Closing out 2014

It's the last day of 2014. A chance to look back at what I have done and what I have become, and a chance to look forward to a future enriched by all that I've learned from what happened in the past.

It's been a difficult year in many ways. A year of learning to let go and say goodbye. A year of fighting to get from one day to the next.A year of fighting to keep my light shining when the darkness was at its deepest.

I have said goodbye to the business that we did have. I have said goodbye to my space in the art gallery. I have said goodbye to my grandmother, who left this world to enter the next. I have said goodbye to my son twice, the first time when he left for bootcamp and the second time when he left for Texas. I have felt crushed by these things, and they have led me to struggle with finding my way in the darkness.

It's been a good year in many ways. I have seen my son graduate high school, and take on responsibilities of caring for himself. I have been blessed by family and friends who surrounded and lifted us up when things got hardest. I have been blessed to know that in spite of everything, I am loved.

I have seen the fruit of our struggles to get my son through school. I have seen the fruit of our struggles to parent him in spite of our own faults and failings. I have seen the fruits of surrounding myself with community and serving others. I have seen the fruits of prayers and of cultivating a close relationship with God.

It's been a year of preparing the ground. I didn't achieve many of my goals. I didn't accomplish the things I had in mind. Instead, as I look back, I realize that the work I have done this year has all gone toward teaching me the things I needed to know to achieve the work that needs to be done in the new year. The ground is now ready, the seeds are beginning to grow, and I have great hopes for 2015.

The business that passed away spurred me on to grow in my understanding of why I failed, and what I could do to succeed. That education was crucial, and the seeds that were planted as I struggled to master what I needed to know are almost ready to begin showing themselves. The poverty that crippled us inspired me to write a book, and to develop a plan for helping others. Those plans are nearly ready.

The struggles to rise up out of poverty inspired me to write other books, and those books are in process, too. I know that these things have been prepared for a purpose and with a reason, as part of God's plan for a future in which I will serve him in a much bigger way than I ever thought possible.

2014 has been a year in which God got me ready for 2015. Everything that happened during it taught me, inspired me, motivated me, and pushed me into doing things I might never have done otherwise. I am grateful for their role, and I am looking forward to seeing the fruits that come of the work that's been done.

Brandy's Guide to Creating Racial and Class Divides

Step 1. Take a story about two teenage boys of roughly the same age, but of different race or different economic status. Bonus: Get them to be different both racially AND economically.

Step 2. Despite the many differences in their case histories and details, be sure that they are both being tried for similar crimes.  Double Bonus: Make sure the white kid's crime outcome is of greater severity than the black kid's, even if his crime didn't happen because he intended to hurt someone but as a result of a severe lapse of judgement.

Step 3.  Be careful to omit important details in your reporting of the story so that it appears that the white, rich teen was treated better than the poor, black kid.  Triple Bonus: Be sure to emphasize the wealth of the father of the white kid and the stupidity of the defense used for the white kid, thereby implying that the kid got the leniency he did because of a better attorney and not because the judge was a generally lenient judge.

Step 4.  Flavor your article with emotional language that creates a psychological bias against the judge and the rich kid. Quadruple Bonus: Submit this article as NEWS to places like the Huffington Post.

Step 5. Post a link about this "news" story to sites you know aren't likely to do any fact checking, but are likely to have a knee-jerk reaction and will help the story go "viral".

Step 6. Sit back and watch as the media helps millions of Americans everywhere eye one another with suspicion and hatred, absolutely convinced that our justice system is a complete failure and that race and class are the biggest problems we face.

Congratulations!  You have created racial and class divides in 6 easy steps.  You can now roll up your sleeves and get to work on conquering these divided people, since they are too suspicious of one another to trust each other and too demoralized to believe in the system they created. Repeat this process a few more times and you won't have to worry about collapsing America.  She'll fall in on herself like a house of cards.

Two of the most meaningless phrases used in journalism

Today, I'm going to spend a little time ranting about bad journalism. I have read many a newspaper article which uses the phrase, “Scholars agree” or “Scientists agree”. Allow me to tell you why those are two of the most meaningless phrases in the English language and why you should NEVER use them in any kind of article which you want taken seriously.

1) It is not provable.

