The following is a presentation of TFNN. The Morning Market Kickoff with your host, Tommy O'Brien. Good morning everybody, I'm Tommy O'Brien, coming to you live from TFNN, 8.30 a.m. Thursday morning, 60 minutes to go until the opening bell. We got markets in negative territory, S&Ps right now, negative by about 10 points, trading at 3107, you got the NASDAQ negative by 9, 96.72, the Dow negative by 44, 26,179. We have a little ECB stimulus going on right now, putting a little bit of a bid in the market, putting some action into the forex market as well. We'll start things off, let's jump over to the charts. We'll start it off with the Dow and why not, we'll start it off with the headline of that ECB. ECB unveils, bigger than expected increase in crisis bond buying. The headline number there, and as we come on the air, we get weekly jobless claims, why not we'll drop to that number, since that's hitting right at 8.30, 1.877 million weekly jobless claims this week, the expectation was for 1.775, of course 24 hours from right now, we get non-farm payrolls Friday morning, 8.30 a.m., that number the market waiting for as well. So you have the ECB, in March the ECB unveiled its Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program, which will see it by 750 billion euros, and they are now scaling that up, and where is the number? Yeah, they were looking for 500 billion, but they actually came in at 600 billion, I believe, jumping back to this article, and there it is. So at a virtual meeting on Thursday, President Christine Lagarde and colleagues decided to expand the amount of purchases by 600 billion euros, or 675 billion US, extended their duration until at least the end of June 2021, so bigger than the market was looking for, which was a boost of about 500 billion euros, 100 billion extra euros. And that, now we jump back to the charts, and there's your acceleration on that pop, so you have the Dow down at about 26,100, you're currently trading 26176, you see the pullback though, we were up as high as 26254, the S&Ps, 3105, on that ECB news we spiked all the way to 3111, you back it up to yesterday, there's the close of action on Wednesday at just under 3120, quite a day in the markets yesterday, right? Dow was up more than almost 500 points, NASDAQ 100, you see the pop on the news, but we've given almost it all back, 9664, the NASDAQ just within reach of all time highs, but not quite there yet. Crude oil was above $37 briefly, you have crude pulling back 3679 currently, gold contract trading a bit higher after pulling back the last few days, gold trading 1714, Euro US dollar. There's some acceleration Euro, spiking higher on that news from 112 to above 11260, we pull back, we're currently trading at 11229, in terms of other headlines you have happening out there, American Air, they're gonna boost flying 74% on demand rebounds, so the busiest days next month, we'll have above 4,000 flights up from 2,300 in June, that's America's and senior vice president of network strategy. The carrier plans to operate about 40% of 2019 capacity next month, that's a big number. I mean, you went from basically normal business to a snails crawl of air travel and to have it immediately jump back to 40% next month, encouraging when you think about not many trips planned, especially air travel trips, you might jump in the car and make a road trip as things get back to normal, but have you booked a flight where you're actually gonna be flying next month and they're gonna have 40% of those flights already available, encouraging news for Americans, some of the airline stocks yesterday, some of the biggest flyers and as we speak, the SMP is now down at 3,100, down 17 points, so American, there's an acceleration on that to 1286, we were at 1185, we were just at 1032, some of the other airlines, Delta trading higher from 2847 to flirting with about $30, see Southwest, above 38, so all of them getting a little bit of a pop on some encouraging news. Other headlines, I'm gonna pull it over, in term of equities making moves this morning. So we'll start it off, J.M. Smucker, the food producer, they're out with their quarterly earnings, $257 a share, they beat estimates of $229, revenue beat as well, driven by increased demand, Smuckers did forecast a 1% to 2% decline in overall sales for the fiscal year, SJM, actually trading lower from 115 to 109 market, maybe looking for a little bit more action on their earnings, because we closed at 114, 159, we're gonna open at under 110 on that chart, you're looking right at about this level right down here on that Smuckers. Tiffany's, so the luxury good makers LVMH is exploring ways to renegotiate, maybe just a renegotiation of its 16.2 billion acquisition of its US rival. The deal was announced in November, has yet to close. Tiffany, so of course the news breaking a couple days ago, that that deal may fall apart, you see the fall off on a couple days. This is when the news begins to break in October, I believe that's when the deal gets done in November, the price tag working $16.2 billion, I believe