Okay. Me too. Starting. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, September 17th. I'm Larry Rhodes or DJ Douter 5. Any issues? We have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. Ahoy! Stealing just a little bit of the film tomorrow on Dread Pirate Higgs, but I'm glad you've done it. Ahoy! Dread Pirate Higgs. There it is. A proper pirate. A proper pirate. A proper pirate. Digital Freethought Radio hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religions, religious faiths, post-deferianism, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you think you're the only non-believer in your town, well, you're just not. Here in Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, where you think we wouldn't have any, we have a group of over a thousand of us, card-carrying members. We're the Atheist Society of Knoxville, or ASK, and we'll tell you more about us after mid-show breaks, so be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? I want to talk about people becoming ornaments, leading into a conversation on gender. I want to talk about unity, and how they're now charging more people, as if corporations don't necessarily have the best interest of its consumers, and how that actually applies to religion, and how religion can also operate as a corporation as well. And then if we've got time, I want to talk about a new word that I came up with, and we'll see the three criterias that make you that particular word. But before we get into the meat and potatoes today, show how about a dish of pasta led to us for our own dread power hicks. Arrr! Grr be me, captain, I shall not want. He maketh me to float in salt water. He stireth me through glassy seas. He filleth me bowl. He stireth me through the straits of noodliness for goodness' sake. I, though I sail through the heaving of tempestuous waters, I will fear not sinking. For thou art with me, thy mast and thy rudder, they comfort me. Thou preparest a feast before me in the presence of me mates. Thou quenches my thirst with grog. My goblet runneth over. Truly, pasta and grog shall abide with me all the days of me life, and I shall dwell in the galley of the quab forever. Rawr! Fantastic! I love it! Hey, Dredd! You will be very happy to know that Netflix has come out with a new show called One Piece, a live action version of a popular manga series that's out, that's about pirates. And the problem is, is previously Netflix has had a very bad track record from adopting comic books, particularly Japanese comic books into live action dramas. However, this at this time, this time, it's unanimously approved as like a quality transition from the comic show. And I can tell you maybe the key point was pirates because everybody loves pirates. Not necessarily everybody loves Space Cowboys or Emos or Demons, but pirates, everybody can get behind that. And they found like a really good way to just showcase. Hey, we're just pirates. And what's the name of the show? One piece, one piece. Yes, you'd love it for worldbuilding. I mean, I think it'd be actually something that you'd get behind, though. OK, I'll check it out. The it is. I'll see if we can put the pasta faring imprap tour on it. It's a piratey. It's a piratey comic book. Like there's just there's I mean, there's sea creatures. There's a lot of shivering me timbers.  I think you are ours. And I'm going to have it. It's on Netflix. You can check it out. I'd recommend that it's only eight episodes, but one piece. The Netflix season and it's already been greenlit for a season two, which is like though peace as in piece of eight. Correct. Yes. One piece. I left everything in one piece. That's what it'd be. Gotcha. OK. Larry Rhodes. Oh, I'm sorry, Dredd. How have you been, though? How what's up with you? Doing well. We we had our church AGM on Friday. So we've got, you know, reestablished our our officer rank and our crew are all together. And we've got a bunch of stuff we're moving along with, including a pro bono lawyer representing me in my quest to get my ID with ICBC. So very, very positive stuff. You know, if you just hang out at a dog park, I'm sure you can find more pro bono lawyers, right? Or like maybe a butchery just be like, hey, who loves bones? I do. Are you a lawyer? I am. We can hang out. We can hang out. Larry, we'll have to check in with you. By the way, don't mind this random cough I got. I had a little bit for the last about two weeks ago, I had covid. I'm thankful that I got vaccinated because my symptoms were fairly mild. However, I do have this like nagging case of you, uvula itis, which is just like some slight inflammation in the back of my throat. That's it. Nonproductive cough tested myself yesterday. In fact, I'm still negative. So just don't mind me if I got this weird little coughing. But Larry, checking in with you, how you been, my friend? I've been fine. I'm not riding my motorcycle or anything. My knee is really killing me. I'm going to say doctor this Wednesday, though, about possible surgery. Who knows, I'll be on crutches in a few weeks. But OK, Tordo Road to Recovery. Yeah. Speaking of weird roads of recovery, my mom recently had a toenail surgery. And so I wake up now to notifications that are like your mother has contacted you and I tap it. And it's just this weird picture of like half a toe that has like cuts in it because she's showing me steadily healing. I know, right? I know, right? And so she's just asking like, hey, is this looking good? Or is it like too much pus or is it? Why is my skin wise? Like, mom, your band-aids are too tight. Let let it like dry up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm just like every day I wake up to that. But I it's, you know, it's it's who else can you show it to that your own family? So it's one of those things. But she's she's doing well. She's on the path of recovery to guys wanted to talk about some hot topics. We'll have a quick lead through on gender today. And I think what we could do is probably define what it means to us before we talk about it in detail. And then I'll lead it up to Dred Pirate Higgs and I'll I'll throw out my hat. I don't know what gender, how the word is used in the most popular sense today, because it seems to be a lot of contrasting opinions, even among people who handle that term as like a very if even for people who think that term is very important, I don't hear a consensus on what it means. And so as a result, I don't I don't want to I don't want to identify or claim knowledge on something that seems to be something transformed into something that's still very ambiguous. I do know when I was a kid, gender was just the more polite form of saying sex, they would have unlike forms or policies for like people who didn't want to have the word sex on the document. They put gender a bit more right, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now means a completely different thing. And so I'm not I recognize that these don't mean the same thing anymore, but I don't think there's any consensus on what gender means. And I also don't like what it's attempting to define because I think that is inherently tied to society and culture as it is today. Or so like what it meant to be a woman today, a woman today, gender woman today is completely different than what it meant 50 years ago. And so like today, I woke up to try to figure out the pay-per-view results of a UFC fight that was headlined by two women fighters, two female athletes that fight each other in a cage. Like that concept would have been completely foreign to what it meant to be a woman 20 years ago, 10 years ago, compared to now where it's just, oh, no, that's a normal thing.  