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Obama succeeds in convincing U.S. taxpayers that our tax dollars must now go to these over-indebted, flunky Mediterranean nations who have partied at the public trough for too many decades. Obama will cry doom, of course - "If we fail to rescue these troubled countries, the economic implosion will reverberate in our economy, and we will face horrible catastrophes here at home!"

40 cents from every dollar loaned by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) comes from the U.S. (after we borrow it from China). If the Germany solution doesn't succeed, then the IMF will surely come begging for U.S. dollars, and we will inevitably play along. I wouldn't be surprised if Bernanke just went ahead and coughed up the money in spite of the Congress or the wishes of the American people.

I know I keep asking the same question, but if all the Western nations (who, granted, are shuffling debts amongst themselves all the time) are collectively way too deeply indebted to some private bank(s), why do we not propose that the entire Western world file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy and be done with it - start over with a clean slate? After all, that's what the Bible requires. Do those bankers really need all our stuff? What on earth could they do with all of it, anyway?

Don't tell me that someone doesn't have a cunning plan up his sleeve to systematically crash all of the Western economies to force a global, "New-World" currency, overseen by the bank owners.

Are you feeling powerless yet?

Backlash

2011-11-26T13:08:00.000-08:00

It seems the backlash is already brewing. B.C. Chief Justice Bauman contorted himself into upholding one of the world's stupidest and most tyrannical laws. Many Canadian observers and commentators are taking note of this decision, and it is sinking in that Bauman's choice is questionable at best. The common thread in these critiques is a touch of bewilderment that such an intelligent jurist could reach such bizarre conclusions. It isn't that his explanations weren't articulate and reasoned - it's just that he is wrong and out of touch. You cannot criminalize private, consensual-adult associations and intimacies in a modern, Western nation. You daren't even try. It isn't even clear what he means in some cases. Let me show you with one simple excerpt from Bauman's ruling just how myopic he truly is:

"Having found a reasoned apprehension that polygamy is associated with numerous harms, it follows that criminalizing the practice is one way of limiting those harms, . . ."

So, clearly the criminalization of the practice for the last 100 years has successfully limited the harms associated with the practice of polygamy, right? !!!!!!!!!!!!! Okay, follow along with me here. If that kind of logic is the best grounds for the passage of criminal legislation, then we should criminalize the practice of divorce, right? After all, divorce devastates the lives of millions every year. The same thing is true for guns and knives, so we should ban them, too, right? We should ban cars and chemicals (both of which kill tens of thousands per year). We should ban single-parenting or the promiscuity that causes it. The list never ends, but some shrill little posse of haters and colluding politicians has decided to criminalize a rare and specific practice which to my knowledge has not been the cause of a single domestic violence fatality in the Americas in over 100 years.

A friend pointed out to me another incongruous aspect of this ruling that I had ignored. Bauman stresses the salutary benefits of S.293 in that it endeavors to protect women and children from "harms". Feminists must surely view this a little dimly since polyandrous unions would also be criminalized. What about the four poor, subjugated men who find themselves in a plural marriage with one overbearing woman? Don't they deserve to be protected from all this harm and danger, too ?????

The ambiguity and pomposity of Bauman's reasoning leaves us all wondering how the criminalization he champions could ever be implemented. Please read the following articles:

A-confused-judicial-treatise-on-polygamy/
Canada-doesnt-need-a-law-banning-polygamy/
We-have-as-many-double-standards-on-polygamy-as-solomon-had-wives/
P olygamy-ruling-offers-road-map-to-avoid-prosecution-lawyer/
State-shouldnt-interfere-in-consensual-adult-relationships/

The hater-harpies are dancing and celebrating what, to them, appears to be a pivotal victory. The long-awaited day has arrived when law-enforcement can storm the homes of the Fundamentalist Mormons and round up the criminal adults in 'multiple conjugal groupings'.

Fast forward to the arraignment:

"Your Lordship, these three people were found in the same house sewing and doing laundry. We have good reason to believe that they have formed a multiple conjugal grouping, otherwise termed 'religious polygamy solemnized by a religious ceremonial ritual overseen by one of their informal clerics'. We ask that they be denied bail because of the extreme flight risk."

In the history of the world, there have been entire nations which have been seduced into insanity and self-destruction by false ideals and bigotry. Let's hope that Canada wakes up in time.

WHAT AN IDIOT !!!

2011-11-24T16:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got word that British Columbia's Chief Justice Robert Bauman published his decision upholding S.293 (Canada's anti-polygamy law), stating that 'there is no such thing as so-called “good polygamy”'.

This approach is certainly the more judicially convenient and politically palatable one for him to take. From a practical perspective, however, has he thought through what comes next? Will they round up all the women and then put the kids in orphanages?

Bauman also says that the original spirit and purpose of S.293 was to "protect the institution of monogamy". I find this utterly disingenuous. First, the institution of monogamy in Canada must surely be highly susceptible to change in light of the relaxed gender requirement as of 2005. Secondly, the tens of thousands of polygamists and polyamorists in Canada have had no impact on the institution of monogamy to date, and their continued existence will be no more relevant than before. It appears that Bauman was taken in by some of the spurious theories of the hater-nasty tribe. He even falls for the "not-enough-women-to-go-around", "zero-sum" lunacy!

Sorry, but I am now persuaded that this judge has either no backbone or no brain. At least now he can wash his hands of the entire matter. After reading some of Bauman's reasoning, I am persuaded of the following:

1. He is educated and articulate.

2. He had his mind made up before the Reference proceedings were over.

3. Having decided to rule that polygamy was "inherently" harmful, he had to massage the arguments to support and 'back into' his pre-determined conclusion.

The problem with deciding to prohibit polygamy because of the "inherent harms" associated with it is that you cannot prosecute the (intangible) "institution of polygamy". You can only prosecute the human actors who espouse the abstract concept of polygamy. This is just like my earlier point about knives. Knives are far more tangible and are (admittedly) inherently dangerous - they wound and kill people, but no judge in his right mind would ever dream of outlawing knives. I shall quote some of Bauman's argument so that you can further see the bizarre fallacy of his reasoning (emphasis mine):

------------------------------------------------------------------
' . . . . S. 293 prohibits more than two individuals from associating with one another in a conjugal union. As seen above, the criminal law does not prohibit a whole range of activities that can be characterized as polygamous, such as:

(a) Serial monogamy, through divorce and remarriage (de facto polygyny, as it is sometimes called from an evolutionary psychology perspective);
(b) Having sex or affairs with any number of partners while in a conjugal union with an unknowing and unconsenting partner (that is, adultery);
(c) Having sex with many partners at the same time;
(d) Having children with more than one partner, whether as a result of conjugal union, one night stands or even group sex; and
(e) Raising children by more than two adults, such as through blended families, including where one or more adults are unrelated to the children.

Yet, while the law is tolerant of these behaviours, S. 293 criminalizes three adults from agreeing to form a conjugal union together. Section 293 prohibits their association together as a conjugal union. While polygamous activities are not prohibited, s. 293 criminalizes polygamous groupings.

------------------------------------------------------------------

What the HELL is a "polygamous grouping"? What kind of tortured logic is that? How do you dispatch the Mounties to a polygamous household to check for that - (especially if the women live in separate residences)? If all of the multiple-sex-partner activities listed above are "not prohibited" by S.293, then what will the exact nature of the charge be? This judge (like the law-enforcement community in Utah) has painted himself into a corner where his framing of the crime of polygamy is essentially as a 'thought crime' -- "Have sex for the wrong reasons, and we will imprison you!" I predict that there will be no more successful convictions now under (the freshly upheld) S.293 than there were in the last 100 years.

I hope that George Macintosh will be financially supported by the province to take the case to the Court of Appeals. If not, then I can't wait for them to try to prosecute the first family for polygamously grouping. After all, if it is a "group" crime, they'll have to arrest the women over 18, too. That will go over real well !!! They don't remember the 1953 Short Creek raid, do they?

WHAT AN IDIOT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Read this brilliant article concurring with my thoughts.

Today's the Day

2011-11-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

Today's the day when Justice Robert Bauman will issue his decision in the polygamy reference case addressing whether Canada's (S.293) law forbidding polygamy is in violation of Canada's charter of rights and freedoms.

I pity the poor guy. The hater-witches are not wrong - Warren did molest the young wives. Does this mean that all polygamists must go to prison? The law says that you are guilty of polygamy even if you didn't have sex with any of your partners, and even if you don't even intend to have sex with them. What, then, constitutes "a partner"? - someone with whom you study at the library?

I have said it twice before, so now I'm belaboring, but I think there are three potential outcomes in this decision (one of which I'm not sure is even available to Justice Bauman):

1. S.293 is constitutional (and doesn't violate the Charter).
2. S.293 is unconstitutional and is now void.
3. The B.C. parliament must craft a more legally sound anti-polygamy statute (I don't think he has the option to order this, but we'll see).

So, folks, picture me now, sitting at my desk, grinning from ear to ear in anticipation of the announcement around lunch-time today. How fortunate I am to be happy with whichever decision comes down. Why? - because we win either way!

If S.293 is upheld, will they go and arrest Winston and Jimmy today, or will they wait until the case is appealed before the Canadian Supreme Court?

If Winston and Jimmy are prosecuted under this stupid law, what will be the nature of their crime? - "You had more than one sex partner, and you had religious thoughts in your mind during the same approximate time period"?

If, by some stroke of fate, Justice Bauman orders the law to be rewritten, I, Renn Oldsbuster, will personally demand to be part of the rewriting team. I will take a sabbatical from my company and go to Vancouver and show those Members of Parliament how it's done (and vastly simplified from the original): -

Polygamy
S.293 Revised, 2012
(1) Every one who has sex with more than one person in a ten-year period is guilty of an indictable polygamy offence, and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.
(2) It shall be a defence to the indictment if the accused can show either that:
   a) All of the partners were of the same sex as the accused, or
   b) All of the intimate activities were engaged in solely for recreational purposes, or
   c) No sexual intercourse occurred, or
   d) None of the participants was a member of any religious congregation at the the time the sexual intercourse occurred.
-------------------------------------------
That ought to work, don't you think?
-

Shameless Advertising

2011-11-17T22:14:00.000-08:00

I don't even know what to say about this . . . . or this >>>>>

I guess this is what your tithing money is used for.

Who needs missionaries when you have this kind of advertising?

Clearly this is what Peter, James and John had in mind in 1829 when they restored the Melchizedek priesthood through Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery.

All The Marbles

2011-11-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

I just heard FOX NEWS's Trace Gallagher say the following:

The Dow is up today on news that Europe may finally be resolving its debt crisis, hopefully thus avoiding a WORLDWIDE FINANCIAL COLLAPSE."

Why is a "worldwide financial collapse" even feasible? Why do the media even utter such expressions? What would a "worldwide financial collapse look like?