comes to about $135 per a share. You see that during the pandemic, it quickly became realized that that 135 might not come to fruition, it makes it back to 130 and hangs at that level from March 25th, and now we're back at about 112 so far on Tiffany, even this morning trading lower. On anticipation that it's not gonna be the same price tag of 135 if it happens. Sienna, the maker of networking equipment, earned $0.76 a share for the second quarter, well above the $0.49 the market was looking for. Sienna out there numbers, C-I-E-N. Right now we're trading a little bit lower, $55.75, we closed yesterday above $56. FedEx is adding surcharges to some US shipments following a similar move by UPS. The move is designed to manage rising costs and a surge in package shipments amid the coronavirus pandemic. I wonder how that plays out when Amazon's almost like a third competitor in that industry and they are never gonna squeeze people for money now, seems like that would be an opportunity for somebody to come in and grab market share potentially at a lower cost. FedEx, no real action overnight for some context from 160 down to 88, back to 138 UPS from about 120 to 82, we're gonna open flat in Amazon, why not? We're gonna open basically where we closed 24, 78, we've been hanging around at this area since about April 16th, right? April 16th, we hit 24, 61. So you're talking about almost six weeks, Amazon's just been hanging between 2,300 and 2,500. Carnival, cruise lines, extended the suspension of some voyages of it's Princess Cruiser's brand, they travel to Australia, Canada and Taiwan, many cruise ports around the world remain shut due to COVID-19. Zoom Info, debuts today on the NASDAQ after the platform's initial public offering 21, I saw the source list, is that Zoom? No, Zoom Info above the expected range, so an IPO. This one's interesting, so Simon, the mall owner, suing apparel retailer gap over $66 million in unpaid rent. The gap's the largest tenant for the nation's largest mall operator, so Simon, SPG, malls shut down, talk about some max paying from 140 to 40, 140 to 42, crazy. 72, 88, quite a pop, I mean this is a daily, check out the acceleration we had on these malls yesterday, Simon. I mean this, we started off Monday trading in Simon at $57 and we just hit 77 overnight at 75 and gap, I believe it's GPS. There it is. Many of our new listeners have heard about the Tiger's Den. The Tiger's Den is a lively community where professional traders and investors can meet, exchange ideas and information in a comfortable moderated atmosphere. Hear all of the TFNN shows, plus see all of the charts as they happen live and have access to archives of all of those charts. 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We can now have the S&Ps below 3100. We're looking at 15 minute bars. This bar starting right at 830 and you see the volatility from about 3110. Now down 10 points pre-market session lows 3096 down about 7 tenths percent in the S&Ps. NASDAQ down about 3 tenths percent and the Dow giving back some of the gains that had yesterday down about 6 tenths checking in on the Russell. Russell volatility continuing down about 1.2% on the Russell so far. Some of the other news stories I was reading this morning an interesting one out from Bloomberg talking about the US jobless claims. Timely article with you of the weekly jobless claims of course this morning. You have non-farm payrolls tomorrow morning. We got ADP yesterday. US jobless claims under state reality with gaps in federal data. So federal figures so zero claims in the new program in 18 states state data show half a million claims through the same program. Things are moving so quick right now. And there's such a backlog Florida having a lot of problems with unemployment. The numbers just the some of the systems not set up and fortunately to handle this type of a surge. You have US Labor Department's weekly jobless claims report has yet to reflect at least half a million filings for federal pandemic program with data reporting lagging behind payouts. You have 18 states Florida where I reside where TFNN resides along with many of our listeners and customers Alabama Arizona Hawaii West Virginia among 18 states that showed zero initial claims under pandemic unemployment assistance or PUA in the Labor Department's weekly report last Thursday but some states have actually received at least half a million in combined claims through the program. Something to keep in mind that's a big number there folks they go over jobless claims under counted among the 18 states Florida 171,000 as of June 2nd. Some of the bigger numbers you have Georgia with 85,000 Arizona 77 Alabama 55 West Virginia 29 all of those numbers not being reflected in some of those federal numbers. As then they just struggle to keep up so big numbers there and look for that to continue and we'll see what happens tomorrow as we get some interesting stuff going on with the non-farm payroll and the market begins to wait for that number. So China interesting yesterday you had President Trump banning