Like the idea of what it means to be a woman means to be a man seems to be steeped in culture and very fluid. And so as a result, I don't understand why we're coming up with labels to define stuff like that. But that's me, just me. I'm just me. I don't personally put a lot of weight into the label dread or Larry. What do you think the idea of gender is? Well, in today's society, it's kind of a loaded question. I know what gender roles are. I know that you can be one gender or sexual physiology but identify as a different one. It's it's more fluid today than it's ever been in human history. But I think that we need to endorse it and embrace it because it's who people are. It's what makes them happy. It's what it what allows them to love the person that they love. You know, it's it's more about what you're attracted to. You can't change what you're attracted to or how you feel inside. I mean, we have tried it as a society to change that as punishment, as legal punishment. You know, we you are going to be reassigned your gender because of this court trial and it's always failed. It's always had horrendous results. And we need to reconcile the fact that we need to recognize what people are and how they feel and how they who they love. And Dredd, before we get in before I get to you, could I just address a quick comment from from Larry?  I do think they are two different things. However, when someone is assigning. When you say like someone was assigned the wrong gender as a baby, I don't know if doctors are in the business of assigning gender if they are assigning sex like they will get a. Absolutely.  Well, they don't really have anything else to go on. They don't have I don't know if you're going to like guitar music or if you're going to like no, I don't know that I can't assign your gender, but I can't assign your sex. And if the kid disagrees, it's like maybe you disagree with the societal add-on that they put on to sex, which is gender. And you want to be a different gender is like totally fine. But as far as what your sex is, that might be a different conversation. Like that might be. I remember. I remember as a as a young boy, I was asking my mother, how do we how does the doctor know what what sex the baby is when they put it on the form? Well, they look they look. I just want to make you shock to me. You have a right. You have a right to be whatever gender you want. But I think there's consequences of that comes with what sex you are. And that might like you can participate in what pills you need, what kind of medical checkups you need to go to, like what what sort of way we need to make sure that you can stay healthy and viable in society, etc. Gary, what do you think or what do you think gender is? And the add-ons that I put on, sorry about that. Were you talking to me?  What do you think? Oh, oh, I see I've got my name wrong here. You're going for you. Yeah. So yeah, if you don't mind. Hey, yeah.  Yes. So depending on the context in which you're having the conversation will dictate the way in which you use these these terms and the meetings that are associated with them, certainly sex in in the common language, I think, is biological, right? So you just think about in 10,000 years when anthropologists and archaeologists are digging up your bones. Yes. How would you be identified? And it isn't by what you clothe yourself with or how you act or your manualisms or or other what your inflections in your speech or the kind of language you use, it's your biological construction. Physiological, your physiological. Attribute backup. Yes. And that will determine whether you're one or the other. Gender, of course, is nothing to do with that. And certainly and I agree with Larry that we need to, you know, embrace the idea that gender and sex are different. But at the same time, not make it sort of a primary characteristic of what a person is. Yes, you know, down. Well, it says it's soup, you know, because again, you know, like even a person's color is the least interesting thing that you could consider about a person. And I think gender is kind of the same thing.  If I just meet someone on the street, I'm not really concerned about what their gender is or their color or their sex. You know, it's, you know, and I think we have to get over that. That sort of reliance on these rather superficial identifiers. Right. And I can I can I'm just like hair color. Who cares? Let me address one thing. I think there might be a better word that we can find. So like I always considered sex to be a descriptor. Like I'm just describing someone. So like if someone said, hey, who stole your car? I don't say, well, it's a person that values classical guitar music. And I don't want to make it. It's like just just describe them. I'm not telling you to identify the person. I just want a description so that we can objectively look for a person that looks like this description. They're wearing a red shirt. That's meant and it's a man. It's like or it's a male. What do you want to say? Whether you prefers John, Jean-Paul Sartre or Ken as a philosopher. Who cares? Right. But I might identify as things that aren't necessarily what I'm described as. So like I might be a person who identifies as a flu fighters fan or some of that exactly exactly what I mean. Yeah, exactly. Or someone that likes, you know, I don't know, electronic music or PlayStation over Xbox, like these might be things I identify as or Chevy. Who cares? And they describe sort of like my identity, but not as my physical description. Right. And so I see sex as a describer of my physical state, my biology, right? And I see gender as sort of like the identifier. What do you identify past just your your basic attributes that we can objectively assess? Like, tell me tell me more about you. I want to learn about you. And I think if we understood it like that, it's a lot easier for me to wrap my head around what gender is, because then, of course, you can be there's going to be so many different kinds of genders and different ways that people relate to them and these to be things that we embrace and try to work towards learning about each other. But I think the value of it is when you separate it from sex. Because I think some of the confusion or the problems that I have with some of the debates that are going on is in times when it's convenient, they overlap to problematic circumstances and then other times they're completely separate, only when it's also convenient to. And I'm like, dude, if they are separate terms, keep them separate. Identity, description. That way the realm of biology can just stay consistent with descriptions.  This is how we understand it, how it works. This is how we can test it. This is how we can prevent certain diseases that are predominant in certain different kinds of sexes. These are intersex people and this is also valid and we don't have to change them one way or the other. There's just another state of sex and we can better understand this as a science practice and it doesn't reduce people or make them less valid. But gender could just be its own psychological, interpersonal, get to know you sort of thing and let that just be a separate realm. That's not the same thing. That would be my meaningful variables. That's the only thing I would fight for.  Hey, that's the best I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. You couldn't tell the differences if they were on a lineup, a police lineup. Yeah, maybe like genders, how you express looks like a Catholic. Sex is how other people can identify you.  Genders, how you identify yourself or express yourself. That's exactly I like that. Dred, you had made a comment of people becoming ornaments. What did you mean by that?   