All of the nations using fiat (paper/electronic-ledger-entry) money are squashing and stretching their "money" supply like pizza dough. Truth is, a nation's true wealth is not stretchable. A nation can only gain greater wealth through physical productivity or by plundering another nation's wealth. Since the paper money supply is stretchable (through printing), it has never been the true index of the size of a nation's treasury. You cannot print gold and silver, so it represents a more accurate measurement of our wealth - our treasure. Still, even precious metals are more a token of wealth than the actual wealth itself. So, if the Mediterranean private bankers have hijacked our printing presses (mint) and snatched all of our gold, have they truly divested us of our wealth?

Let's say they took all the gold and silver and amassed it in an impenetrable fortress on some remote Pacific island, how then are the people and nations of the world crippled financially? Do we need those bankers and their paper money? Do we need the gold? Is it not all a manipulation, a confidence racket?

If a worldwide financial collapse is feasible - and is coming - why is it? It is feasible because the people and their governments have complacently accepted the boom-and-bust, banking choke-hold foisted upon them for several millennia. Can those wicked bankers eat all that gold they have stolen? No. It is not really even that they need or want all the gold. What they want is to centralize power - not just nationally, but globally, and a worldwide financial collapse is the only means of achieving that. They have to fool us all into thinking that there just isn't enough money to go around (partly because we still owe them so much, and we can never get caught up on our late payments). Why would we be so stupid as to fall for this con game? There are seven billion people on this planet, and the usurers in control probably number only in the hundreds. Why do we let such tyranny persist? Do we remember that almost all of the wars in history have been money driven? Do we understand that a worldwide financial collapse must inevitably be accompanied by a worldwide war?

Coach Joe Paterno should have spoken out in public indignation when he learned years ago that one of his assistant coaches was sodomizing young boys. Mormon Church leaders should should have spoken out in public indignation years ago when they realized that their previous no-abortion policy was being changed. Our nation's presidents should have spoken out long ago in public indignation when they realized that our national sovereignty was being liened away to a pack of foreign bankers.

- - BUT THEY DIDN'T !!!!!

Well, actually, JFK spoke up (and it got him killed).
-----------------------------------------------
Here's today's quiz question:

Q. Who holds all the marbles?

     A. The International Bankers
     B. The People
     C. Jesus
-----------------------------------------------

Polygamist Doctor Escapes Prosecution

2011-11-09T18:33:00.000-08:00

SPECIAL REPORT

Chief Court Reporter, Renn Oldsbuster
November 9, 2011

Famed doctor, Conrad Murray, has escaped prosecution and conviction for his crime of polygamy. Murray, who was found guilty yesterday of involuntary manslaughter in the death of king-of-pop, Michael Jackson, has evaded incarceration for his polygamous lifestyle. Unlike Utah, where polygamy is considered an aggravation - an "enhancement" to other crimes (committed by Fundamentalist Mormons), California has chosen to turn a blind eye to what, in this case, was probably a more serious violation of the law ( - - see Murray below, along with three of his wives in happier times).

Dr. Murray allegedly had children from a number of these plural wives, but it is not clear whether the women in this polygamous family have gotten along smoothly.

This complete disregard of the blatant crime of felony bigamy is part of a disturbing trend in recent years in America. Hugh Hefner, perhaps America's most notorious polygamist, has never been charged. Tiger Woods' polygamy was utterly ignored by Florida's Attorney General. Charlie Sheen, an inveterate and flagrant polygamist, has evaded prosecution for years. Warren Jeffs, a virtually unknown polygamist from Utah, has not been convicted of religious bigamy, even though he is reputed to have taken over four thousand wives (mostly between the ages of 4 and 12).

Of special note recently, the Kody Brown family of Lehi, Utah; and Las Vegas, Nevada, has flaunted its egregious polygamy in nationally-broadcast, videotaped confessions. He has 17 children and four wives, and Utah's Attorney General, Mork Shortlift, has adamantly refused to enforce the law he has spent his entire career aggressively defending.

All fifty states have some sort of anti-bigamy statute, although it appears that all of them have lost the stomach for putting America's millions of casual and religious bigamists in prison.

This legal ambivalence is not confined solely to the prosecution of the crime of religious polygamy. In recent months, monogamous President Balack Obama has instructed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division to stop deporting illegal aliens and has directed the Justice Department to sue the states of Arizona and Alabama for attempting to enforce immigration laws.

??????????????

-------------------

News Updates

2011-11-09T17:30:00.000-08:00

It looks like Papandreou is out. Berlusconi has agreed to step aside also. The Dow dropped 390 points today. Europe is rumored to be on the brink of utter financial collapse [according to correspondent, Chicken Little).
---------------------------------------------

Yesterday, Merril Jessop, 75, got a ten-year prison sentence in Texas for performing an "illegal" wedding ceremony. I have blogged about this before, but I just have to rub this in! What in the blazes is an illegal wedding ceremony? What element of the event is criminal? - the words? - the arrangement of people in the room? - the ages of the people in the room? What part of the FIRST AMENDMENT do Barbie and her puppet jurors not understand?

Now, I'm not saying that what Merril did was not inconceivably reckless. If he had half an inkling that these (alleged) eleven young daughters of his (whom he was surrendering to Jeffs, his colleague in the church's First Presidency) were going to be molested in short order, he should have caught the first train out of town with Carolyin and the rest of his immense tribe. However, it has also been reported that he picked up a couple of young dames in the bargain, so maybe there was some kind of wink-and-a-nod quid-pro-quo going on.

Nevertheless, I think Merril has suffered enough with the discovery of Jeffs's despicable debaucheries and the monumental humiliation. I wish there had been some kind of plea bargain opportunity (like in Wendel's case) to avoid prison time. Maybe he is feeling some sort of mea culpa and wants to fall on the sword.

The galling thing for me is the absurd contention that these fantasy ceremonies conducted in a private setting can constitute a crime in modern, 14th Amendment America. I understand all the jurisprudence surrounding enticement, grooming, aiding and abetting, complicity, collusion, and so on, but this illegal wedding idea is even more intangible (let alone its being entirely novel in Texas). In many cases, assisting in some way (even obliviously) with the actions of a criminal can be weighed and deemed criminal in and of itself, but it still seems to me like a huge stretch to criminalize a strictly religious performance - one which involves the utterance of purely religious phrases, and no more physical interaction than perhaps a brief hand-clasp, - one which presumes no legal stamp of approval, no governmental imprimatur. I weep inside at the thought that no one has the stamina to take this farce to the Supreme Court and get it overturned. In the wake of the Jeffs disgrace, however, I'd be surprised if any of his cohorts can escape the wrath of a disgusted American public. Perhaps the prosecution's view is that, despite the informal nature of the ceremony, the young girl participating in it was losing all personal and community-approved freedoms to escape imminent sexual exploitation by the putative "husband". Yet, if that is the legal standard, you would have to incarcerate the entire community - or maybe just outlaw religion.
--------------------------------------------
In other news, it has been reported that Judge Bauman will render his decision in the British Columbia polygamy reference case in a couple of weeks. Remember that this anti-polygamy case was not about establishing new, anti-polygamy legislation, it was about whether or not to uphold a 100-year-old, anti-polygamy law that was atrociously crafted and NEVER implemented. The judge has an unenviable task. Any ruling is likely to be appealed (see my earlier associated posts here and here and here).

If he rules in our (polygamists') favor, I shall cheer because he will be acknowledging what everyone already knows - that you cannot criminalize informal, multi-partner intimacies in a nation that already solemnizes legal, homosexual marriages. If he rules that the law can be lawfully applied, I shall laugh out loud because, despite my not wishing any harm on Winston Blackmore's and Jimmy Oler's families, I am DYING to see what the RCMP and the prosecutors think they can do next. Of the perhaps hundreds of faithful Fundamentalist Mormon families in the Bountiful/Creston area, which ones will they handcuff first? Will they take the women, too? I have visions of the 1953 (Short Creek) raid all over again. Sincerely, I wonder how it is that supposedly intelligent public officials can be so incredibly myopic and stupid. I guess I'm just naive.

Perhaps the law of unintended consequences will kick in, as with Bank of America's boneheaded $5.00 monthly debit card fee, or Obama's ill-fated 15-cent Christmas tree tax.

A Metaphor

2011-11-07T10:03:00.000-08:00

I just went to see the new movie, IN TIME, with Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried and Cillian Murphy. Apart from a few inconsistencies, the movie was actually good. I give it a 7 out of 10, and I told my teenagers to go and see it.

The plot had several interesting twists, and the movie's main concept was clever. In the characters' world, people older than 25 have only one more year to live, unless they can earn more time. As the story develops, we learn that powerful international forces have manipulated the availability and cost of the extra time the people so desperately want. In truth, there is more than enough "time"-currency to go around, but its distribution is manipulated, creating a class division in society - "have's" and "have-not's".

The metaphor for our current global banking/financial system is unmistakable and, may-I-say, brilliantly conceived.

I came away with some searching questions about the management of our planet (and the whole universe for that matter). What I found especially a propos is the idea that values, human efforts, costs, and pricing can all be manipulated - stretching the precious resources for the powerful, and constricting them for the powerless. The question of over-population surfaces, too, with the need for some powerful overseer to supervise it aggressively.

"Thou shalt not have in thy bag diverse weights, a great and a small." (Deuteronomy 25:13)

Most of all, I liked the screenwriter's concept that time-currency was limitlessly stretchable (just as the supply of paper or electronic money is limitlessly stretchable in a fiat-banking economy). Interestingly, the message of the movie will likely resonate with socialist and conservative thinkers alike. I prefer to echo the words of Cleon Skousen, who would say that it is not about democrats and republicans, or liberals and conservatives, it is about liberty versus tyranny.

Go see the movie, and see if you agree with me.

Into The Fire

2011-11-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

Just a few months ago there were vast riots and protests in the streets of Cairo, Egypt. Tahrir Square was filled with anti-government demonstrators for weeks. The crowds called for the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the long-time premier of Egypt who had brutalized the people for years. He and his family had lived in luxury and opulence for years, plundering and enjoying a billion dollars in U.S. aid each year while the people starved.

The uprising was successful, but not before hundreds of Egyptians were killed by pro-government forces tasked with quelling the insurrection. I watched in amazement as military vehicles raced through the crowded streets, literally mowing down defenseless pedestrian protesters. When Mubarak finally stepped down and ceded power, the military stepped in and assumed control. This was a time of great celebration. The people had brought about the change they thought they wanted, and everyone hoped for a brighter future.

The military transitional regime promised to give way to democratic, civil elections within six months. The goal was to change Egyptian society into a free democracy as soon as possible.