Unless you and your army of reporters are prepared to visit every single scholar and every single scientist in the course of history and question them to verify the fact that they agree with a certain statement, you have just submitted a statement that is so completely full of bologna that any editor who publishes it should be fired on the spot for allowing you to submit such meaningless garbage as if it were fact.

2) It is not likely.

Think of how hard it is to get two people who were eyewitnesses to an event to agree on exactly what happened and you’ll begin to see my point. For every additional person you add to that mix, the likelihood of getting a consensus goes down. Now consider how many scholars and scientists there are on any given subject matter, and you begin to get the picture of just how unlikely it is that all “scholars agree” or all “scientists agree”.

3) It relies upon anonymity

Just because someone has studied something in an academic setting or gotten their degree in chemistry does not guarantee that they are any good at what they do or even that they actually know anything useful. Without knowing the specific scientist or scholar, you can’t know the quality of their studies, the depth of their research, or the reliability of their interpretations of the data. In other words, without knowing who they are, it is impossible to judge whether their opinion or belief about a subject should be something we allow to guide our own.

4) It is manipulative.

Most people don’t like standing out from a crowd. They like to believe they are “normal” or whatever passes for normal at the moment. When they read a phrase that states that “scholars agree” or “scientists agree” they are being told that if they don’t agree, they are alone. It conditions them to accept whatever follows that phrase without question.

It is also designed to disarm the scientist or scholar who questions the statement, calling into question their own qualifications. The implied challenge is that if you were a “real” scientist or scholar, you would agree with all of the rest of them.
 

Conclusion: Stop Being Lazy

Stop being lazy. If you want to use consensus of opinion as part of your writing, that's fine, but make sure you cite your sources. Tell me what study was done, what the questions were that were asked, and let me be the judge of whether I trust those sources or not. The job of a journalist isn't to dictate opinion, it's to inform me of the facts so I can develop my own opinions based on facts.

What's Wrong With Our Country?

Do you want to know what's wrong with America today? In a word: laziness.  We allow other people to do our thinking for us, we allow other people to do our homework for us, and we want other people to take responsibility for our mistakes.  That's what's wrong with our country today. It's not a partisan issue, it's not a race issue, it's not even a religion/lack of religion issue.  It's a laziness issue.

The George Zimmerman case is a perfect example of laziness in action.  People let the media do their homework for them, and their homework was so badly off the mark it was laughable. In fact, a lot of what the media did was out and out make up stuff or alter stuff so that it sounded like something it wasn't. While what the media did was wrong, I don't put the blame on them.  I put the blame for the violence and the riots that are going on right now because of the verdict on the heads of the people who were too lazy to do their own homework.  Ask any one of them whether they believe the media is trustworthy and 90% of them will tell you they DO NOT trust the media, but that same 90% won't go out and do their own research on the matter.  They allow themselves to be shovel fed whatever concocted B.S. the media dreams up and then blame the media for the wrong answers they receive.  It's not the media's fault - it's the fault of all those who didn't bother to research, to read, to examine the facts, to understand the stakes, and instead allowed themselves to be duped, manipulated, and used by those who use the media as a wedge.

Another great example of laziness in action is abortion.  An overwhelming majority (72%) believe abortion should be illegal in most cases, yet we continue to allow it to go on just as our ancestors felt overwhelmingly uncomfortable with slavery but looked the other way rather than be inconvenienced by having to get up and DO SOMETHING about the situation.  We don't want to deal with the consequences and the aftermath, so we continue to allow millions of innocent babies to die because we are too lazy to take a stand.  Our future is slowly being wiped out, our nation being destroyed, because we won't get off our duffs and speak out.   If those of us who believe it is wrong were to stand together there is NO WAY the other side could continue to succeed, but we won't stand together because that would take work.  May God forgive the nation that has to tell Him that they did not defend the innocent because it was too much effort, as assuredly we someday will.

A third example of sheer laziness in action is the consistent blaming of the "government" for every conceivable problem with our nation.  It's a good cover, and maybe it makes you feel better to be able to point a finger at congress or the Supreme Court or the White House or the Senate and say, "They are the problem, they need to fix it".  However, that's not how our government works, and blaming the government won't fix the problems.  It's our government, WE are the government. WE need to rise up and FIX the problems by holding our elected leaders accountable, by evicting those who refuse to act on our behalf, and by stopping the senseless and ridiculous blaming of parties for problems that exist because we were so lazy we left it up to other people to run our country and now we see that they didn't know how to do it any better than we did.