Chinese airlines and the China's aviation because of the fact that US airlines weren't being allowed in China even though Chinese airlines were allowed in the US. Now you have China's aviation authority to allow more foreign flights after the US banned Chinese carriers. So they said Thursday it would allow all foreign airlines to choose from a list of approved cities to operate one international passenger flight a week beginning June 8th and that was only about 12 hours. So good for that showed some progress get things done get things back to action and some fair travel back and forth. Other stories what did I have up here jumping back to equities there we go Costco. So they reported a 5.4% increase in May comps sales compared to the estimate of a 3% decline. The warehouse retailer also saw e-commerce sales more than double compared to a year earlier. Costco the big box stores check out that so 306 to 309 Costco. They did have their numbers coming back but checking out where they're going to be. It's amazing when you look at the volatility other companies had this one figured out pretty quickly that life wasn't going to be much worse it might even be better we go from that February high of 325 never made it really below 280 but we've never traded back above that 325 just kind of been in a tight range near the highs for Costco. Fossil fossil matched estimates were a quarterly loss of $1.51 though the luxury good makers revenue exceeds estimates the company anticipates the pandemic will continue to pressure I would say through this year FOSL is their symbol. I'm gonna be down a bit about 10 pennies to 360 or 370 there's your action on their numbers to 409 but pulling back a bit as they miss a bit and Cloudera reported a quarterly profit of 5 cents a share beating the estimate of break even the computing company's revenue topped expectations Cloudera gave a weaker than expected corn quarter revenue their symbol CLDR talk about a drop off from 1269 to 1106 some of these operators in the cloud space checking in on zoom zoom quite the acceleration yesterday falling their earnings we're up at about 221 85 we started the year in zoom at about $65 not bad box at 1882 jumping around some of the tech Netflix fang stocks Microsoft Microsoft to reach the high of 185 94 yesterday looking open a bit low at the market this morning some of these tech stocks though you look at it right I mean look at this we've been hanging up near these all-time highs 185 we might as well be in this range we're up in this range towards the beginning of February you jump over to the likes of Apple Apple was a 327 similar action we're right up in this range now right up near all-time highs as the NASDAQ is Google shares not quite the same charge we got a little bit higher to go 1532 with i we were flirting above 1450 for a while you might call the higher range in Google Netflix shares been quite a juggernaut made it all the way to 458 Netflix trading right now at about 421 when I think of Netflix jumping over to Disney Disney going to open a bit lower today and we got a bit ask of under 121 but quite a charge higher yesterday for Disney put this on some short time you see the trade I mean we closed out Tuesday trading at about 118 and change we traded up almost $4 yesterday to 122 45 pairing some of those gains on Disney now some of the Disney parks excuse me some of the parks in Florida being in Florida some of those parks opening up in terms of bush gardens universal so I believe somewhere maybe June 10th middle of June Disney taking the route with their parks to wait it out until July and I said before I think what you're seeing here is Disney has a lot more at stake than just their parks so they're going to manage that they're going to make sure they do it slowly because Disney plus their movies their content their brand much bigger and much more going on than just park revenue as compared to many of the companies that just live and die off park revenue so they got to get it back on Disney 120 90 some of the ride sharing companies lift got quite a lift couple days lift talking about that they saw some big increases up huge yesterday from 31 50 up to 35 50 back and off a bit to 34 39 uber shares at about 36 35 after a pop yesterday so speaking of a pop yesterday everything charging higher on optimism about the market yesterday bowing shares start the day off in the 150s and end the day in almost the 180s bowing we can open higher again today look at that 173 we closed that yesterday you got to pop right away last night you're getting a pop probably on the airline news with american talking about expanding to 40 percent of their routes and bowing at 181 I mean we've almost doubled since those lows but at that time folks I mean bowing bowing is going to be around but it doesn't mean that it's going to be around in its card form the possibility of bankrupt we might be over that hurdle if things continue going the way they are but it was very real when bowing was at $89 and they're dealing with their 737 max on top of airlines being shut down everywhere