Yesterday, as I drove into work, I heard the following on NPR news radio:
-------------------------------------------------

THE MILITARY HAS DECIDED TO POSTPONE THE DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS TILL LATE 2013

HUNDREDS OF BLOGGERS AND JOURNALISTS ARE BEING ROUNDED UP AND TRIED IN MILITARY TRIBUNALS (MOSTLY FOR EXPRESSING THEIR OPINIONS)

THE MILITARY IS DEMANDING THAT, AFTER THE TRANSITION TO A CIVIL GOVERNMENT, THERE BE NO CIVIL OVERSIGHT OR OPEN CRITICISM OF THE MILITARY

THE MILITARY IS WRITING LANGUAGE INTO THE PROPOSED NEW CONSTITUTION REQUIRING THAT THE MILITARY BUDGET BE UTTERLY SECRET

-------------------------------------------------
So, where do the Egyptian people stand after their spectacular freedom revolution?

I remember the hoopla surrounding the liberals' push for Obamacare. The chant was "WE NEED HEALTHCARE - VOTE FOR HEALTHCARE !!!" Of course, this was stupid - a manipulation. We already had "HEALTHCARE". What the socialists were howling for was a CHANGE in the way healthcare would be provided and funded in America. They got the approval (by fraudulent means) and now we have a mess.

Speaking of change, Greece's opposition leader is now calling for the resignation of prime minster Papandreou. In Rome, thousands of demonstrators are crying for the departure of Italy's President, Silvio Berlusconi - why? - because, like Papandreou, he is the messenger for the IMF, delivering its demands for deep austerity measures to address the nations' crushing debt and bankrupt social entitlement programs.

What these protesters (along with the OCCUPY WALL STREET louts) need to realize is that the "change" they are clamoring for is not necessarily what they want, or what is good for the country. Sinister political and financial forces behind the scenes are simply exploiting these young, passionate revolutionaries and using them to usher in a new leadership arrangement. If the bankers can convince you to hate the king who borrowed all the money, then they can convince you to commit regicide and replace the king with a new and more tyrannical ruler (see Bolshevik Revolution). The vast global power of the banks and the devil to upset entire nations is breathtaking.

The Egyptian protesters did not like the frying pan, so now they have left it and gone into the fire. Soon we will be next.

The Biggest Lie

2011-11-04T08:06:00.000-07:00

I saw a bumper sticker on a car today. It read:

"My boss is a Jewish carpenter"

I found a website that has gone to some lengths to challenge the accuracy of this assertion, claiming that the subject of the statement (Jesus of Nazareth) was not really a carpenter. Fair enough.

What caught my attention (more than the "Was He a carpenter or a Rabbi?" question) was the assertion that Christ our Savior was Jewish. The term "Jew" (and the various original pronunciations of it) apparently emerged during the Babylonian captivity (those 70 years [597 to 515 B.C.] during which the southern Palestine tribe of Judah [plus some of Simeon, Levi and Benjamin] mixed with the Babylonians [before eventually repatriating to Judea]).

So, from 515 B.C., the (Judahite) people of the captivity were back in Jerusalem, now being nicknamed "Jews". Earlier, back in 722 B.C., Shalmaneser and Sargon II had rounded up the people (Israelites) of Ephraim/Samaria for deportation northward into Assyria (the effective disappearance of the "10 tribes"). Not all were deported. Some of the "10-tribed" Israelites made their way south to Jerusalem.

In 157 B.C., John Hyrcanus, the leader of the Edomites (Idumeans) from Mt. Seir, invaded Judea, and the two peoples were intermingled and perhaps permanently fused. The Edomites brought with them many of the teachings and traditions of the Talmud. Clearly, by the time of Jesus's appearance in Jerusalem a century and a half later, southern Palestine/Judea was a melting pot. Edomites, Jews, Edomite-Jews, Romans, and Israelites lived in close proximity, and did not always get along. After Jesus leveled some pretty searing indictments at the Jews (and they at Him), they crucified him.

So the crux of the question is - did Jesus descend from the same Jewish population which murdered him? As a resident of Jerusalem in Judea, Jesus was, by residence/nationality, a Judean (despite his family having come from Cornwall, England). By lineage, however, was He a "JEW" or "Jewish"? For the answer I decided to do a quick Google search and turned up the following webpage - which I found enlightening.

Greece Wavers

2011-11-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

News reports are coming in today indicating that the Greeks are not so tickled with the urgently proposed bailout/restructuring program offered to them by the other European Union countries and the European banks. Greece's prime minister has scheduled a national referendum (in January !!!) for the Greeks themselves to vote on whether to accept the very austere proposals. Reportedly, 60% of Greeks are against it (most likely because they won't accept fewer entitlements and higher taxes).

This news is causing shudders in the world's markets (Dow Jones is down 600 points between today and yesterday). Many U.S. investment firms are deeply invested in struggling European nations (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, etc.). A total default by Greece would have a ripple effect not only in Europe, but also in the U.S. Our stock market is biting its nails moment-by-moment as news of Greece's indecision flows in.

If Greece utterly rejects the restructuring plan, the options are mostly grim - it could separate from the Eurozone and revert to its former currency. The prospect of a bankruptcy filing is already being discussed. Who would be the receiver/trustee?

The point here is that the reason why this is sending jitters worldwide is because other European nations have economies nearly as shaky as Greece's, and there is a huge fear that, should Greece default, the enormous international banking (paper) losses will cause a domino effect and trigger the failure of those other nations.

My question is this - if the precariousness of Greece's situation is sufficient to rattle the whole world, are we not dangerously close to some sort of meltdown anyway? I have said this before - virtually all the Western nations are far deeper in debt than they should be. If any one of them were to default, bankruptcy, receivership and repossession are inevitable. If you survey the current European economic landscape, it is apparent that without massive monetary infusions from Germany or the U.S., many of these foundering nations will fail anyway, sooner or later. There is discussion of China stepping in to help the situation - but didn't China recently turn to Europe for financial assistance?

In Bible times the Jubilee was required every fifty years. It mandated the forgiveness of all debts and the dissolution of all "corporations". The big problem with debt is found in:

1. Incessant carrying costs (interest)
2. Daily compounding interest
3. Rule of 78's (front-end weighted amortization) formula

Debt is just plain expensive. Its voracious thirst for the payment of the 11th dollar on every 10 dollars borrowed encourages the inflationary scheme of printing all those 11th dollars. Debt also frequently results in default and liquidation - the loss of wealth. What we are observing is the massive transfer of wealth on a global scale. If the banks won't obey the law of the jubilee, the people's only option is to rise up and repudiate the banks and their debt tyranny. This is why the banks finance the government and the military - then they can use the power of government to prevent the people from rising up and resisting them. The "Occupy Wall Street" protesters are not wrong about tyranny in the financial sector, but their efforts are too insignificant to make a dent, and they have not successfully identified the real culprits.

Jesus owns this world. It is His footstool. We are only stewards (not owners). We are unworthy stewards who have broken some of the fundamental biblical guidelines. We were incapable of effecting our own spiritual salvation, and are now incapable of securing our own temporal salvation. When the tyranny and oppression reach a critical peak, Jesus must intervene with His own brand of oppression - a "Marvellous Work and a Wonder" (- catastrophic global tribulations) to punish the wicked (plunderers, supplanters, deceivers, usurers,) and discipline His people (Ephraim and the other Israelites).

Watching Greece fail is like watching the death of the canary in the mineshaft - it is an unmistakable omen.

10 Years' Probation

2011-10-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

GoSanAngelo reported today that Wendell Nielsen was sentenced to 10 years' probation for his crime of pure felony adult bigamy. The sentence was the result of a no-contest plea.

While the Kody Brown family and the Utah AG's office joust over whether or not Utah's polygamists currently live in fear of the threat of prosecution for sleeping with more than one partner, Texas has gone all in and bet the farm.

Wendell Nielsen's only crime is having slept with more than one girl. Texas is obviously pressing this prosecution and conviction because Nielsen is the only man in Texas EVER TO HAVE SLEPT with more than one woman. Texas needs to make an example out of him to keep the state pure and unsullied.

I guess I should start calling for donations to pay for the lawyers who must needs take this case to an appeals court. Texas gained notoriety when (through the Lawrence case [June,2003]) it single-handedly secured the permanent decriminalization of gay sex (and all other private consenting-adult sex, for that matter). Texas must be bucking to get religious polygamy re-affirmed as a practice fully protected already by the Lawrence decision.

You cannot go to an American court and complain about a bad law unless you have been threatened or harmed by it. Case in point.

I guess I still wonder what probation means to Wendell. Will the probation officer routinely inquire as to whether he has confined his sleeping regimen to the bed of just one of his ladies, or whether he has maintained his customary rotation? If he is caught with two different ladies in a six-month time window, will Barbie throw him and the equally-guilty ladies in the slammer?

Only in America !!!!!!!!!!!! Someone should tell Hugh Hefner to steer clear of Texas.

Anteaters and Evolution

2011-10-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched a science channel show. It featured the (Xenarthra) anteaters of Brazil. The show followed a female anteater and presented amazing film of this weird creature clawing open termite mounds and catching termites with its long, sticky tongue.

Of course, this documentary, like many of its kind, was vigorously preaching the concepts of evolution, even going so far as to say that the Brazilian anteater "co-evolved" with the termites it eats.

The anteater's jaw is fused. It cannot properly chew. Its jaw is so long that it acts more like a suction tube. If it doesn't suck down 30,000 termites a day, it will die of starvation. The narrator in the documentary explained with great confidence that this creature's ant-eating mechanism evolved over "millions of years" to aid it in eating termites.

My question is this - during the first part of those millions of years, while the mouth and jaw were not yet fully "evolved", how the hell did it eat anything? Did the termites just run up and climb into its mouth out of compassion for its sorry, underdeveloped snout? Did the anteater's ancestors sit around thinking - "Let's not eat worms or mice or anything else. Let's let our jaws fuse together so that we can't chew anything. Let's patiently wait a couple more million years until our snouts are useless for anything other than suctioning out termites, then we will be able to finally eat."?

????????????

Critical Mass

2011-10-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

You know me - the cogs in my brain are ever whirring around, trying to make sense of a nonsensical world. I have been wondering about the FLDS dilemma. I know (from what I've read) that when someone in the FLDS world realizes that Warren is a deviant child-molester, then that someone must immediately be cut off from the 10,000-member congregation. I understand also that that person's wives and kids must then be assigned to a different family - a family that is still under the ether.

A mathematician might be able to figure this out better than me, but it seems that this process of realization will follow a certain graph, most likely an exponential one. At first, one girl will flee her church captors, and her family will have to deal with the mysteries and unanswered questions. "Where were you, dear? Why don't you want to wait for uncle Warren? Why are you angry with him? What did he do to you that is causing you so much trauma?"

Most likely at least one set of family members will recognize the signs and come face to face with the abuse and treachery. If that family has the courage, it will face the music and accept the instant excommunication and ostracism. Let's fast-forward a little into the future and see how, pretty soon, a bunch of families will wake up and accept the terrible reality. Perhaps some will even stand up to Warren's brother and his goons and begin to propagate the awful discovery to their fellow faithful. After all, how many families can you reassign before there is no one left to take them all in?