Yeah, and how people are represented or present themselves. The things that jumped in my mind when you say people as ornaments is trophy wives, something like that. Is that what you have in mind? Oh, no, no, not specifically. I'm talking more about people who make themselves ornaments who like the diamond encrested cross that people or tattoos or, you know, just that rely much more on the superficial aspects of their person rather than developing a deeper and, I guess, more interesting interior person intellectually or as opposed to just superficially or more real dread. Yeah, there's a good point. You know, it just it just seems to me that, you know, and, you know, of course, as everyone gets older, they say about the younger generation. But, you know, it just it seems to me that people rely much more just on these superficial qualities as the things by which they believe they should be judged as opposed to anything of more intellectual substance. Larry. Well, it seems that today's society is kind of pushing us in that direction as yeah, our interactions are more fleeting, like on the internet or in person. You know, we see each other for a little while and move on that it becomes more important to rely on outward signals than internal honesty, integrity and. Oh, I like it, Larry. And all that. Yes, that's that's good. I like the person may never have the time to learn right through you. Well, everybody has 30,000 friends. You know, everyone has 30,000 friends. Like I can't I don't have time for everybody. You know, my thing on top of it to go on dread story was I once went to Sweden to a metal festival and I like metal music. And I would say like I'm pretty good at having like my favorite kinds of bands in different genres of metal because there's not just one kind of metal. But I didn't bring any my I don't have any metal regalia and I didn't bring any like black t-shirts with me. So like I'm there working at like a lab. And so I only have like my dress shirts and like my normal slacks. And I go to a metal festival for that's like a three day festival where there's just people with face paint. They got the spikes, they got the black shirts, they got tattoos and I'm there in my dress shirt and I felt I felt everyone was super cool. But I felt like one, I'm not even like in from this country. And then two, it's like when the metal people are like, they're like, they're seeing in Swedish, which is like the perfect language for metal music. Who do you guys are animals today? And I'm like, yeah, I'm an animal. Everyone's like, OK, he's hanging out with us. But the idea of like not looking the part or not having the accessories. Like I probably enjoy that music just as much as everybody else. But I didn't have the the accessory limit to demonstrate that. I didn't want to myself. Would you say that's a little bit so I'm actually I think I'd go a little deeper because like John Paul Sartre, he talked about authenticity, being your authentic self. And when you're not, he called it bad faith. And he made the example of a waiter who has never waited a table in his life before, but is dressed like a waiter, tries to act like a waiter, tries to carry the trays like a waiter, but isn't a waiter. And that is bad faith. So he's not working out or he's not being authentic to who he is on the inside. He's an ornament. He's pretending to be something on the outward show that he isn't on the inside. Is it like stolen? And that's what I mean by people becoming ornaments is that they're ornaments to themselves. I see they have an outward show that doesn't actually reflect who they are on the inside. And I think Larry hits it on the head here with social media and the sort of fleeting elements that we actually have to connect with one another. Is that we just do our best to make a first impression without giving any thought to how it actually reflects. Who we are on the inside. I got it. So it sounds also sounds to me like stolen valor to a point where people who dress up like military people because they in their minds want to be perceived as a hero, though they don't realize the harm that they want people saying thank you for your service. Yeah, just so they can think about themselves, but not necessarily earn it and diminish the value of the people who have made that sacrifice, which I find harmful. I would say this, I'm going to feel one more thing on the idea of gender. I do feel like we have social norms that we apply to attributes and that we've either masculinized or feminized them. And I feel like that is something that evolves over time, but is also inherently sort of like meaningless because we know it's a social construct. When I hear people say. I identify as this separate gender. I'm only seeing them point to another arbitrary basket of social contrivances. And in my mind, it would be like, listen, if you're a guy and you want to paint your nails, you can be a guy that paints your nails like that is that is that it should be something that's just in everyone's basket. Like that shouldn't necessarily be a feminine thing.  Makes you any less masculine to paint your nails or like other men or, I don't know, rollerblade or or want to be a stay at home dad. Whatever whatever weird contrivances that we put in the masculine feminine box, I feel like we should just stop looking at those boxes and just let it be more freely distributed as far as traits go because we know we have great female athletes, we know we know we have great dads that can stay home. We know we have great managers. We know we have female doctors that are great. We know we have great men nurses, like all these weird lines in the sand that we built up, I find stifles social progress. And so when people start generating genders and saying like, these are real things. And this is what this gender means. And it has these attributes. And then they started throwing the word should around. This is what this gender should be like. That's what this gender should do. You know, I find that rules. I find that silly, but I do appreciate that we're having the conversation because I'm hoping that the conclusion that we'll reach is that this is silly. We shouldn't be saying that men shouldn't be nurses or only women can be this degree or all these little attributes, only females can be ballerinas. Like none of this makes sense. Like this we should just conclude that this is silly. Maybe we should either come up with new definitions or usages of gender or get rid of the ones or these these ideas that we have, because they're prejudiced and biased as well, and that's not moving us any forward. That would be my thought process. What do you think, Dredd? I would agree, absolutely. And if when people pigeonhole people into these sort of roles, again, it really speaks to inequality. And if and if we're all really interested in equality, then we have to kind of let go of those you know, those biases, right? We have to be able to really, truly say and and take it into ourselves that we have to look past that superficially, you know, just consider it a superficiality and move on. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, I could I could completely know someone's gender and still not know if they're a good person or if they're a person worth hanging out. Precisely. Exactly. Those aren't policies that make or break a person on the inside. It's it's who they are on the inside, and that's what we should be looking for. The society as a whole says it's on the winds, which what's on the inside that counts, but then it turns hypocritical when they they judge you by what's on the outside. Right. I like intentions and actions. So how about that? Let's judge people based on those two things and let's move everything down to just descriptors, because that's all there is at the end of the day, you know, like let's not identify ourselves with our ornaments. Larry, any final thoughts and would you mind taking us out? Well, not final, but this is the break. OK, that's good timing, because I'm just going to grab my dog. OK, this is the digital free thought radio hour and W.O.Z.O. Radio 103.9 LPFM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Oh. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm Dr. Five and we're on W.O.Z.O. Radio 103.9 LPFM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's take just a moment to talk about the eighth society of Knoxville. ASK has was founded in 2002 when a 21st year and have over a thousand members. We have weekly in person meetings here in Knoxville every Tuesday evening at Knoxville's Old City at Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top table or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck, just go out on the deck, turn left and go to the end of the deck. You can find us online at Knoxville's. I mean, sorry, Facebook, meetup.com or KnoxvilleAtheist.org. You can also just Google us as Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one, start one, right? Well, I'm bad. Where do you want to pick up? I want to talk about corporations and religions. And maybe there's some ties between the two. So recently there's a been an uproar with a gaming engine company. Game Engine is essentially a program that makes video games. And there are a lot of popular ones out. One of the most popular is called Unity. Unity is a game engine that allows creators to be able to make video games. That can go on consoles, PCs, etc. And in fact, if you played video games, if you played video games in like, I don't know, in the last 17 years, guaranteed you have played at least a couple of Unity games. If not a majority of the games that you played have been on the Unity platform. Now, here's the weird thing. Unity is a 12 billion dollar company. They have a lot of profits. However, like companies do, they always want more profit. And so they found a really good way to make more money, which is to charge the developers not just for the cost of their game engine subscription, not just for a little bit of revenue from every game that's sold, but also a new fee that just came out a couple of weeks ago that charges the devs for every single time one of their customers installs the game. They will be charged 20 cents per game install. Now, think about this. If I have a game that I downloaded from Unity and I have it on my PC and install it, a developer gets charged 20 cents and if I take that same game and uninstall it and reinstall it again, maybe like three months later because I was just rearranging software on my computer, they get charged another 20 cents. And if I install that on another computer because I own the game and I just want to play it on two different PCs, maybe I have one in my living room, one in my bedroom, they get charged another 20 cents. If I stole the game, if I pirated the game, which I don't do, I try not to do, but I also don't do it anymore.  If I install a pirated game, no offense to Pirate's Dread. That developer also gets charged 20 cents. The money all goes to Unity. It seems so counterproductive.  OK, there could be dozens of developers on a single game. Do they charge them all 20 cents per installation? That's a good question. I don't know that. But I do know this. If I make a free game that's like a tutorial or just like I'm a YouTuber and I make free games for people, I will get charged for every single time someone installs that game, right? There's a lot of counterproductive. I can bankrupt myself. This will not stand. Yeah, so that was the initial message that came out. And since then, Unity has made some clarifications and and regression saying like, listen, OK, in order for us to charge you, you have to make at least $200,000 in the last month and have $200,000 or 200 installs. And they're trying to like make tears. So where people who make free games don't get necessarily charged, people who buy games as a charity bundle don't get charged, don't charge the developers, they're trying to make it so that they can still keep the rule. But there's still that fee that didn't necessarily improve their product or or wasn't the best interests of their consumers. What do you think, Larry? Well, you're talking about a game development engine, right? Yes. As versus the people who are writing in the game, using that engine. Now, it depends on how you define the word developer. Bethesda is a developer. It's a corporation. Now, if if they charge, if Bethesda uses their engine to develop a game and then they sell games and they are and people install them, I can understand that people who develop Unity would want like 20 cents per installation from the developer meaning the corporation who puts the game out. So maybe it's a misunderstanding of who the developer is that we're talking about here. So what's unfortunate is it is that one, if I was a one person in my bedroom and I was making video game, I would be the developer. It's it's and if Bethesda is a corporation, they're still the developer. They'd still be charged if they're using a Unity product. What's sad, though, is what people would rather have is a revenue share system where it's once you buy the game from that money, a percentage of that money will go to Unity rather than put me in a situation where I may not be making any money on my game right now, but if 14 million people and reinstall the game for whatever reason, maybe I announced the sequel and a bunch of people want to play the first game and they reinstalled on their computers, now I have this $50,000 fee that I had to pay out of nowhere just because I announced a new game that came out. So like it puts me in a precarious situation where I don't get an influx of money and unit gets percentage of it, I just get charged money. And the bottom line is this is not a fee that enhances the product. It's not a fee that suddenly gives me more value as a developer or the consumer of their product, I am stuck with this tax in an ecosystem that I can't escape without a lot of work on my end. And they know that that's why they can charge it. It's not in my best interest. So my thought process would be, do you know what also is in your best interest? Do you also know any large organizations that operate not necessarily in the best interest of their concern? And I thought, isn't this sound a lot like religion? Because there's a big upheaval on the idea of unity, but no one's talking about how Christianity has never offered a product for anyone to to physically have or tangibly experience, yet they still charge money. They still charge your identity. They still want your kids to go to their Sunday schools. They still want to inhibit science. They still want to tell you not to get vaccinated. They still want to tell you what politicians to vote for. There's a lot of social taxes that come with belief in a religion. A lot of fees that come with it that are both monetary, time based and social base, and there's no enhanced value when Jesus says, hey, listen, I need to tie. Why didn't any of his followers be like, and what we're going to get in recent, what will we get additionally in return? Yeah, with additional things like, well, you get eternity next to the right side of my guy, my guy is like, yeah, that's what we had before, but now you're asking us to tie. So like, we're going to get more stuff, right? After you die, yeah, what added value are you bringing to this? Yes, with all these additional charges, not only that, but like with the rate of inflation and the number of people who are working and the more money you should think you're beginning, I think I would at least get another product, at least a Bible 3.0. Like, can we get some miracles on demand? Like, I'm still praying, like, come on, can we come up with some sort of enhanced value for the customer? Because my return on investment is only further depleting. Like, what do you think, Larry? Well, I think that I'm going to try to offset some of the customer comments going forward that they're going to say, well, it's voluntary.  