but nonetheless we're going to open at 181 you're talking about a solid double from that 89 low stay tuned folks I'll be coming back from the break see what else we have on tap for Thursday trading of course non-farm payrolls tomorrow as we talked about and check out that s&p making it all the way almost to that 786 number of the full drive down to 2174 and we're approaching a thousand points above that level at 3100 stay tuned folks I'll be coming back right after the break I'll be back in three minutes back in the day I joined the hotel california in 2006 and like many of you was drawn in by as well as whatever you think about you bring about whatever you focus on grows you see I believe that everything in life happens for us not to us and tom ignited the fire within me to want to learn how to master the markets so how did I go from knowing nothing about technical analysis to becoming the number one market timer for the s&p 518 and the number two market timer in 2019 simply put I hired coaches with a proven track record which led me to a whole new set of tools that I created to interpret the message of buyers and sellers I would love the opportunity to teach you this award-winning set of tools and help you improve your market timing you can test drive my newsletter service mastering probabilities for the next 30 days with no risk to you plus you'll gain access to archive workshops that will take you step by step through my system sign up 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forget you can listen to tfnn live on your mobile device 24 hours per day go to tfnn.com and hit watch tiger tv that's tfnn.com and hit watch tiger tv for the latest market information folks so you have christine the guard holding a press conference for the ecb right now on the heels of their additional stimulus checking out the euro you spiked from 112 up to 112 60 above that level we pulled back a bit gold really accelerating you trade overnight from about 1700 gold charging higher on that news in the ecb as well 1723 crude oil 3668 checking back on the indices as we've pulled back a bit since I came on the air the highs at about eight a.m. we're now giving up 150 Dow points from that level of 26 100 s and p is trading at just under 30 100 the fall about 15 points off of where we were at or 10 points or so in the nasdaq 100 at 96 59 in terms of that ecb what they're putting in so the headline number buying 1.35 trillion euros that pandemic bond buying and to get into it so they're going to increase it by 600 billion euros 672 billion us the amount comes on top of the 750 billion euros that they're already doing the emergency programs help keep borrowing costs lower for the countries in the eurozone the latest decision comes after data reveal the severity of the impact of the coronavirus in europe the unemployment rate in the eurozone rose to 7.3 percent in april from 7.1 in march I imagine you're going to see that number rise higher the ecb have previously warned that the euro area economy could contract as much as 15 percent in a worse case scenario so look out for that right now how about 0.75 percent quite a number put that on a five day to see where we're at we've ticked up quite a bit recently you back it up i mean where is that on this chart here you're looking at a yield that was at about 0.65 percent on june 1st and we just ticked up to 0.75 and it's june 4th remarkable action in the dollar index trading up 97 37 currently on the dxy stay tuned folks we're gonna man larry pesavento coming up live with trade with uc i'll be back at 10 o'clock with tom we got natural gas inventories at 10 30 as well this morning s and p's right at 3100 as we speak the dow 26 thousand 115 in the nasdaq 100 down about 25 points but still right near all-time highs station folks we'll be right back larry pesavento


It's been a long long day. I got a lot to say. It feels like I'm carrying a two-ton weight. I go to see my friend. Hello, I'm Monsignor Patrick Winslow. And I am Father Matthew Cowd. And we are speaking from the Rooftop. A podcast brought to you by 10 Books, in which we invite you to join our conversation out here in the open air. Where we look out upon the world around us from the rooftop of the church and share with you what we see. Well, hello there. Greetings. Good to be with you. I know it is. It's always a delight. Self-confidence and self-delusion. They go so hand in hand, don't they? Yeah, and usually my self-confidence is unfounded. I'm reminded of that constantly. Like the time we recorded one of these sessions and I didn't turn the device on. Yeah, that was our most brilliant. It was so brilliant. It was incredible. But it's lost now. It's known only in the mind of God and hopefully he forgot it. It's like those great musicians where they say the lost tapes have been found. Yeah, that's right. The lost compositions. Yeah, well, that's us. So that'll be lost. Well, you know, I was thinking that I should let you know very recently that we made a retreat inside a prison facility. And I know you know this. Sure. Yeah. Because