At what number is critical mass achieved? - 1,000, - - 5,000? The FLDS people are very obedient. They prefer to operate as a collective. When a goodly fraction of that collective is made aware of Warren's perversions and the degradation of their virtuous daughters, will they finally revolt and throw off the tyranny of the man behind the curtain? Whither will he run, and will he get there before law enforcement gets to him? I was never good at equations, especially when they entail a humanitarian crisis of such unthinkable proportions.

Your math is as good as mine.

On a similar note, this situation reminds me of a skit I saw recently from Monty Python's Flying Circus -
The Funniest Joke In The World.

The idea was that when a person happened upon this particular joke, it contained such lethal material that the reader instantly died - BRILLIANT !!!!!!!!

Escape From What?

2011-10-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, Carolyin Jessop co-wrote a book titled ESCAPE. I think hers was more of a philosophical escape than anything else. Jessop received a college education and ran a business away from the twin towns. It would be more accurate to say that she left her religion and ran off with her kids. In her book there is much information which would be better described as tabloid entertainment than factual narrative.

Last week, a young woman who is alleged to have been one of Warren Jeffs' wives, ran from her previous residence and sought refuge. She reportedly sought protection with the family of one of the men who left the FLDS fold (under Lyle Jeffs) when he learned of Warren's molestation of his own 12-year-old girl partners.

So I have a question. I know Warren had more wives than one. Who knows - maybe 100? He was incarcerated over five years ago (August, 2006). Presumably, those scores of wives (ranging from 12 to 92) must have been housed somewhere. Recent photos show dozens of these very young wives all together in pastel prairie dresses. I can imagine that Warren didn't want anybody else messing with them while he was away awaiting his miraculous liberation. So where did they all get put? Were they all together, or were they grouped in several locations? Were they free to speak to the media? NO. Were they free to mingle with other community members and reveal their group sex party experiences? I don't think so.

This latest escapee appears to have had to go to extreme lengths to get free. Why? Was she being detained against her will - or, worse still - was she being compulsorily medicated to facilitate the restraint? I don't know. Where are the other young sister wives of hers? Presumably, they are all still being concealed/confined in some way. Maybe they get to sew and sing hymns, or even study the writings of Prophet Warren S. Jeffs. Do they go to school? NAHH! Are they free to go into town or drive around, or even talk to their chums on the cell-phone? I bet not. Do they know what a computer is? Would they even know what to think or do if they were to be liberated?

Has there been more than one who has fled this detention situation? Do the other ninety-nine want to flee also, but cannot? Can they escape and, if so, escape from what?

If they do escape, what tales will they tell? I can think of more than a few entities who are itching to get their hands on them. How healthy would that be?

America is Finished !!!

2011-10-10T11:36:00.000-07:00

I watched a YouTube video today that gave me the convincing I finally needed that America is finished.

A civil rights proponent (U.S. Congressman) attended a rally organized by the Occupy Atlanta/(Wall Street) mob. He was scheduled to address the zombies in attendance but was turned away. Yours truly is at least as supportive of the eradication of the Federal Reserve banking system as are these hippie youths. Sadly, these robots appear to have had their brains removed. Watch and shudder!

Repo' Time

2011-10-07T18:36:00.000-07:00

In an interview today, British MP, Daniel Hannan, predicted that Greece will default in a month or so. Hannan is a brilliant economist and political thinker who is willing to say what many others fear to. For an example of Hannan's vigorous denunciation of central banks, read his article More Money Printing.

I want to ask what will happen when Greece defaults. My guess is that in order to get all that loan money (that it cannot repay), it was required to put up the land area (surface and mineral) as collateral to the bank to secure the loans. You should know this story by now.

The banks have fancy, official-sounding names like - International Monetary Fund or Inter-European Redevelopment Bank, but you and I both know that these central national banks and central international banks are OWNED by somebody. Yes, owned by people like Kuhn, Loeb, Schiff, Rothschild, Lazard, and others. You rarely see these characters, but they still exist, and they still own the big banks, and the big banks are rapidly gobbling up all the small banks. Remember that what they give/lend to the people is paper or electronic (debit card) money. Remember that what they take in exchange is paper money with interest, and then when that runs out, they take the gold, silver and land.

It is important to remember that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 was a repossession. Russia had been dragged into a century of wars with its neighbors, borrowing billions from the Dutch and French banks to pay the soldiers. Unable to pay principal or interest, Russia watched the banks send in their agents (Trotsky, Stalin, Lenin, Peter Hammer, Virl Schultz, and Herbert Walker Bush) to carry out the foreclosure. Time to repo the collateral. That couldn't be done without wiping out the royal family (so that it wouldn't rise up later and repudiate the creditor). The thinking at the time was that an enslaved, communist country would be a better credit risk.

In Russia the creditors seized the country through violence and by installing a new regime that would do their bidding. This has always been their vision for the whole world. It's hard for them to repossess your car if you are still driving it.

Greece will go under. It CANNOT keep up with its financial obligations. It never could. Through liberal, progressive socialism, the government's financial obligations were ratcheted ever upwards until they could NEVER be satisfied. So now what?

There is only one pathway. The creditor bank must install its own agents to govern the newly-liquidated country. This way, it can completely control where ALL the resources are allocated. By fomenting unrest and stirring up public riots, the bank can solidify the popular disillusionment with the old leaders, thus smoothing the transition to the new tyrannical rulers (see Egypt).

Problem is - Italy and Spain are not far behind. It's all been prophesied. The Mediterraneans and the Europeans are not uncomfortable with the veiled oppression of democratic socialism (having cowered under it for centuries). When all of Europe's economies are crippled, the people will acquiesce relatively peaceably. Not so, here Stateside. Pick your poison, I guess.

It's a bit like the atheism/evolution squabble. If you think humans came from tadpoles, and God is a fantasy, then the idea that He holds allodial title to this planet is laughable. In my view, I am His kid, and I walk this orb with His permission. The rodent devils who have raped and plundered it are in for a surprise more irksome than the repo-man. Strange that the LDS Church is so silent in this period of intense prophetic fulfillment.

A Prophecy

2011-10-02T22:18:00.000-07:00

BREAKING NEWS  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

Esteemed Senior Apostle, Boyd K. Packer, of the LDS Church's Council of the Twelve announced a prophecy yesterday during the Church's semi-annual General Conference. Here is some of what the Salt Lake Tribune quoted - -

Peggy Fletcher Stack

The Salt Lake Tribune

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/52664839-78/church-lds-packer-temple.html.csp

Updated Oct 2, 2011 02:35AM

"The end is not near," senior LDS apostle Boyd K. Packer said Saturday.

Today’s youths can look forward to "getting married, having a family, seeing your children and grandchildren, maybe even great-grandchildren," Packer told more than 20,000 Mormons gathered in the giant LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City.

This is monumental. Church leaders (who virtually never claim any specific revelations from God) have made very few prophecies in recent decades. This is a rather remarkable development. Mormon faithful will fawn over this surprising prediction. Depending on how old you are, you can presume that Packer is envisioning the "end" coming about in approximately 65 years. Who knew??? Gosh, I figured that the mere re-election of Obama would single-handedly cause the world to break in half . . . . .

The gratifying element in this prophetic surprise is that we can now all relax, right? What better way to lull the already wayward saints into lethargic complacency. It's kind of like the "All is well in Zion" reassurances. I'm not completely sure what Packer is alluding to when he refers to "the 'end'" (being decades away). I rather think of the Millennium as a beginning. It certainly won't terminate our Earth. It will, however, put an end to much iniquity and the smooth sayings of false prophets. Of the people of this day, Isaiah (in Chapter 30) said, --

9. That this is a rebellious people, lying children, children that will not hear the law of the Lord:

10. Which say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits:

Jeremiah agreed, prophesying (in Chapter 23), --

16. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord.

17. They say still unto them that despise me, The Lord hath said, Ye shall have peace; and they say unto every one that walketh after the imagination of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you.

18. For who hath stood in the counsel of the Lord, and hath perceived and heard his word? who hath marked his word, and heard it?

19. Behold, a whirlwind of the Lord is gone forth in fury, even a grievous whirlwind: it shall fall grievously upon the head of the wicked.

I am truly offended that this guy would be so pompous and disingenuous as to try to get us to believe that he has recently gained some special, insider knowledge, while at the same time he fails to quote the verbatim words of God to support such a prophecy. I will give his senility the benefit of the doubt. I am more dismayed that naive Mormons everywhere will gobble this up as a divine proclamation and then not "trim" their "lamps".

Equally galling was the renewed repudiation of polygamists (and fundamentalist Mormons) by Elder Russell Ballard. "They are", he says, "not affiliated with the Church" (other than having founded it [and the Salt Lake Valley], I guess).

In closing, let me comment that today's announcement of the construction of two new temples in Africa (Republic of the Congo, and South Africa), will hopefully not be followed by an announcement of their likely premature closing (as was the case with the Nigeria temple).

"And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well--and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell." (2 Nephi 28:21)

Insult to Injury

2011-09-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

Forgive my coarse language, but I had a couple of WTF moments yesterday. Before I get to that, here's a portion of a letter mailed by a telephone company to a subscriber:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Mrs. XXXXXXX,

We have made repeated unsuccessful attempts to contact you by phone to inform you that your line has been disconnected. If you wish to pay the past due balance and have your line reconnected, please reply to this letter or call us on the phone.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOX NEWS yesterday aired a spot showing a gathering of residents of a small mid-western town. The people were welcoming home a young Iraq veteran who had lost his arm and both legs in an IED explosion. The reporter pointed out that the generous townspeople had managed to collect $50,000.00 in donations to pay for the soldier's medical expenses. WTF !!!!!!!!

Later, FOX NEWS reported that the International Monetary Fund has recently had to pay out so much in relief to failing nations like Greece, Ireland and Portugal, that it (the IMF) is now looking for approximately $3 trillion dollars in bailout money (the largest portion of which would need to come from U.S. taxpayers). WAIT !!! - wasn't it the IMF (and its private banker owners) who looted all our money in the first place through fractional reserve banking and usury? WTF !!!!!!!!!!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lastly, I am starting to get befuddled by some of the circular reasoning surrounding polygamy. Some of it goes something like this:

"I resent these polygamists who break the law, take multiple wives and go on TV to parade their criminal lifestyle in our faces. I resent them because this should not be allowed, and they are breaking the law!"

Polygamy should be against the law because I resent it. It is offensive. It is against everything we are trying to do here in America."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The circular argument uses its own conclusion as one of its stated or unstated premises.  Instead of offering proof, it simply asserts the conclusion in another  form, thereby inviting the listener to accept it as settled when, in  fact, it has not been settled. Because the premise is no different from  and therefore as questionable as its conclusion, a circular argument  violates the criterion of acceptability."
(T. Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoning. Wadsworth, 2001)

How do you argue with it?