How do we solve America's problems? We start by taking responsibility.  If we see a problem, WE take responsibility for fixing it. We don't leave it up to our elected leaders or our political parties or our local governments or our federal government. We roll up our sleeves and we get to work to solve the problem we see.  Real leaders do that.  They don't wait to be told what to do - they spot the problems and then they figure out a solution to the problems.  We need to do that, too.  Is it going to be easy? No. Is it going to happen overnight? No. Will we meet resistance? Yes.  That happens anytime someone introduces something new, anytime someone sets out to do something worth doing.  However, if you and I and everyone we know starts to do this, our nation will start to change.  Slowly but surely we will restore our nation to the greatness it once had and will once again stand as a free people.  It's up to us.

The Most Important Right of All

Enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, but largely ignored by government, judges, and the public at large, is a right to life.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. " - Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Thomas Jefferson was a well-educated man, and the order in which he names the rights is neither accidental nor incidental.  That the right to life must come before all other rights is, if one thinks about it, a self-evident truth.  Of what use is freedom or rights to those who are dead?  They are beyond caring about the issues we find so absorbing.  They are also beyond the reach of earthly government laws, and are subject to laws of a much higher order if one believes in life after death. 

The reason the 2nd amendment, the right of the people to bear arms, was crafted was to protect that life from those who would seek to steal it by force.  Yet, in 1974, the government neatly ignored the logic and intention of the Constitution to create a "right" to abortion for women.  Sadly, almost 40 years later, the ignorance continues even and perhaps especially among the highly educated. Women such as Dana Kusnir who trumpet abortion as "one of the most important rights that a woman can have". Evidently, Ms. Kusnir does not understand what she is saying.  The most important right for any woman, whether born or unborn, is the right to life. The "right" to abortion deprives an unborn woman of that right.  It is an act of tyranny, an act so contrary to the intention and the logic of the Constitution that it begins to unravel the very fibers which hold the constitution together.

Abortion's legalization makes the right to life a right granted by the state, and thus an alienable right - one that can be given or removed at whim by the granter.  If the state can choose to give or to remove the right to life for the unborn, it can give or remove the right to life for anyone.  That's a dangerous power for any government, or any human being to have.  If the government can decide based on an arbitrary factor - whether a child is wanted or not - to permit an execution, what is there to stop that government from applying those same arbitrary factors to a born child or to a grown adult? When a born child or a grown adult is no longer wanted by parents or family or by the government themselves, what is there to stop the government from ordering its execution?

It's already happening all over the world. Switzerland allows "euthanasia" for mentally ill patients, who - if they are truly mentally ill could not be said to be of sound mind to make the necessary agreement to their death.  The Belgian parliament allows children to "choose for themselves" whether or not to be euthanized - as if children can be considered free of undue influence by caregivers or physicians themselves. The UK has authorized the euthanizing of autistic children and those with Alzheimer's disease, without the need for consent by the person being killed. The state giveth and the state taketh away.

The Words They Don't Want You To Use, and Why

If you really want to understand your enemy, know what they fear. I saw a post on the internet today describing the words that our government's computers are searching to find when they scan all those internet messages through the NSA filters.  Some of the words were completely unfamiliar to me, so it made me curious as to why the NSA is concerned about these particular words.  Let's go through just a few of the items on the list of 746 words that will catch the interest of the Federal Government, and more importantly try to figure out WHY those words are of interest:

ARTICHOKE: No, not a reference to the vegetable. This is a reference to Project Artichoke, a CIA project that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD on August 20, 1951, run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence.[1]
BADGER: A secret army task force created during the Desert Shield buildup to surge the production of anthrax and botulinum vaccines; introduced a vaccine adjuvant (toxic substance that boosts a vaccine's efficiency). The adjuvants, in this case squaleene, were tied to thousands of cases of Gulf War Syndrome

CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency doesn't want you watching what they're doing. So stop already.

COCAINE: Just the mention of the drug is apparently enough to get you on their watch list. (Here's an interesting party trick: Google CIA + Cocaine. Truly eye-opening stuff.)