it took two of the seminarians along. And it was really a great experience for those who may be listening. It's a three-day event. It's very similar to like a Curcio experience where it's like three consecutive days with a series of talk, prayer, sacraments. And it's all kind of moving in a direction toward really inspiring people to take from that experience some momentum and being intentional in their faith and trying to go from there in a more earnest way. Except it's inside the facility. So you bring in, we had probably, I don't know, 25 guys or something as an outside team, maybe 20 guys as an outside team. And we had probably on the inside, I don't know, maybe 45. Okay. It's just an optional thing they can come to? Yeah. So it just, it gets promoted inside the facility. And they, because it's a sponsored event, meaning the facility has invited us in to be able to pull this off. It's all monitored, you know, you're in it. In this case, we're in a gymnasium setting, a table set up and speakers and things. And we're able to have all of our sessions there, including the sacraments and mass and confessions, all of it. But they come in at the slot of time to enter and they stay with us all day long. And they're very long days until we leave on Sunday afternoon. But it was successful. It was a wonderful experience. It's a program known as Residence and Counter Christ. And it's meant to have this effect on these men. So I'm going back this Saturday with a group of men including my dad who's flying down here just for the weekend to be able to go into the facility and reconnect with the guys. It'll be one month since we were just there. And a group of guys from the outside will try to go back every month and connect with them. And then in a year's time, we'll do the rec weekend again. And so we kind of keep it available to the population. And would the men that have been through it, should they continue where they come into the church or they just they're deep in their faith if they're already Catholic? The majority of the men were not Catholic. And we have I think about 21 who signed up for RCIA. So potentially they will be the ones assisting with the next one. That's right. So they'll come back, assuming that they're in the same facility. They would invite it back to be part of it, as well as invite it to be inside team members. How does that work? You worked in other prisons before up in New York. I remember visiting a very difficult place with you. That was a maximum facility. And how does it work relative to transfers? Do people typically stay in the same one, especially if it's a life sentence kind of a thing? It really all depends on your behavior. I mean, certainly there are going to be factors that are really not about the particular inmate about populations and having to shift. So you have a certain proportion number here versus there. But by and large, they have fairly lengthy stints at various locations. But should they have to be disciplined to a greater degree, they might go from a medium facility to a maximum. They might go from one max facility to a max A facility. You might then actually get out of a max and go down to a medium or a minimum. And oftentimes, especially in upstate New York, there are certain programs that would be available at different level facilities. And so a men would shift out of say a maximum facility because they've been working hard on conquering their addictions. And if they go to this medium or minimum facility, they have basically money through Friday, five hours a day. It's like AA work all day long for them, whether they're just doing constant type of rehab work on themselves. Yeah. So you can have these types of programs available in some of these lesser less severe facilities, because they allow for a sort of matter of freedom and be able to attend to participate. So there are those type of factors that depend on the individual, their discipline, their, their behavior, the programs that they may want or request. And then there are probably other factors that are being driven by the state itself and determining population distributions.   Yeah. Things are going to be different, et cetera. But in the main, what do you find to be the immediate reaction? So you've got, let's say, you've got 25 people that come. Obviously, there's 100 hundreds, depending on how big the place is, that shows not to come. Right. Oh, yeah. So these are people that are either looking for something to do that's not what they were doing before. And some of them are mocked for going. Yeah. Imagine so. And yet, what do you experience the sort of receptivity when you just had the gospel? You were reading the gospel this morning about the seed falling on different soils. So I would say that kind of going into it, you're going to have obviously different degrees of receptivity. We had a young man who for the past year had been kind of reading himself into the Catholic faith. And he knew even before this weekend, because he was meeting with some Catholic volunteers on a weekly basis that he