2011-09-14T17:26:00.000-07:00

I noticed yesterday that Joe Darger and his three glamorous wives appeared on Good Morning America to announce the publication of their new book, LOVE TIMES THREE (written with reporter, Brooke Adams).

I wish to make merely one observation. There are apparently several unmentionable hater-harpies who cannot contain their tooth-gnashing over this. From what I understand, the Dargers are decent people with normal kids and a moderately successful lifestyle. The hate crusaders will rant on ad nauseam about child brides, lost boys, baby cemeteries, incest, maleducation, welfare fraud, and God knows what else, but none of that applies to the Dargers.

Truth is, there is no such thing as a "typical" polygamist family, so you cannot make sweeping generalizations about people from this culture. I know the Mother Church is cringing over this new, happy band of polygs stepping into the cosmopolitan limelight. Shurtleff is at a loss as to what to do. The Browns want to show they have been threatened by a felony bigamy statute, and Shurtleff insists that the statute is there, not to prosecute polygamists, but rather to teach the people of Utah the wisdom of their elders.

I would never try to tell a gay man he is evil not to be attracted to women. Likewise, the haters can whine on endlessly about the wrongness of plural marriage, but they cannot argue with reality, and now reality is staring us all in the face. I understand that one of the approaches recently taken by the haters is to say that the Dargers' book is poorly written. I just read the book, and I can tell you that the content and linguistic delivery are both impressive, so I can only assume that the haters cannot read, or that they did not in fact read the book. Truth is - the message of the book is entirely autobiographical. It is hard to argue with facts, and it is not easy to argue that another person's feelings are not really his or her feelings. The Darger family explodes the prevailing stereotypes. The Dargers' television appearances have silenced many critics. Their very existence neutralizes all of the tabloidy, sensationalistic squawking about polygamy in general. I cannot wait to see Dr. Drew do a '180' on his own show.

I Have To Laugh

2011-09-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

Obama is traveling from state to state touting his brilliant new job creation idea - an "American Jobs Bill". He is preaching to teachers and students that it is time to "create" new jobs for teachers and firemen, and for construction workers to build new government road projects. This half-a-trillion-dollar STIMULUS plan intends to spend this money over one year and then tax us to pay for it over the next ten years. How can this plan sensibly infuse money into the private sector of the economy if it intends to suck out the same amount of money (plus interest) immediately thereafter? 4 - 4 = 0

I know Obama is not unintelligent, so I can only conclude that he is a complete, socialist &$$h@le !!!!!!!!!!!!!

What's more - he knows that Congress will not pass this stupid bill, so he just wants to be able to campaign on the lament that he was trying to create jobs, and the rotten, evil Republican congress stood in the way.

I have to laugh!

Make Up Your Mind

2011-09-06T21:58:00.000-07:00

I am including the full text of an AP article below because it is indicative of the insanity of the State of Utah. Attorney Jonathan Turley recently filed a lawsuit against the State of Utah, challenging its idiotic bigamy statute, on behalf of the Kody Brown family. Utah's Attorney General is arguing that the Brown family lacks the necessary standing to challenge the law. The assertion is that the Browns have not been sufficiently "harmed" to claim justifiable standing.

It's all fine and dandy for the AG to support an ongoing criminal investigation, then say that charges will not necessarily be forthcoming, but he has to eventually make up his fricking mind.

If the Utah county prosecutor proceeds to arrest the Brown family, the Browns will then have the harm/standing they need to challenge the law. Buhman will likely not do that, because neither Shurtleff nor his Church wants Reynolds overturned.

If the AG insists that there is ZERO possibility that the Browns will ever be arrested for consenting adult polygamy (protected under Lawrence), then he is in effect saying that Utah's stupid bigamy statute is unenforceable and that he never intends to apply it.

I'm no legal scholar, but it seems to me that, if a law is utterly eviscerated and effectively dead, then someone - namely someone who is still menaced by it - ought to be able to step up and demand that the courts or the legislature repeal it, permanently.

The double-talk coming out of assistant A.G. Jerrold Jensen's mouth is stunning. He says that no mere consenting adult polygamists have been arrested for more than 50 years. READ MY LIPS - this is a LIE !!!!!!!!! Mark Easterday (of Monroe, Utah) was arrested in 1999 for practicing polygamy with his wife, Pepper, and his girl-friend Marian. He pleaded the charge down to adultery and paid a $500.00 fine. Since that time, someone has gone into the court records in that county and changed the documents to reflect that Easterday was originally charged with adultery. This is fraud.

I expect that the Federal court will look dimly on Utah's lack-of-standing argument. There has been enough saber-rattling in the last year to frighten any family into exile, let alone a family with four wives and a TV show.

Anyway, I don't care. Utah has now painted itself into an exquisite and impossible corner. It is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. What's more, I just got wind of another consenting adult polygamist family which is going to storm into the spotlight next week. Sooner or later, Snotlick is going to have to make up his mother-loving mind and grow a backbone. Listen - there are tens of thousands of polygs in Arizona and Utah. Make up your mind - arrest us or shut up. You simply cannot have it both ways. If you think this legal ambivalence is trivial, think about it this way - - - - -

I, Renn Oldsbuster, hereby challenge the Attorney General AND the Utah legislature to pick one of the following two statements and then publish it in the newspaper and online:

A. "Utah's bigamy statute squarely applies to informal religious relationships between consenting adults, and we intend to pursue the prosecution of all Utahns found to be involved in such relationships."

OR ---

B. "We admit that the purport and cohabit prongs of Utah's bigamy statute constitute impermissible targeting of a religious minority, therefore we publicly proclaim our repudiation of this statutory language, and promise all consenting adult polygamists that, even if the law stays on the books, we will NEVER apply it to them. We also encourage the legislature to change the statute to criminalize only those parties who fraudulently obtain more than one legal marriage license."

Pick one, SNOTLICK!

Further evidence of the AG's broken memory is the fact that Judge Walter Steed was removed from his judgeship because he has three partners. If the anti-bigamy statute will not be used to target polygamists, why does the AG use it to target them?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) Sept. 6, 2011 —
State attorneys say a federal court challenge to Utah's bigamy law by the "Sister Wives" cable TV show family should be dismissed because they can't prove they've been threatened with arrest or prosecution.

Polygamist Kody Brown and his four wives — Meri, Janelle, Christine, and Robyn — filed their lawsuit in Salt Lake City's U.S. District Court in July. A criminal investigation of the family began after the launch of their TLC reality show in fall 2010.

No charges have been filed by either the state of Utah or prosecutors in Utah County, where the family, which includes 16 children, lived. The family moved to Nevada in January and contends they were forced to leave Utah in order to avoid prosecution.

But in court papers filed Sept. 1, the attorney general's office argues that criminal charges aren't necessarily forthcoming.

"They have not been warned that if they do not cease to engage in their polygamous relationships that legal actions will be taken against them," Assistant Utah Attorney General Jerrold S. Jensen wrote. "And — what is probably the tipping point — there have been no arrests or prosecutions for the mere practice of polygamy in Utah in over 50 years."

Court papers say the policy of the Utah attorney general's office is only to prosecute polygamists for bigamy when it occurs in conjunction with other crimes.

In a statement provided by e-mail, the Brown's attorney, Jonathan Turley, said the state's motion for a dismissal is an effort to avoid scrutiny of an unconstitutional law.

"Under this extreme position, state officials can criminalize any private relationship while denying the right of citizens to challenge the law, even when those citizens are denounced as presumptive felons by prosecutors in the media," Turley, a professor at George Washington University in Washington D.C. "We will vigorously oppose the effort to close the door of the courthouse to this family."

Under Utah law, it is illegal for unmarried persons to cohabitate, or "purport" to be married. A person is also guilty of bigamy if they hold multiple legal marriage licenses.

The third-degree felony is punishable by up to five years in state prison. Both men and women can be prosecuted under the law, which also applies to unmarried, monogamous couples that live together.

The Brown's lawsuit asks a federal judge to declare the law unconstitutional.

Appellate court records shows that only three bigamy cases have been prosecuted in Utah since 1960, the state said in its court filing. All three cases involved crimes other than bigamy, including fraud, criminal non-support of spouses and children and sexual assault of a minor.

Utah County has no stated policy on prosecuting polygamy, but historically has a similar practice, Jeffrey Buhman, the county attorney states in affidavit filed with the court.

Buhman has said his office's investigation is ongoing and no decision about whether or not to prosecute the Browns has ever been announced.

Early Mormon settlers brought polygamy to Utah in the 1840s. Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abandoned the practice in 1890 however, as Utah moved toward statehood.

The Browns belong to the Apostolic United Brethren, one of handful of self-described Mormon fundamentalist churches that continue the practice as part of their faith.

The polygamy advocacy group Principle Voices estimates there are about 40,000 fundamentalists who practice or believe in polygamy living in Utah and other western states.

Like most polygamists in Utah, Brown is legally married only to his first wife, Meri. He subsequently "wed" Janelle, Christine and Robyn only in religious ceremonies and the couples consider themselves "spiritually married."

Turley has said the focus of the family's lawsuit is really privacy, not polygamy. The Browns are not challenging Utah's right to refuse to recognize plural marriage nor are they seeking multiple marriage licenses.

"What they are asking for is the right to structure their own lives, their own family, according to their faith and their beliefs," he said at a news conference outside the federal courthouse two months ago.

Is He Ready?

2011-08-30T08:25:00.000-07:00

Warren is doing just about everything necessary to get himself over to the other side - and why not? I would. I mean -- when you commit adultery or pedophilia - or whatever the word is for the debauchery he has committed, why would you want to stay on this planet? If you have a conscience, if you recognize the severity of these types of sins, you realize that the least you can do towards atonement is to die. In earlier times, fellow church brethren could oblige and help you take the step. Nowadays, in this pathetic, namby-pamby culture we live in, you are on your own. If Warren keeps starving himself, and if the prison staff don't get in the way, we could be observing his early and timely passing very soon. The drawback is that he may be cherished as a martyred prophet rather than as a disgraced pervert.

My question is this - if the Lord's prophet is dead and buried, will Lyle step in as the rightful heir? Is he next in line? Is he the senior member of the 12 or the 7 or the 3 (or however many it is)? Is he secretly aching for the chance to wrest control like Warren did? Is he ready? Is the Lord ready? At the very moment when Warren takes his last gasp, will God resume this ostensibly unending stream of revelations by talking to Lyle ad infinitum? Is it natural and normal for the thousands of faithful FLDS congregants to simply transfer their unstinting obeisance to the brother-in-waiting?

I remember the passage in Moroni 10: 3-5, where we are admonished to test purported revelations. If we are presented with the claim of prophecy or revelation from another party, we must study, ponder and pray, and ask God if these things are true. Only after receiving direct personal confirmation from above that the alleged utterances are from Him are we to embrace them. I pray that all my fellow saints in all the remnant communities will remember not to skip this critical step.