CORNFLOWER: Think you know all about Jonestown? Think again. Jonestown was a CIA run mind-control experiment, and Cornflower was a book used to condition children up to the age of 20 to become programmed government assassins. But don't talk about Cornflower. The government doesn't want you to ask too many questions.

DEFCON: Started in 1992 by the Dark Tangent, DEFCON is the world's longest running and largest underground hacking conference. Given their concern about information terrorism and infosec, it's no surprise that this would make the list.

DOMESTIC DISRUPTION: Very little information or explanation to be found about what this means. I suspect it is a reference to civil war or civil uprising, especially as when searching domestic disruption + civil war or civil unrest, I found references to the military creating a new division to handle civil disruption

ECHELON: A worldwide network of spy stations.

FBI: Don't talk about them, and they promise not to watch you.

FREEDOM: Your discussion about freedom is cause for the government to flag you as a potential terrorist? Really? So much for the land of the free and the home of the brave.

GEODSS: The Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) system, which can track objects as small as a basketball more than 20,000 miles in space, plays a vital role in tracking space objects, particularly those in deep space.  This seems rather benign, so why is it a trigger for being put in the watchlist?

INFOWAR: Possible reference to Alex Jones' popular radio program known as the info wars http://www.infowars.com/

INGRAM MAC-10: Fully automatic sub-machine gun

INTERNET UNDERGROUND: What sounded like the name of a report or a website turned out to be one of the rare items that might be worth watching. Essentially, only about 20% of the internet is visible to the search engines.  The other 80% is where the real stuff happens - assassinations ordered, child trafficking, sex trafficking, drug orders

MI5: British version of the CIA

MI6: British version of the FBI

SOROS: George Soros, specifically. Another protected citizen. Apparently, any mention of Soros is enough to wind you on their special list.

GSG-9: An elite German counter-terrorism unit formed in 1976. To quote a former member, "We move in as a team of five, we take care of it, and everything is basically over before they even know what happened."

HACKERS: Programmers who specialize in exploring the programming code created by other programmers, usually with the intention of exploiting software or hardware vulnerabilities

ILLUMINATI: A secret society founded in 1776. This group has as its primary objective the creation of a new world order - a single, unified government under the control of elite members where the rest of civilization is enslaved. Many do not believe the Illuminati exists, but if the government is using it as a flag word to mark you as a terrorist, one has to think they take it seriously.

INFOSEC:  Stands for Information Security. Refers to the techniques used to protect information from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, perusal, inspection, recording or destruction. It is a general term that can be used regardless of the form the data may take

INFORMATION SECURITY: See Infosec.

INFORMATION TERRORISM: the use of a combination of false and true information combined in such a way as to destroy the reputation, assassinate the character, or undermine the perceived trustworthiness of an individual, corporation, or entity.  

Important note on this: These may be flagged because they are the words used by a group whose business is tracking the activities of the Illuminati and reporting the evidence they have compiled against them.

INFORMATION WARFARE:  "activities undertaken by government, groups, or individuals to gain electronic access to information systems in other countries ... as well as activities undertaken to protect against it." (defined by The Brown Commission)

IW: the use of information or information technology during a time of crisis or conflict to achieve or promote specific objectives over a specific adversary.

MAYFLY: A reference to Project Mayfly, in which the transnational tobacco companies of British American Tobacco (BAT), Imperial Tobacco, Rothmans Tobacco, Gallaher, R.J. Reynolds,Philip Morris and the German tobacco company Reentsma in 1980 to "influence, modify or change public opinion to the industry, smokers and smoking, to create a more favourable climate [for smoking and the industry], however directly or indirectly." [1]

MSNBC: These 5 letters stand for Microsoft National Broadcasting Company. Or, as some of us like to call them, the lapdog of the liberal elite.  Apparently you shouldn't be talking about them, just listening to their every word. Don't worry. They'll tell you what to think.

NORAD: North American Aerospace Defense Command. Conducts aerospace warning, aerospace control and maritime warning in the defense of North America. Why is someone talking about this agency a concern to the NSA?

NSA: National Security Association. Wow.  Just talking about the NSA is enough to get you watched by the NSA. 

Pink Noise: May be a reference to website www.pinknoize.com/cia which hosts documents on convert CIA operations

PLAYBOY: I am just as concerned about pornography as the next person, but I think it a far stretch for the government to be putting people talking about Playboy on a list of potential terrorists. Makes you think they know something we don't, and makes me curious to find out more.