wants to come into the church. And then you would have then other men who are coming and maybe they're just coming for the food, because it's an opportunity to get something other than jail food, prison food, and, hey, we're okay with that. Sure. We're not proud. We'll take whatever incentive. Maybe you hear something that will strike you. And we're really open about it. We're not upset that you came for the food. We don't feel used. We know exactly what we're getting into here. We want you to be here. We think if you come for the food, you might actually find something more, food for the soul. So I find that the men, generous speaking, are cautious. They're going to size you up quickly as to whether or not you're fraud. This is necessary for their own survival. They're going to determine, I think, very quickly whether you're trying to play them. And if they size you up in such a way that you're authentic and sincere, it makes, I mean, it makes for a whole different event. And of course, that's exactly how we come off, because we actually are being sincere. We don't have to pretend to be, and they pick up on that very quickly. That garners respect immediately. I suppose even just coming in there, there's a certain amount of respect, just because unless you're asking them for something, why in the world would you do this? Why would you intentionally go in? There's a suspicion, right? What do you get out of this? And they learn pretty quickly. I remember I was in the one in New York with you. I went to the one that you were in recently. I've been there to serve the men. And I've not done it extensively, maybe a half a dozen times in my priesthood.  I don't know if you ever felt that, but I know it's irrational. I've never felt that, but that's in large part because I'm guilty. Or maybe because I feel like I've gotten away for so long that no one's ever going to catch me. When I was in college, my dad started doing prison retreats back in the late 80s. So when I was in college, I mean, he would make us go in on the Saturday time period where outsiders like my mom could come in. So I would come in. So there was some familiarity that happened for me long before I discerned into the seminary itself. And I would see my dad kind of go in and out, in and out all the time. He was doing these rec programs in upstate New York, but he was also in between them, whether they do one or two, two a year at a facility. He was running Bible studies with them all the time. And it was a joke. I mean, my dad, we would just joke that he'd rather be in prison, you know, because he was always up there. But that's how committed and dedicated he was to the work. It goes to show you that in these types of efforts, the more you give, the more you receive, you get sucked in because of the goodness that's coming from it and the impact to be a light and darkness. Yeah. And the impact that it has on real people and to understand their situations from which they come, which are complex and difficult. And quite honestly, they evoke a certain amount of empathy. And then even, I think because of that, by the time I was a priest and was asked to be a chaplain for the facility up in New York, it was all pretty easy.  The facility that was just that, you know, more like less like that, right? It was a little more like normatories. Whereas this, where I was up in New York, was just what you saw in the Stephen King Shawshank film. It was very old world in the heart. And that would make anyone feel like maybe I'm not getting out. That said, getting back to the disposition of the guys, you know, they have, they have to live in that facility. And that is a community. It's not necessarily a community. It's a smaller world. Yeah. And they have their own norms. And it is, how should we say, not well received when you behave maybe in a Christian way. Right. You're breaking up their hierarchies.  Norms, expectations. And then all those things we consider to be a sign of weakness. And then suddenly you might be on the receiving end of some vitriol and harshness, maybe in violence. And so it's a tricky thing to talk to these men about, hey, go live your faith. Well, you know, it's not like they're going to go live their faith in town, where they have a lot of people who are living it, or, you know, they can rebound nicely. They're going back into a facility where the types of things that we're telling them are not going to be very well received. Yeah.  It's hard. Is it the case that in the internal workings of, we say this, the social structure organization that's behind the scenes sort of a thing, how organized is it in terms of the actual governance system? Like is there one guy that rises to the top? They're gangs. Typically. But even the gangs, you probably have. There's hierarchy in the gangs. And there are gangs without a doubt. And the officers are fully aware, right? This is, again, they have to deal with the population as it is. They can't pretend like it's not that way. So they know the gangs, they know the groups, and they align. And oftentimes they're aligning in ways that are bad.  