You know that what the fees are and what you're expected of you before you join the club, that's not true for children. You know, the people that that inherit the the ideas, the the methodologies, the costs without any benefits from it until after they die. And the guilt is a large cost of it, too. But it's it's not an entirely voluntary thing. And if it were, I wouldn't worry about it. You know, wait till the person is 21 years old, pitch your your religion to them if they want to join, no problem. Right. Not only that, but like, I feel like it's a violation of the spirit of a terms of service, you know, so think about it like this. If I was charged, if Apple came out suddenly and said, for every Apple product you have in your home and on your person, we will charge you one dollar per month. So if you have three iPhones in your family, we're just going to charge you three dollars. That's our new terms of service. And be like, why are you charging this new fees? Like, because if you don't like it, you can go to a different phone. It's like, well, I've already bought I bought into a yearly contract for this phone. I can't necessarily swap it out, but I bought into it with the understanding that I wouldn't be charged this additional fee. So like you sort of adjusted your terms of service that breached the contract that we started, which was the understanding that I wouldn't be charged these additional fees when developers bought unity. They didn't know this fee was going to come down, you know, today. And they're still stuck on the hook for a project that won't be up for another four or five years where they may have to sell a product that incurs them a fee that reduces their bottom line at the end of the day. Like they don't want that either with the Bible. Hey, listen, this is our God. This is your path to salvation. You it sounds great. You're going to have some potlucks. You're going to meet some great people. We're going to have great moral privileges will feel a lot better than everybody else will be chosen people. It's like great. You buy into it. But then there's that the baggage of hell. There's the baggage of evil. There's a baggage of guilt. There's the baggage of now I have to discriminate against against people who don't necessarily believe the same things I do. I have to choose schools. I have to take my kids after the hate gate.  But only them and not their sin. Right. Like I have to like start parsing people from things that are part of their authentic selves and come up with these arbitrary bifurcations of people and sort of take them as their full authentic self. It's it's a terms of service that you weren't sold into, but is the bait in and switch of a lot of religions, except for post-fairiness. I feel like cost friends pretty cool. Yeah, I would agree. Post-fairisms are an exception to that. We're the new religion, right? We don't, you know, we don't demand anything. I mean, that's it's a dogma free religion, fortunately. You can take it or leave it. Like they say, we don't have to hate anybody. We have the God back guarantee, right? For 30 days. If you don't like it, your old God would probably take you back. So dogma and all. So I had something on my mind. I hopefully it'll come back because it really hit the point here. Feel free to interrupt the time. But I would say, like, overall, the agreement that was made at the start, the one that I signed up for isn't what I'm being offered. Let's go ahead, Dred. Yeah, so it's interesting that actually that people actually develop this behavior themselves. It's not necessary that a company is trying to do it.    They have a proclivity for for being loyal to products. So I think companies, of course, can exploit that. Yes, proclivity and and and then charge for it. And yes, religion is very much that way. Right? Right.  You go in the Catholic and you buy into the culture and then you get ensconced in, you know, what's going on in that religion. And it creeps in. It's that slow creep of all the other attendant values and ways of thinking that suddenly you're a different person at the end and don't even recognize that the change has occurred in yourself. Very true. So true. In fact, I like I want to I want to highlight a point. If you ever if you ever look at a hemi cut or a half cut cross sectional cut of a human brain, you will see essentially a central core that looks very different than what's on the outer surface. So like when you think of a brain, you think of this pink wrinkly surface, that's the outer part of your brain. There is a core to your brain that's very consistent with like other animal kinds of things. And the reason why we have these two kinds of structures of brains is because we have evolved on top of like our old historical brains. So like we have a reptile brain. Yeah, exactly. When we say reptile, we're not literally saying we have a literal reptile brain in our head. We're just saying we have like a prehistoric, fundamental brain stem that we've added on additional functionality to sort of like adding on additional chips to a computer or like a new engine into which is generally how evolution works. Right. We're adding on that gives us modular and have these like higher ambitious, more arbitrary, ambiguous conversations about nuanced topics empirically. Right. But the thing is that core brain is still capable of doing some thought process and affecting how the rest of the brain works. So when it comes to things like, is this a danger or am I safe? Is this a good thing to eat or is it a bad thing to eat? Does it taste good? Does it not taste good? Like all those core functions are still there in our brain. And when a corporation is like, how can we sell our product to more people? Should we sell our car based on the idea of how many airbags there are or, you know, what our fuel efficiency is or stuff like that?  Yeah, but a naked, but a scantily clad woman in the backseat of that car. Now the lizard brains firing is like, we need this.  It's like what we drive to work and back. It's like, yeah, but this drive in the desert and there's a pretty lady in the back. And that means we can have proclivity to have more kids, which is good. And it looks safe. It looks safe. There's no there's no predators around.  Yeah, I feel like corporations know what it takes to get us on board with things that aren't even necessarily in our best interest. And they have fine tuned their marketing specifically to get through to that that fleshy wrinkly part of our brain back to the lizard brain. And I don't see a difference when it comes to religion. I find like religion operates in the same marketing values of like the tobacco industry of like the alcohol industry is targeting you. Do you feel uncomfortable? Do you feel sleepy when you wake up? Do you feel like you're not you could know more people? Well, let me help you connect with more people, potentially find more mates, make you feel more safe and and give you that one salve, which is you're going to die one day. Wouldn't it be great if you did it? Wouldn't it be great if death was just a change of address? Oh, man, do I have the answer for you for a lizard brain operating system? That is like the the best news you could possibly get. It's the best product you can possibly get. But we know from our higher brains that it's essentially snake oil. What do you think, Fred? Well, I was going to say that, you know, for the 200,000 years that we have been homo sapiens, we've been, you know, through that evolution, we've been running on our emotions and reason and and logic and skepticism are all very recent developments and take up maybe the last 200, 250 years of that 200,000 year evolutionary train. Yeah. And so it doesn't come naturally to the human brain to reason and think these things through.  And the only thing that motivates us is our passions. And then we reason to justify it. Right. So of course, marketing is a targeting. Yes. The emotional triggers. Right. That make us then use reason to justify our choices. I shouldn't lie to our passions. Right. Reason is a learned behavior. You have to learn how to reason. You have to practice your reasoning. You have to practice that. If you stop using for three years, you're going to be just as good. It's not a bicycle. You have to constantly rigorously test it and that takes energy. It takes a proper education and it takes proper training. And it takes proper like practice, rigorous practice. It's a discipline and we're not born out of not just with yourself, with other people. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it works best in a community where people share those skills so that you can hone them against each other and just independent. And everything that you're saying takes effort, like the energy well to be in a society where reason is touted as a discipline that people endorse and actually go through the process of training and uplifting is so rare. Just do the fact that it's a lot easier to operate on authoritarian authoritarianism or just strictly passions because that's how we're that's our default state. And if you're asking improvements, you can make to humanity. It'd be stuff like that, like give us the ability to reason out of the gate. Why not? Why don't we have that? Larry, it also takes a well stocked baloney detection kit. Yes. Carl Sagan brought that term into our lexicon through his book, A Demon Haunted World. Yeah, great. But in other words, it's basically the tools of logic and an exception. So I would recommend just doing a Google search for the baloney detection kit by Carl Sagan and also the rules of logic and learn those rules of logic will help you throughout your day to day life, making better decisions. Yeah, absolutely. And just to follow with Larry's thing, our skeptic magazine actually produces a booklet called the baloney detection kit, which is just a couple of bucks. I've got like 24 of them that when I come across somebody that looks like they're moving towards a more skeptical mental framework. I give it to them as a as a means to bolster their skills and build them up in that as a nice little pamphlet. And like I say, it's like a buck 50 or something. Yeah, I just want to say I find this conversation inherently prejudiced because my gender identity is baloney. Well, I'm a squirrel, so. Are you what they mean when they say squirrel? Guys, let's see, one quick one. I had a weird term that I wanted to present. Maybe we'll talk about more. This is the idea of a person that goes to church or goes to mass and is still an overall terrible person once they leave mass.  I think we can say on the radio like a layer you give me the look. But like, I think that counts. It's a brand new word. These would be my three rules for whether or not you're a mass hole. One, just letting you know, you can be your religion. I have no problem with there being religions. I'd love for everybody to be their religion, but I don't want you to force your belief on other people. So please don't force your beliefs on other people. I'd also even, in my opinion, I think even forcing your kid to go to like a Bible study or or stuff when they're in that professional age constitutes as forcing your beliefs on other people. If you want to be the religion you are good, but give other people the opportunity to like follow you. Don't encourage them as the soul loving authority figure in your life of what they should be and what they shouldn't be. I feel like that's a problematic situation or at least give them the options of like what the full variety of tables are or start with nonbelief first and then when they have a good reason to fall into go for it because who wants to have all these believers that believe just being virtue of the fact that they were indoctrinated at a young age. Second one is don't inflict harm. Don't cause unnecessary harm. I throw its circumcision into this, not getting vaccinated. Inhibition of sciences. Don't go out of your way to cause harm to other people. Prejudices attacking different groups just because they believe different things that you do or practice love in a different way that you do. That's unnecessary. So forcing belief, inflicting harm. And then the third one in the last one is using your religion, your experience of mass to not be a good person. So like, oh, I don't have to I don't have to contribute to this charity because I prayed for them or, oh, earthquake happened in here.  Or I don't have to think about bad things or the crimes that are happening or inordinate institutional racism or inflections of lack of privilege to people who wear pirate hats and can't necessarily wear them in their own driver's license, because when I go to church, I'm a good person and I prayed and I know I'm OK. It's like, don't use your excuse to not be a good person and unilaterally offer those privileges to everybody. That's all massholery. It's massholery.  I'm just saying, don't use your your religion as an excuse to not be a good person, because that, in my opinion, is just another form of harm, which is very common, very common.  That would be my takeaway. That's my final words. Dred Pirate Higgs, what's yours? Well, you can find my stuff on my pirate YouTube channel. M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E. I've been doing weekly sermons on various topics. I've seen them. They're very short. They're like three and a half to five minutes long. Just little snippets of, you know, some personal reflections. And, yeah, I think they're starting to get interesting because I'm starting to get into a groove. So, yeah, check it out. Of course, I livestream this Sunday mornings for me at 7 a.m. Pacific Standard Time and also do the views on the news often at 11 a.m. Sunday morning. So, yeah, check it out. If you like it, subscribe. Nice. And Dred, looking forward to seeing latest updates on your quest for chaos, now that you're in order and ready to go along with that. I just want to say, from my perspective, I do. I do think that we should think about religions and corporations in the same light. And whenever we're really upset about a corporation doing something really against the consumers, we should also think, hey, what is religion offering us? And isn't this almost being run like a corporation? If that seems crazy to you, think about how people can follow a corporation as if it was a cult, like, in my opinion, in a sense, like Apple products tend to like operate within a closed ecosystem and they have a lot of fanatics. And if they were to suddenly come out with a charge per device that they sell just randomly, I think people would be upset by that. So why not for a dollar cost of like some Apple Chilean corporation? Don't we get why don't we get upset when a religion says, hey, by the way, we're going to need your kid to not get vaccinated, hate these groups of people. Vote for this politician when they become older.  Like it can get really stark with how religions operate. And so I say, first, think about that impact in the same context you would as an oracle corporation. Think of religion as a corporation and buy by it still. Then you buy by it. But if you don't, now we're thinking about it on the same level. Now you'll see how an atheist sees it. Larry, final thoughts and what do you think? Well, excuse me, my content can be found at digital free thought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for a radio show archives. We've got off 300 shows there, atheist songs and articles on the subject. My YouTube channel is at doubt or five. And you can find my book, atheism, what's it all about on Amazon? Oh, there it is. Dred's holding it up. And if you're having trouble with leaving religious beliefs behind, you can get help from religion from recovering from religion.org. That is if you remember clergy, but have come to see that the claims of religion are not justified. There's if you're stuck behind the pulpit, as it were, there is help for you at the clergy project.org actually drop the the and it's just clergy project.org. Remember, everybody is going to some other religions. Hell, the time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life and you'll see next Wednesday at seven o'clock here on W. O. Z. O. Radio. Say bye, everybody. Bye.