PRESIDENT: Anytime you mention the president, you clearly must be doing something worth watching.

PRIVACY: Apparently, concern for your privacy is a reason for the government to be concerned about you.

RAND CORPORATION: It boggles the mind to think that talking about a corporation that is "a nonprofit institution that helps to improve policy and decision making through research and analysis" is enough to land you on the terrorist list.  Maybe this article will help you understand why the government doesn't want you discussing them. 

RENO: Don't know if this is for the city or for an undisclosed project, but apparently all citizens of Reno had better watch themselves when speaking or posting online using their city in the title. 

S/KEY: a one-time password system developed for authentication to Unix-like operating systems, especially from dumb terminals or untrusted public computers on which one does not want to type a long-term password.

WACKENHUT: America's largest (and the world's second-largest) private security company. Founded in Miami by four ex-FBI agents in 1954 (one of whom was George Wackenhut, now deceased), under the name Special Agent Investigators Inc. Acquired by a Danish corporation in 2002.

WAIHOPAI: This secretive location is referred to by the New Zealand Government as a "satellite communications monitoring facility" and is officially called GCSB Waihopai. Part of ECHELON.

WILLIAM GATES: You might be interested to know that discussing Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is enough to land you on the terrorist watch list.

From just this small sample, the real concern of the government seems to be less about preventing terrorism and more about ferreting out those who might find ways to prevent them from spying on us, those who might find ways to find out what they are hiding from us, and anyone who actively pays attention to their activities.  It appears to have virtually nothing to do with real terrorism and everything to do with keeping the citizens in our nice, safe little boxes so they can do whatever it is they want to do without having to worry that we'll try to stop them. Another question is why US funds are being spent surveying for information relating to British agencies.

The 20 Craziest Pro-Gun Arguments you'll ever read

Take each of these statements and substitute the word {guns} every time you see {x}.

1. Taking away {x} violates my Constitutional rights.
2. Nobody should have to register {x}. It's a private matter.
3. Allowing access to {x} is necessary to save lives.
4. If someone can't afford {x}, tax payers should help them pay for it, even if they don't agree.
5. The right to {x} is only a problem for religious people. It's nobody's business who buys or sells {x}.
6. Teenagers are old enough to make their own decisions about whether or not they want {x}.
7. Teenagers should be able to get [x}without parental consent or notification.
8. The world would be a better place with less people in it. That's why we need {x} - to help reduce the population.
9. The mentally ill should be given {x} whether they want them or not. After all, if they don't need them, nobody does.
10. People should be able to get {x} whenever they want and as often as they want for any reason or no reason at all. It's a right, and nobody should be able to stop you from exercising your rights.
11. Women need {x} to protect themselves.
12. Women are empowered by the ability to have {x}, and that's why it's important to keep them legal.
13. The government shouldn't have a say in who gets {x}.
14. People who are opposed to {x} are just trying to force their beliefs on other people.
15. Nobody should have to be educated about {x} before being allowed to get one.
16. Anyone who wants {x} should be able to just walk in and get them.
17. So what if {x} do kill people? The world would be better off with fewer people in it, anyway.
18. Making {x} illegal will only result in more deaths.
19. Giving poor people {x} helps them to reduce the number of children they have, and saves the government money.  Poor people need {x}.
20. If you don't like {x}, you just shouldn't get one.

Sounds totally insane to you, doesn't it? I know. It is.  It would be absolutely insane to pass out guns to people with mental conditions, or to encourage poor people to reduce their family sizes using guns. It would be insane to say that we should use guns to help reduce the world's population, or to say that nobody should have to be educated about guns before buying one.

Yet, these are the 20 most common arguments used to justify abortion - an act that kills a living human being without just cause or provocation and without benefit of a trial by jury solely for the crime of being "unwanted".  If it sounds insane to you to advocate guns because guns kill people, imagine how I feel when you spend your time arguing for abortion.  Abortion kills people. Get it?

Abortion kills more people than guns do every single day. It's not even a close race. almost 55 million deaths in the last 40 years.  It doesn't just kill the babies. It kills the mothers, too. How many more deaths are going to have to take place before you realize that banning guns without teaching people respect for life is a futile exercise?