But you also might align just from an ethnic way as well. Or you might align from the background or gang initiation kind of stuff. Right, to be a part of something, protection in that. But there, I mean, these men have families on the outside. And these men are deeply wounded and hurt. I have to say, in terms of the types of things that these men seem to have been there for, homicide was top on the list. And also crimes related to fentanyl. Those were there. Now, the homicide, it wasn't like cold blooded murder. It was some bad people fighting, right, that led the death to someone. It wasn't like somebody just walked into a house and started shooting people. It was probably a really seedy scene to begin with. One thing leads to another, anger overflows and someone's left. Right.  It is without a doubt. The natural consequences of that one moment of not controlling myself or not taking the drug or whatever that they might have been. Wow. And we talked, like, for example, one of the things I talked to the men about was anger. And, you know, you may not know this, but anger is a response to an injustice. Wow. I see he's still reading his St. Thomas. This is good. People don't understand the humor there. That's because he's a Thomistic theologian. So the sort of, Thomism 101 is understanding that anger is a response to an injustice. Real or perceived. Real or perceived, is correct. Right. So being a choleric, I perceive anything as an injustice. And I am constantly on the end of that. I ask myself, why do I always have so many choleric friends? I don't know what I do. I don't know. Because choleric friends can't be friends with a choleric very easily. Well, I must be, I must gravitate toward them too. Yeah, but you're sort of, you get the sanguine thing going, right? So it's nice for a color to be around someone who's more sanguine. Oh, yeah. Well, that's true. Or more phlegmatic. It's kind of like putting, you know, chili pepper into something just for like a light kick. You know, you kind of need that complexity, you know, the little bit of heat to bring body to the thing. Yep. So we had a touch of gober and it's like tofu. A touch of gober. It's like tofu. It just picks up the flavor that's around, kind of goes with it. So, you know, I'm, yeah, I get it. All right. So going back to this point, I talked to the guys about anger as being a response to an injustice or perceived injustice and talked about how anger isn't necessarily sinful if it's a true injustice and it's proportionate. Then we started talking about different ways in which we can perceive injustices and become disproportionate in our reactions. You could see, you know, these guys really internalizing because a lot of their circumstances when the passion ran a monk, you know, and the anger became very inflated, extremely disproportionate, and either somebody died or somebody got hurt and it led them into the, you know, and that's that kind of idea of, if I could go back and maybe I was responding to a genuine injustice, but it should have been proportionate. Proportionate. And that's what's so hard about anger and why we need it because it's, if it's a response to an injustice, you know, your body is modifying itself based upon the apprehension, right? So you get the adrenaline, you know, your heart beats fast and You can feel it. the old ideas you see read because you, in those moments, you typically can't think well. That's why the old adage, count to 10, walk away, do whatever, because your body is so taking over that it sort of clouds your intellect at the moment. I noticed this in particular, whenever people get angry, they go to their easiest language. Remember how people will say in the old days, did you learn Italian from your grandparents growing up or your parents or whatever the language was? Like, no, just the cuss words. Because when they got angry, you revert to the thing that you don't have to use reason for. And I noticed that in Italian, so whenever I would get angry in Italy, I would just, I'd start saying something to someone in English and then I realized I was speaking. It's true. It's a good point because it slides out more easily, requires less reason. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just, it's a difficult passion to wield. I mean, our Lord obviously, we talk about our Lord is not having the passions as passions. The reason we call them passions, today we call them emotions. But for St. Thomas, you call them passions because that we're passio, right? It's something that we suffer. Something happens to us. Like we apprehend something, like let's say you see someone mistreating your mom, right? You're going to get angry. You apprehended something and then something happens to you inside that you don't get to control perfectly. You can't control the emotional reaction to it. You suffer it and you've got to guide it and hone it, shape it, but you can't control the fact that you're having the reaction. That's just happening to you. And that's where you need the cognitive faculty. That's where you need the cognitive faculty, you know, majorly to give you direction. And to do what your passions are blind in that sense, right? Right. Yeah.  