Downgrade

2011-08-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

Forgive me if I beat a dead horse, but I need you folks to work with me here a second, and see if I'm not crazy. Driving into the office this morning, I heard the news on the radio that credit agencies are considering downgrading Germany's credit rating!

Now, it was Germany who made the biggest contribution to the bailout of Greece and Portugal. Germany is the biggest economy in Europe. Last week we read that China's debt crisis is so severe that it is in worse shape than Portugal - China had to appeal to the European banks for an emergency bailout.

During the recent tsunami crisis in Japan, news reports revealed that Japan has a horrible debt crisis (200% to GDP). If the U.S. Germany, China, and Japan, (the world's economic powerhouses), are in such bad financial shape, and the second-tier players, France, Spain, Korea, Italy, Canada, Australia, England, Brazil, etc, are on the brink of ruin, which countries have all the money?

All modern nations are now corporations - businesses in a sense. We know that the U.S. banks are sitting on a mountain of cash (the cash stolen from us by Bush, Obama, Geithner and Bernanke), so where is the gold? Where is the real wealth? You cannot eat cash. You cannot even eat precious metals. Money is merely a token, a receipt for wealth. True wealth comes from land-plus-labor - the machinery of productivity. It seems to me that the banker folks have schemed for centuries to achieve a massive transfer of the tokens of wealth - Gold and Silver, and paper money. The banks know no borders. They are not "patriotic".

If all or most of the nations are drowning in debt, then they have successfully surrendered their wealth and money to the guys who do the lending. If I am not mistaken, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the "World Bank" (along with a handful of other regional lenders) have gained control of all of the world's currency and are manipulating it to create WORLD-WIDE poverty and austerity.

We ourselves are as much to blame as the lenders, because we should have known better than to get in bed with them and trade our inheritances to them for worthless paper. In Old Testament times it was a capital offense not only to lend upon usury (interest) but also to borrow with interest.

Who has the wherewithal to rectify this problem?

Obama Buys Votes

2011-08-19T17:56:00.000-07:00

The following article discusses Obama's recent (Executive Branch) decision to cease deporting illegal aliens who have no criminal record. I believe this is tantamount to an invitation to the entire world to come here and stay. The next step is to register all foreigners to vote in the 2012 presidential election . . . . . . . !?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

-------------------------------------------------
Jan Brewer: Obama plan is "backdoor amnesty"

By MACKENZIE WEINGER | 8/19/11 6:08 AM EDT Updated: 8/19/11 2:12 PM EDT

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer called the Obama administration’s new policy that will allow many illegal immigrants who don’t have criminal records the chance to stay in the United States “backdoor amnesty.”
In a statement, the Republican governor slammed the planned case-by-case reviews of the approximately 300,000 illegal immigrants who are currently facing possible expulsion.
“This plan amounts to backdoor amnesty for hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of illegal aliens,” Brewer said on Thursday.

The Obama administration announced Thursday that its top priority will be targeting illegal immigrants with criminal convictions for deportations, and moving low-priority cases — such as young people who were brought to the U.S. as children, military veterans and spouses of military personnel — out of the deportation pipeline.

Brewer, who enacted one of the country’s toughest immigration laws, said the announcement “is encouraging more illegal immigration at the exact moment we need federal focus on border security.”
Oscar Chacon, the executive director of National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, one of the organizations that led protests against the Obama administration earlier this week about the rising number of deportations, said Brewer “clearly doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“You really have to be in the imaginary world to paint it as some sort of amnesty,” Chacon told POLITICO.
Last year, the Obama administration deported a record number of people — nearly 400,000. The rising number of deportations has angered the Hispanic community, which is a key voting bloc for President Barack Obama.
While taking aim at Brewer’s comment, Chacon made clear that his organization and those like it don’t see the new policy as a real immigration remedy. The first step, he said, is to end the Secure Communities program, in which local police share fingerprints of detainees with federal authorities and immigration officials.
“One of the political goals of yesterday’s announcement was precisely to distract organizations like ours from the focus on Secure Communities,” he said. “While we commend the announcement, we think it’s very late – why did they have to wait two and a half years?”
Brewer — who called the new deportation plan “especially disturbing” for border states such as Arizona in the wake of U.S. weapon sales to Mexican drug cartels — said Obama’s new policy “got it really wrong.”
“We need to remind President Obama that we elected a president that serves beneath the law and did not anoint a king that is above the law,” she said.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61691.html#ixzz1VWBKL99t

An Open Letter

2011-08-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

Someone just sent me this. Very interesting!

This letter was signed by William E. Jessop and Willie R. Jessop

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My Three Wives

2011-08-13T23:09:00.000-07:00


Doctor Drew Gets Into Polygamy!

This week on his nightly HLN tabloid show, Dr. Drew Pinsky got heavily into polygamy. Above is what I believe may be a picture of Pinsky with his three "wives". Jealous of the attention given to notorious pedophile, Warren Jeffs, Dr. Drew has apparently decided to expand his own family.

Like many impulsive, skirt-chasing men, Drew has no idea what he is getting himself into. The above picture shows his wives taking him to task. He does not yet realize that he may be looking forward to many years of stuttering, lying and exaggerating. He will likely eventually wish he were in the Huntsville penitentiary with Jeffs.

"SHUT IT DOWN" !!! ???

2011-08-10T20:40:00.000-07:00

The Headline News folks have been marketing the Warren Jeffs trial controversy almost as giddily as they flogged the Casey Anthony epic. The various hosts and guests have offered their opinions about how to address the after-effects of the FLDS nightmare. Two, in particular, Sonny Hostin and Drew Pinsky, have been especially vocal in calling for the dissolution of the FLDS community. "SHUT IT DOWN !!" they say. They want Hoary Reid to resurrect his RICO-style task-force legislation to target polygamous organizations (???). They want the community to die or simply stop existing. Their myopia and cruelty are stunning.

Sonny Hostin

Drew Pinsky

Their guests, Kathy Jo Nicholson and Carolyn Jessop, seem to have no hesitation in calling for widespread law enforcement intervention into the community. Send in tanks. Send in an army of social workers. Send in 100 psychiatrists. Send in dozens of new police officers. Arrest all the mothers. If Warren molested several pubescent females, the 10,000 community members must be invaded by the government machinery. These busybody hater-crusaders CANNOT stop hankering for a massive siege upon one or more religious minority societies.

I have no idea how they expect the government to implement such a campaign, but it appears the government might try. The government has amnesia. It cannot remember 1953 or YFZ-2008.

So here's my take on this. You people are jerks and idiots. Do you seriously think a massive invasion will achieve anything good? Are you willing to go in there with the SWAT team and point a gun? Do you have enough room in your basement for 6,000 people to crash? Do you have the $20 million Texas already wasted on a raid one tenth the size of the one you are proposing?

Let me, Renn Oldsbuster, explain it to you in terms you might understand. There are currently three fairly distinct categories of people in the FLDS community, and their numbers could change. You decide which ones to capture and arrest . . . . . . . . . .

GROUP 1:
These are the henchmen. This is a finite group of individuals, which would include Lyle Jeffs and the other collaborating brethren. It also includes Warren's wife who assisted in the molestations. If law enforcement wants more convictions, it needs to go after the parties who participated (if they actually did) in the commission or covering-up of the protracted perversions.

GROUP 2:
These are the inveterate suck-ups. These are the people who had NO IDEA of the atrocities perpetrated by their prophet because they were deliberately kept in the dark. These people needed Warren to be a true prophet (deviant or not). They insist on his being a prophet still today (even in his despicable disgrace). These are the people for whom truth is mostly irrelevant. They see fine robes on the naked emperor. These people will cling to the Warren myth till liberals vote for Ron Paul. They will go down with the ship. Their obedience to a false prophet is vain and foolhardy. You CANNOT prosecute these people. Their only crime is their pride and hard-heartedness. They cannot be identified by any visual means.

GROUP 3:
This last group is made up of true believers. They do not worship men. They can detect false doctrine. They are heart-broken to learn of deceit in those people they trusted. They don't believe a man is automatically a "Prophet" because of his leadership position in a church. They are willing to sacrifice anything, but only for true principle and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. These people would never have expected such depravity and betrayal from their leader. However, now, as soon as they learn of it and absorb it, they come down squarely on the side of righteousness and will gladly link arms with other equally sincere saints. If you persecute these people, you can expect to face eternal repercussions.
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So, crusader, explain to me how you will carry out your grand invasion. Maybe you had better spend more of your busybody energies looking for a needle in a haystack or preparing for the day when Obama, Bernanke and Sir Evelyn come for you.

I think that what Warren Jeffs did is horrific. Many of those little girls are probably 17 or 18 or 19 years old now. Are they still pining for Warren to come home? How much counseling and healing must they eventually undergo in order not to have torment for the rest of their lives? Are their families giving them the emotional support they need?

Let us not forget that this travesty occurred on a somewhat limited scale. I am unaware of any more male perpetrators other than Warren. Let us not forget that a few years ago the Catholic Church dealt with an epidemic of molestations by its priests. Despite the magnitude of those horrors, NOBODY is calling for the eradication of Catholicism or a mass raid on Catholic towns. It is clear that people harbor a special and inexplicable resentment towards Fundamentalist Mormons. I wonder why . . . . . . . . . . .

Two Policies

2011-08-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

I find it ironic that we have two states, Texas and Utah, who have diametrically dissimilar approaches to fantasy polygabigamy prosecutions.

In recent TV reports, we have heard that Warren Jeffs participated in "spiritual marriages". If these marriages were "spiritual", then how does the state have any power over them? Granted, if minors and sex were involved, then a prosecution should (and did) ensue. Nevertheless, Texas is pushing forward with "bigamy" charges for several men, including Jeffs.

Mark Shurtleff recently stated that, in his response to Jonathan Turley's challenge of Utah's (nutty) bigamy statute, he will argue that Kody Brown doesn't have standing to bring suit because he and his family were never charged or harmed (just threatened [to the point of flight] by endless prosecutorial saber-rattling).

Meanwhile Shurtleff's less reticent Texas counterpart, Greg Abbott, has no qualms about charging consenting adults (like Wendell Nielsen and his life-partners) with violating adult sex guidelines (!!!). Abbott must be one of the few AGs who were sleeping under a rock when the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas.

This will be a fascinating time. I wonder if Jonathan Turley will now go to Texas and take up the cause of Wendell Nielsen - to prove his commitment to illustrating the absurdity of post-Lawrence morality statutes and prosecutions - in more than one state.

Again, now that Texas is eating Jeffs for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I wonder if the Mo' Church will reach out to Texas prosecutors and IMPLORE them to drop the remaining, looney bigamy prosecutions (in order to preserve its treasured Reynolds decision).