Northwest Technical College in Bemidji announced this morning that a new commercial refrigeration and HVAC program will become into campus this fall. The new program is being added in response to feedback the college received from a December meeting with professionals in the industry. In the meeting they said the industry is expected to grow significantly in the next few years and skilled workers will be needed to fill those jobs. NTC's next steps will be recruiting students, instructors and finding the right equipment for course labs. Students will spend about 60 percent of their time in lecture classes and 40 percent in labs getting their skills so that lab time is really essential to have the technology that's out there right now and so we're in the process of identifying the equipment that we need to have in those labs so students are up to speed and have an idea of how those different controllers those chiller rack systems the refrigeration units how all those work and how they can make sure that they develop the skills that business and industry are looking for. NTC officials say they are hoping to start with at least 20 students next fall. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


there's a so lot going on and what really is calling me to course is this latest bill from Oklahoma that would ban gender-affirming care up until the age of 26 for years we've been hearing from anti-trans pundits and politicians that this is about children is about protecting the children but I think with this Oklahoma law reveals is that it's never been about the children it's always been about scapegoating trans people stigmatizing us in criminalizing our existence making us not exist and we have pundits from anti-trans pundits and politicians on television every single day saying horrible things about trans people on the Internet saying horrible things about trans people things that are leading to bomb threats in the Boston Children's Hospital. The higher I check the founder of lives of tick tock took credit for that bomb threat and also I'm I'm I'm posted proudly on Tucker Carlson that she's communicated with Ron DeSantis is administration and that her work her anti-trans propaganda work led directly to the don't say gay bill so the way we talk about trans people and with trans people in the media has an effect on these policies a lot of the ways in which we're seeing trans people we talked about on the Internet in the news those exact ways are finding them there. That language is finding its way into legislation. So I wanted to come on today for all those people who have the best of intentions and want to support trans people don't know the right language don't know how to talk about it are scared to say the wrong thing. We need the right language to combat this they've anti-trans folks have been setting the agenda and how we talk about this and we take back the narrative and we do it right away because it is what is it January 19th and they're already been 151 bills targeting trans and LGBTQ people introduced in state legislatures just this year alone 151 it's January 19th. You just watched actress Laverne Cox succinctly explain how odious figures with large platforms ranging from Republican politicians to Twitter influencers they're not just controlling the narrative with respect to trans issues they're outright influencing legislation that is being passed. And if we keep allowing them to monopolize discourse things are only going to continue to get worse for trans Americans. So what we need to do is recenter the conversation and Laverne Cox specifically explains how that can be done. Let's listen. So if you want to sort of get if you have to get an education to some of these folks who are using the wrong language and saying the wrong things what would it be. And I'm not language for these first of all I'm not into censoring. But it's for understanding if we are interested in the humanity of trans people and understanding that we exist what I would first of all say to all the people there's so many wonderful pundits and politicians who say well gender-affirming care for children that's something that we should debate right children don't know and I would actually disagree.  It is your business. I think the American Medical Association American Academy of Pediatrics the Interkin Society have developed wonderful protocols that have worked for treating trans children and parents who have are dealing with that can go and get that information if your parent of a trans child. It's your business if you're not it's none of your business what adults do with their bodies is none of their business where this is America it should be about freedom bodily autonomy. I'm firmly instantially pro-choice and we should have a right to do with our bodies what we want to in America and even for children that's their parents. Business is their doctor's business it is not a legislator's business who has doesn't know anything about it. So what I would suggest when because whenever we're debating whether trans folks should have access to health care we're objectifying them when we see senators in Supreme Court confirmations talking about mutilating children, we're objectifying children talking about children shouldn't tell you but just disgusting and when we objectify we dehumanize and that is what this whole project has been about not making trans people real people human beings who exist. I exist there's no trans question I'm not a question I exist here there I have a material reality lived experiences and trans people have always existed and we're not going to stop existing if people don't teach about us. So we should have acceptance it is our business if we're discriminated against in health care and employment and housing which many of these people want to do that is our business if we believe in liberty and justice for all Americans. What people do with their bodies is none of our business. Yeah, every single thing that she said there is 100% spot on this is about freedom this is about liberty. I don't know why in 2023 Republicans still monopolize words like freedom and liberty when the policies that they produce year after year in state after state are antithetical to freedom and liberty everything that they do essentially restricts freedom and liberty from a personal standpoint with regard to bodily autonomy to an economic standpoint they are against freedom and liberty so to continue to let them pretend as if they're the ones with this monopoly on freedom and liberty it's completely bogus. This is something that I can no longer take them seriously about they claim that they care about genitals of trans youth getting mutilated but where's the outrage for circumcision as of 2010 more than 50% of newborn infants are being subjected to a surgery that they're unable to personally consent to yet Republicans are fixated on trans youth and falsely claiming that they're the ones who are getting their genitals mutilated or removed. This isn't about these specific issues and we need to stop pretending as if they're actually concerned this is about bigotry and as Laverne pointed out you know they'll claim this is about protecting children but yet you see increasingly more bills being proposed that ban transitioning for adults so this is really about the children then how do you explain that well it's because their goal is very clear their goal is to erase trans people out of existence and they are going to do that by any means necessary either by legally erasing them out of existence or preventing them from transitioning which will increase the rate of suicidality thus leading to more deaths any way that they can get trans people out of society is what they're going to do even if they know that that causes harm and