Unraveling

2011-08-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

The leadership configuration of the FLDS is currently unraveling. As wretched behaviors have been uncovered, the questions are starting to arise. Who participated with Jeffs in his lasciviousness? Who had full knowledge of it (besides the FBI)? Whom is law enforcement pursuing for further prosecutions, or are the cops just going to give all the other actors a free pass now that they have nabbed the kingpin?

To me it all seems very clear cut. Certain people knew and participated (Willie named some of them on TV today), and the rest of the folks were as oblivious as I was.

Time for decisions. Time to draw a line in the sand. Time to come down squarely on one side or the other. Either you are with Warren and his pedophilia, or you are with true principle, righteousness and the welfare of your young'uns. You have a little time still to work things through because, if you don't have the Internet, you aren't seeing the news or reading my cynical sermons yet. I'm gonna trust that the Creekerville rumor-mill is more efficient than texting, that the critical mass of truth and reality is already cresting, and that Willie Jessop will soon be received as an Abinadi rather than a Judas. Just don't kill him for having the courage to tell the truth.

On the topic of unraveling, I am reminded (by the media) that an alleged 300 families were dismantled by Warren for God-knows-what reason. Many men were simply banished, never to be heard from again. Their wives and children were taken in by other men. This went on for years. Presumably, by now, these transplanted wives have had additional children by their new husbands. How do you unravel that? If the ousted men were honorable, and were ejected merely because Warren wanted their wives or kids, can they now return and have their families restored? Can all the re-configured, reassigned families be unraveled and put back to their correct arrangement? Can the clock be turned back? Can a community of sincere believers come to terms with the fact that it was swept up in a whirlwind of deceit and evil? Can they reconcile the precious truths of the Gospel and the betrayal that sprang out of the idolatry and priestcraft that crept in unnoticed by most?

World Devalued

2011-08-08T15:06:00.000-07:00

The downgrading of the US credit rating by Standard and Poors this weekend has made ripples across the globe. The Saudi Arabia stock exchange took a dive on Saturday, and the Asian markets dipped substantially. Today, the Dow Jones average dipped 635 points, capping the worst week since 2008.

Reports are coming in that France is in deep debt and economic trouble, followed closely behind by England (where rioters are burning government buildings while I type). The strongest of Europe's corporate national economies is Germany, and Germany does not have enough money to bail out even Greece or Ireland again, let alone the other nations to its west. Let's not even talk about Japan.

Am I the only person whose mind this information boggles? Fox News' Elizabeth McDonald just reported that -

"China’s debt-to-GDP ratio is worse than the United States’ ratio. It is worse than insolvent Portugal, which is now relying heavily on the European Central Bank for help, and had to go to the International Monetary Fund to get a financial bailout.

So, let me get this straight - the largest holder of the US's $14.2 trillion (and growing) national debt is China, and China is practically insolvent (who wouldn't be?), then who is it that all these countries keep turning to for more and more bailout money? The third-world countries can't bail us out. Clearly, the answer is - the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But the not-so-clear question is - who owns the International Monetary Fund, and is it a collection of private, international bankers? And where in the world did they get all their money from?

The amount of loose, mined gold in the world is always growing. Manpower is growing. Crops are growing (except in those places where there is drought or stupid, price-controlling farm subsidies). The central banks (e.g. Federal Reserve) increase the money supply (ability to repay debt) by printing more paper money. This devalues the paper wealth of a nation. Every nation is having its net worth devalued. By whom? If all the industrialized debtor nations have had to put up their entire land area as collateral on the now virtually unrepayable debt, then they are all ripe for foreclosure, repossession. All of this torment was created artificially through usury and currency manipulation. you would think that the Devil wants to bring us to the point where we are all dead or at each others' throats. Is the ultimate purpose of usury to earn huge profit or to repossess the collateral? Or is it to RULE THE WORLD ????

Does this all sound like insanity to you? Who would repossess a western nation? Who has taken our money and loaned it back to us at interest? You ask - - if this has been perpetrated against all the (once) noble western nations, why don't they rise up and slay the banker bastard(s) who did it and put an end to all this deficit controversy? Why? - - - - -

- - - - Because they are in bed with them and have assented to the whole plan. The politicians (and not a few of their buddies) are in on the scam. This has been the scheme for the last five to six thousand years.

King James Bible (Revelation 14:8)
And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.

Do scriptural prophecies tell us reliably what is awaiting us?

Who's To Blame?

2011-08-08T12:22:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah 23:

21. “I did not send the prophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied.
22. But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people,
and they would have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their deeds.

23. “Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away?
24. Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord.

Over the last few years, I have wanted to explore the very topical question of accountability. Who is accountable when a person in an authority position leads his subordinates astray? The Mormon Church grappled with this question in the mid 1900's. The message was, "When the Church leaders have spoken, the thinking has been done. If a leader tells you to do something, and it is wrong, do it and you will be blessed for your obedience."

It is such a cozy, comforting feeling to know that you have a prophet nearby. If God doesn't speak to you, but He does speak to someone in your Church, you can feel very reassured. You can relax and figure that when God wants you to know something, He will tell "The Prophet", and the Prophet will tell you. Even more reassuring if you believe that you are in the only "true", "right" church, and that church is taking you straight to the Celestial Kingdom (while everyone else is going straight to hell). This is just simple human nature. We all want security and comfort (even sometimes at the expense of others).

So what happens when the Prophet-leader-dude mucks up? What happens when the President of the Church violates what God has taught? In 1889, God told President Wilford Woodruff to make no more concessions to the courts regarding plural marriage. A year later, Woodruff defied God and announced the (at least feigned) cessation of polygamous marriages. Eventually it stuck, and now the two camps exchange public barbs at each other for devolving into false religion. Who was to blame? Was it Woodruff - or was it the people - the people who would relax, capitulate and go along with it?

What happens when the Church tells the people that God would not "lead the leader astray" and that "were he to lead them astray, God would take him out of his place"? Is this a passport to divine infallibility? Is this what happened in the "One-Man-Rule" hierarchy in FLDS-ville? Did the church-members abdicate their own free agency in exchange for perks and the reassurance of a fast-track ride to heaven? Who is to blame? - a lecherous leader who takes the people's money and daughters and commits depravity in secret? - or is it the people who (despite their naivete) willfully surrendered their self-determination and allowed others to govern their families' destinies?

This is the big philosophical question, and li'l ol' Renn has the answer. EVERYONE is accountable! Who was to blame for forcing the devout Fundamentalists into the "wilderness"? Was it the Feds, the State, the Church, the Arizona and Utah citizens who supported the witch-hunt, and Detective Bishop Fred E. Curtis, who investigated criminal suspects during the week and excommunicated them on Sundays? Who was to blame for re-structuring a community and stripping it of its basic Constitutional principles of common-consent and free-agency (Warren or Lintbag)? The answer - EVERYONE.

It's time for everyone involved in this 100+-year mess to take a hard look at his and her own personal responsibility and choices - and then take accountability. Then let's go back to loving and forgiving each other, and work together and prepare for the bigger challenge that awaits us right around the corner.

The Saddest Part

2011-08-07T21:24:00.000-07:00

This week's revelations about Warren Jeffs's molestations of pre-teens is positively galling. I pray that the (now-somewhat-older-teen) girls are finding some solace and recovery from their doubtless horrifying experiences. I hope they are safe, and that their parents are not dismissing their stories as heresy or fantasy. The utter violation of these girls' chastity and virtue is an offense worthy of capital punishment (I mean it!). The saddest part of this is that they probably had no one to turn to at the time - no one who would even begin to believe such clandestine treacheries were occurring in the church - perpetrated by one revered as virtually a god on earth.

Perhaps almost as sad is the fact that seven men are already serving extraordinarily long prison sentences in Texas for their (arranged) "marriages" to 15- and 16-year-old girls (see this article). You and I both know the difference here. First, these men's relationships were considered REAL (though plural) marriages - not some perverse orgiastic horror perpetrated in secret. Early marriages were once considered acceptable in the FLDS community (if not everywhere else, including Texas). By all accounts, these imprisoned men were/are model citizens and are deeply missed by those same wives (and their children). Stirred up by its malice for Jeffs, Texas found a way to vent its rage upon these seven men, imposing sentences as long as 75 years ( - - teachers who molest 11- to 13-year-old pupils in Texas have even recently been sentenced to probation). Don't think I am excusing these men's crimes. They are all grown, intelligent heads-of-families who should have known better.

Secondly, however, my guess is that the marriages to these teen girls were most likely "sprung" upon the parties with little more than an hour's notice by the "prophet" himself, and the parties would have faced the loss of everything, were they to have protested. If you have lived in that community since birth, and you want to remain, you do as you are told, or you would end up like many a Barlow - houseless, wifeless, childless, jobless, churchless, and friendless.

So now we are left with a strange and sad state of affairs. Warren has called off the crack legal team which was working diligently on the appeal of the men's convictions (based on an improper search). The evidence should clearly be suppressed, but will it? Not unlike the unwitting and uninformed folks back in Short Creek, these Texas inmates must know little of the trial of their (now-disgraced) leader. Do they know yet the extent to which they were betrayed? Must they now sit behind bars for decades wondering what the heck just happened, waiting for a liberation that isn't coming?

Justice and Mercy can be balanced out pretty well - - if only politics and perversion don't have to be involved.

Cult Rumors

2011-08-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

cult/kəlt/Noun

1. A system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.

2. A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.

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"The word cult pejoratively refers to a group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre. The word originally denoted a system of ritual practices. The narrower, derogatory sense of the word is a product of the 20th century, especially since the 1980s, and is considered subjective. It is also a result of the anti-cult movement which uses the word in reference to groups seen as authoritarian, exploitative and that are believed to use dangerous rituals or mind control. The word implies a group which is a minority in a given society." (Wikipedia)

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One of the news channels had Steve Hassan speaking about cults last night. "Cult" is another one of those exquisite weapon words. If you don't like another person's religion, just call it a cult. Clearly there is disagreement over a strict definition of the word 'cult'. Nevertheless, there seems to be consensus that it can rightly be applied to situations like Jim Jones' Jonestown People's Temple mass suicide event in 1978. We have heard the word used regarding Sun Myung Moon (the Moonies) and also to the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who set up an enormous cult commune in Oregon (only later to run into immense legal problems and deportation).

Yours Truly, Renn Oldsbuster, has few peers more committed to the ideal of religious freedom, so I am prompted to wonder if, in a reclusive cult, religious freedom can suffer its greatest restraint. It has become ridiculously convenient for outside critics to call the FLDS community a cult, so does it really satisfy the definition? There are rumors being circulated by ex-FLDS people that certain cult-like conditions are developing in the FLDS society. Are they true? Are the people free to come and go and associate freely with whomever they choose?

It is being rumored that Jeffs' brother has taken temporary control over the community, that he has demanded that followers sell everything they can and bring the cash to him to fund Warren's legal efforts. Purportedly, members are now forbidden to use smartphones or the Internet, or to watch TV or read a newspaper. WHY ??? If this is true, could it be an attempt to guarantee that members do not learn of the horrible (alleged) bad acts committed by their venerated leader?

Some have suggested that, with a complete media blackout, the pro tem FLDS leader can spin the news of his brother Warren's conviction as a terrible miscarriage of justice - the proof of gross religious persecution. If a large number of the members can thus be fooled into continuing to follow deceitful direction and false information, does that not then constitute cult-like control? Do they even have a clue that they are not being told the truth when all news and information is filtered or manipulated?

Surely this has not been the case under all FLDS leaders? There have been periods of openness - Glasnost. Not always have other, fellow Fundamentalist Mormons been derided as "APOSTATES". Why now? Is it a carefully orchestrated cover-up? Can the cover-up go on much longer?

With inevitable leaks, is there now a schism brewing? Are there some community members (aligned with William E. Jessop) who have repudiated Jeffs' idiosyncrasies (excuse the euphemism), and who want FLDS-ville to return to the kind of society envisioned by Joseph Smith? Are their numbers growing, as more and more members discover the inescapable truth and draw a line in the sand, morally distancing themselves from priestcraft and mind-control, accepting that they were temporarily and innocently misled by dangerous one-man-infallibility deceptions?

Are the "cult" rumors true, or it is time to make sure that they at least STOP being true?

More Fodder

2011-08-04T17:39:00.000-07:00

Brighter Days

What Happened ???

"I am not the prophet."

I happened to notice today that the Warren Jeffs sexual assault trial was wrapping up in Texas. Apparently, there were audio recordings of Jeffs allegedly schooling young adolescent girls in the practice of human intimacy (shudder !!!!!!).

I saw some of the hater-nasties spouting their outrageous exaggerations on the Headline News network again. It was a veritable "cult"-bashing fest. In the absence of any counterbalancing voice, they were able to spout unchecked - - - water-boarding, dead-babies, incest, child abuse, abandoned boys, forced marriages - the list goes on. With the shocking revelations emerging from the Jeffs trial, the hater-harpies appear now to have more fodder to call for the eradication of an entire culture. If the allegations against Jeffs are true, he should do prison time. If he had accomplices, then they should be prosecuted, too. One anchor said that with the "cult's" leader now gone, perhaps this whole FLDS "cult" can be shut down - whatever that means. I mean, what does she want to do with 10,000 people who have just discovered the human failings of their once-revered leader? Should we nuke the whole town, kids and all (Waco-style)?

I am reminded of those "War of the Worlds"-type movies from the sixties - the ones where the army fires on the aliens before the aliens can even voice the words, "Take me to your leader". If it looks like a Martian, kill it, then ask questions later. - - - Or the Frankenstein ones with the frantic mob of Transylvanian townsfolk with torches and pitchforks, itching for a bloodbath.

Hopefully now, the long-overdue epiphany can occur in FLDS-ville - where the faithful congregants can see past the deceit of "divine infallibility" of their corruptible human leaders. Meanwhile, the State, with all its fangs, can call off the dogs and realize that, just because one maniac went kooky and destroyed precious lives, the innocent people around him don't have to be guilty by association. Perhaps the hater-hags can think seriously about providing sincere support instead of spreading lies and exaggerations all over the television - more fodder or not. Sadly, the truth is still not as sexy as wild fabrications. What motivates you - money, fame, notoriety, political ascendancy, revenge, lust, power? Are you not as corrupt as the one at whom you are throwing stones?

Three Tiers

2011-08-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

In the seventies, the United States Supreme Court was feeling the need to bolster the civil rights protections craved by certain groups. If a state legislature got a wild hair to pass a dumb law - like "Negroes must not sing on street corners", then the high court could overturn the law and void it. As various classes or groups then clamored for similar protections, the Court was then faced with a dilemma. The question was - how far could the Court go to intervene in state statutes? By what standards could the Court review the state's laws when someone complained that they were unfair or biased?

There were people who were poor and people who were old. The Court had sympathy for them, too, so it had to formulate a way of preventing bad laws targeting them. But surely poor or old people weren't discriminated against as badly as were colored people, were they?

Ultimately, it was decided that the Court would use a "Three-Tiered" framework of review to scrutinize the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of certain legislation. Thus, if a law impacted people according to race (or even religion), then the Court could apply the strictest standard of scrutiny ("Strict Scrutiny") to that law. The impacted class was termed a "Suspect Class". See this article.

The second tier - the one affecting poor or old people - would trigger "heightened (or intermediate) scrutiny". These people fell into what was called the "Quasi-Suspect Class". This also came to include people discriminated against because of gender.

The final, and lowest standard of review is the least demanding. The term often used is "rational basis". This means that, if the state can show that it had at least a "rational basis" for enacting a law, then that would satisfy the Court - the Court would just look away, basically.

So, in short, if you (as a member of a particular class of individuals) want to be protected from unreasonable laws, you had better be at least poor or old, or, better still - have dark skin.

This process signaled the need to define what a "class" of people was. I quote from Wikipedia -

"Some of the criteria that have been cited include:

The group has historically been discriminated against, and/or have been subject to prejudice, hostility, and/or stigma, perhaps due, at least in part, to stereotypes.^[1]
They possess an immutable^[2] and/or highly visible trait.
They are powerless^[2] to protect themselves via the political process. (The group is a "discrete" and "insular" minority.^[3])
The group's distinguishing characteristic does not inhibit it from contributing meaningfully to society."

Certain types of people fell neatly into a class - for example - albinos (or amputees). Albinos don't get to choose to stop being albinos. Negroes do not have the ability to choose to be Caucasian. Old people cannot decide to become young again (except for Joan Rivers). These classifications are permanent and easy to define.

Other, less easily definable classes include Catholics, felons, homosexuals, polygamists, etc. In the 1990's, gay Coloradoans fought hard to be viewed as a distinct class (in order to merit "protected status") (see Romer v. Evans). After all, virtually all gay people feel that their sexual orientation is NOT a choice. They are unable to experience sexual attraction to people of the opposite sex.

The Supreme Court disagreed and decided that the three-tiered framework would be final. No new groups could be added to the Suspect and Quasi-Suspect classes. This was brought to my mind again yesterday when I read a blogpost from a gentleman who insisted that homosexuality is an involuntary condition, while polygamy is a choice. WOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Think about that! Gay people are drawn to same-gender partners. They cannot get excited about the opposite sex. Still, when they bond with one or more individuals, it is a CHOICE. They select a partner through free choice. They reject the partners they find unappealing. Why is this different from polygamists? The fact that polygamists are a "class" of people who have not been accorded any special kind of status (suspect or quasi-suspect) is the reason why the state of Utah can get away with arguing that its asinine bigamy law is worthy of only "rational-basis" review - that it need only argue that it has a "compelling interest" in protecting the sacred sacrament of holy matrimony within its borders. With such a low standard of scrutiny, the Supreme Court is at best complacent. The argument, however, is as flawed as the one promoted by the Prop 8 supporters in California who insisted that if Tim and Jeremy next door got a marriage license, then the neighborhood children would grow up to be murderers - - there simply is NO causal relationship.

If you think about it, there are thousands of polygamous families in Arizona and Utah. If Reynolds were overturned, what would change? NOTHING !!! Their numbers would remain the same. The only difference would be that perhaps they would be persecuted less, and they would live more in the open, and the Mormon Church would feel a little bit more self-conscious.

I am attracted to Beatrice. I love Beatrice. I want to have children with Beatrice. Beatrice is my wife. I choose not to leave her. I love Violet. I can't make myself stop loving her. She is physically attractive to me. I am not attracted to Fred. I cannot make myself be attracted to Fred. Intimacy with Fred would disgust me. I love Cecilia and Phoebe. They love me too. They trust that I will never leave them or our children. I cannot make myself stop loving and supporting my plural family.

Tell me how polygamy is a choice. I could say I choose not to be attracted to Marilyn Monroe, but it would be a lie. No course of therapy could get me to find her ugly.

I think this is the fundamental logical disconnect in society's view of polygamy. Society feels that polygamy is a sin, a crime, and that its practitioners should just choose to stop committing this "sin", this "crime". There is confusion over what is inherent nature and what is moral choice. Serial killers may be born with psychopathy or may have acquired it. Therapy does not fix them. The inclinations are permanent. Their crimes are a combination of nature and personal decision making. Nature does not excuse accountability.

I am a polygamist - it's hardwired into my DNA. You cannot change that. You can kill me, but, like Ogden Kraut, I will still be a polygamist. By nature, I am attracted to a significant number of women. I choose not to commit adultery. By nature I am not attracted to children. I choose not to marry nasty women. I choose to pay my bills. Most guys I have met seem to have an innate tendency to be attracted to multiple women. That is biological or genetic or something like that. The "choice" part comes in when the guy "chooses" to be loyal or not. Fidelity is a conscious choice. Polygamous attraction is no less hard-wired than same-gender attraction - - - - PROVE ME WRONG !!!!

My point is that, when the Supreme Court starts down the pathway of defining classes of people, it should remember that I can no more choose to stop being a polygamist (by nature) than a person with Down syndrome can choose not to have Trisomy 21. My conduct is, however, pursuant to my choice.
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Irony of Ironies

2011-08-02T21:37:00.000-07:00

Simpson

Lintbag

General Authority

Stake President

An article today in Utah's Salt Lake Tribune reported that Judge Diseased Lintbag just ordered Shark Murtleff to pay Brutal Wisass's trumped up ($5 million) in fiduciary (ripoff racket) fees. There are too many ironies in all of this for me to capture all at once.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that these three characters are all establishment Mormons - I mean - the kind of Mormons for whom Church membership is a badge, a trophy, a lubricant, a passport, a club membership card, an indulgence, a free pass, a mask, - - - you know what I mean. One thing it is not is a guarantee of purity.

They are locked in a bitter struggle despite their unstinting allegiance to the mother Church. Clearly, Lintbag is in Wisass's corner. She has NEVER NOT ruled in his favor. She is his advocate. She must almost be hoping for a cut of the ill-gotten gains. She desperately wanted to sell UEP property chunks to raise money for Wisass's commissions. Now that it looks like there is little chance of getting blood out of the UEP stone, Lintbag has decided to mine slightly deeper pockets - the Utah A.G.'s. She now finds herself in Dee Benson's corner. Perhaps Lintbag's campaign against the FLDS and the federal judge must take a back seat to the need to secure cash for Wisass.

The FLDS and Shurtleff made repeated good-faith efforts to arrive at a settlement agreement, but Lintbag refused at every turn, effectively causing Wisass's fraud meter to keep on running. The only conclusion I can make is that Lintbag spent so much time at Happy Valley U, that her brain went permanently soft.

As I have said before, just because the leader of the FLDS community has long been devolving in a pathetic public disintegration, is that justification to persecute an entire community??? Lintbag and Barbie must have taken Hubris 101 together. Governor Pyle could have taught them a thing or two about tar babies.