we've got to stop pretending as if they just are ignorant and they don't know they want trans people to die that is the goal of Republicans some of them perhaps are just ambivalent towards trans death trans deaths and don't care if trans people die if trans youth die but a lot of them are vicious enough that they want to inflict as much pain and suffering on this community as possible because they believe that their existence is illegitimate and that is the point that Laverne Cox I think is trying to drive home here and so it's what we all need to grapple with now I want to point you to an article published back in May of 2022 by out front magazine written by Vienna Austin and they argue that these anti-trans laws are tantamount to attempted genocide and I think that this is a really important conversation to have I've debated with myself about whether or not it's appropriate to use the G word because I don't want anyone to accuse me of being hyperbolic and my advocacy of trans people I don't want people to say no I don't think that it rises to genocide we're talking about simple bigotry here it's common this is a civil rights issue so in order to determine whether or not this is attempted genocide against the trans community we have to first understand what is a genocide now we're going to go to the UN's criteria here this is from the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide and this is the criteria as laid out by the UN A. killing members of the group B. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group C. deliberately inflicting upon the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part D. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and E. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group so now that you know the criteria we're going to go to Vienna's article because they're going to tie specific policies specific anti-trans policies to this criteria for genocide as laid out by the UN and as you're going to see they make a very compelling case here they write puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy the topics of these policies have been shown to drastically reduce the horrifically high suicide rate of transgender youths saving lives to block trans youth from such a treatment manufactures a higher suicide rate and best manufactures more suicides more deaths within the transgender community specifically amongst youth this flagrantly violate sections A B and C of the aforementioned definition this policy produces conditions for trans youth via lack of access to life-saving health care that cause mass mental distress in the form of suicidality and depression which itself leads to drastically more suicides and suicide attempts a prevalently proposed enforcement for such policies as is the case with the aforementioned policy of Texas governor Greg Abbott is to treat the providing of such vital health care as child abuse had it not been overturned the directive would have likely resulted in child services departments removing transgender children from affirming homes and families providing gender affirming health care and placing them into non affirming ones which do not this enforcement would additionally meet and violate section E of the aforementioned definition of genocide albeit in a unique way so let's be very clear these anti-trans policies that are being produced by Republican controlled legislators across the country are going to kill trans people trans youth and they know about this we need to stop pretending as if it's possible to educate them and if they were no longer ignorant they wouldn't propose such harmful policies they know exactly what they're doing their goal is to kill trans people and the reason why it's so important for us to have a sober analysis and really acknowledge what their intent is here is because then and only then in my opinion we're going to be able to actually address it with the urgency that is needed now Laverne Cox in this next clip that I'm going to play for you doesn't specifically say the word genocide but she explains how all of these issues anti-Semitism you know sexism transphobia they're all interrelated and the Nazis also targeted LGBTQ plus people and in fact that was one of the first acts that they did so let's listen people should know that one of the first things that the Nazis did I think it was in 1933 was they burned Magnus Hirschfield's gender for sexuality Magnus Hirschfield was studying trans people LGBTQ people Lily Elby who the Danish girl the film Danish girl was about she had her first gender-forming procedure at Magnus Hirschfield the Nazi's burned it down all of this research and there were LGBTQ people in concentration camps stamped with pink triangles so in this moment of a rise of anti-Semitism we see this ride this documented rise in anti-trans legislation and rhetoric these are not a coincidence so we as we fight anti-Semitism as we fight for reproductive rights we have to fight for trans rights as well and they're on TV every day we need to be more vociferous we need to be more engaged in this and I know trans people are a small part of the population but it is not unrelated to everything else that is happening this is about justice and bodily autonomy for everybody it's about freedom we're Americans we should be about freedom she is exactly correct here so it's time to treat this threat with the seriousness that it deserves we're no longer just talking about bigotry or prejudice or discrimination we're in much darker more dangerous territory where an entire group of human beings in the United States are existentially threatened and so that was the main takeaway at least for me from this interview with Laverne Cox she's just trying to get people to understand that now is the time to get involved you don't have to know all of the language but you do need to arm yourself with the information needed to push back you do need to know the intent behind these bills and that these lawmakers know exactly what they're doing we can't shock everything up to ignorance maybe in some cases we can but ultimately there's enough information out there there's enough long-term studies of trans youth out there to where if somebody is genuinely curious about trans people they would know that gender-affirming care is indeed medically necessary for trans youth but the thing is that they don't care and the goal is to prevent trans people from existing


As an amputee, this little sock thing actually serves a really important purpose. I recently had surgery, meaning that there is still a lot of swelling, also still experiencing a lot of nerve pain, and that is where the shrinker comes in. Shrinkers are made of pretty tight, yet still stretchy material.  As you can see, they fit pretty snug. First of all, as the name suggests, they help to shrink your leg. If there's swelling or other issues going on, they can help shape it, kind of push any of that swelling out. Additionally, if you do deal with pain, nerve pain, having pressure around the spot that hurts can be really helpful. I wore these probably for about a year after my initial amputation and haven't touched them since, but after this most recent surgery, my prosthetics suggested I start wearing them again to get the swelling down, get the shape back in my leg, so that I can get back into a permanent socket where the volume size isn't changing all the time anymore. Something that a lot of people don't know is that there's volume changes that happen pretty much constantly as an amputee. You can wake up one morning and your leg not fit because you had too much salt the day before, which is super annoying. So shrinkers help with maintaining size, shape, getting swelling out of there, and also helping pay management. They're pretty cool.