And with a lot of these men, they were burying out tommism because whether they realized it or not, the circumstance in which they found themselves was that the passion overwhelmed their cognitive faculties and somebody ends up dead or seriously wounded and you end up in prison and your family ends up feeling an enormous amount of pain for your absence. And this is a massive consequence for a moment for everybody involved. Can you imagine having all the emotions? Because we're made to have emotions, passions. Can you imagine having them all under the order of reason, like all at your beck and call? Isn't that amazing? So, as I said, our Lord didn't sort of the idea behind the Medieval is that the Lord did not have the passions. He had the emotions, but he employed them. So like when he wants the assistance of anger to drive the money chains out of the temple, he has the perfectly proportionate amount of anger to the situation. And it's never out of control of his own reason and will. And I think that for a choleric, just saying as a choleric, one of the reasons as I get older that I find myself getting a bit more phlegmatic is because you get tired of destroying things. Like you get angry and yes, you get a lot of things done, you get people hopping, you get things moving, but you leave a lot of wreckage behind. And you realize that if I just slowed down a bit, I need the anger, it's an injustice, but if I would just slow down a bit, I wouldn't have to go back and fix things. I just want to go on the record. What? I forgive you. Thank you. This is a public apology. I interpreted that way. Well, let me ask a follow up question for that. Just because it's an area I don't really work in a lot, but what do you make of the difficulty that these men that have entered into a new social situation, they're forced into it. They might not have any hope of ever getting out. So eventually, you adjust.  This isn't living on the outside anymore. This is my new reality. And you do watch people that get educated sometimes. They do amazing things, conversions, et cetera. We even got a saint that lived his life after committing murder in a hot moment. Yeah, exactly. Turned out to be an amazing saint. Yeah. I think it was guillotined in the end. Yeah. I think so too. Jacques. Yeah, I just read something about him the other day. It was fascinating. Jacques, something. But of course it's Jacques. That's what every Frenchman says. Jacques, right? It's true. It was one of these cases where he genuinely stole bread for his hungry family. Yeah, it was something like Jean Valjean. Exactly. It was one of those situations. And so when they get out, if they get out, it seems to be so hard for them to stay out. I was working with police when I was in Franklin, kind of the ride-along chaplain deal. And so many of the men that these cops that I was working with had put away, they would get notifications when they'd be released from prison because they're just going to go right back in. And so they would just go look for them because they're going to do things to get back in because it would find it difficult to live back in the world. There was no change. Or they just can't function anymore outside. Did you talk to any of them about that? Well, this goes back to the... Repeat offenders or...? Well, you don't really have to talk about it because it's so obvious that the root causes remain. So if one of the root causes is a drug addiction, well, guess what? If drug addiction landed you in prison the first time, it's probably going to land you in prison the next time and the next and the next. If your root cause is an uncontrolled anger and you keep putting yourself into situations where that is going to be sparked left and right, guess what? The outcomes are not going to be any different. And sometimes what can happen is the experience of prison can work against you. It can make you more hardened or it can make you more weak in a given area. So having opportunities for these men to be able to say, hey, wait a minute, here's something for my hard circumstance and my hard situation. Again, they did bad things to people. There's no question about it. And to be quite honest, rare is the inmate that's going to tell you they didn't. They might tell you why they felt justified in the moment or maybe they feel like there was a little eye for an eye. But they're not going to say that they didn't cause harm, at least not the ones that come to our program. But I think that the difference between somebody going out and staying out has to do with change. It's interior change. And that's really what we're trying to speak to. And you know what's interesting? To give St. Thomas even more props as though he needs them for me. As I talk to them just about this simple issue of anger, and disproportion, anger, and we flesh things out more and more, you could see as well as they reflected back to me afterward, how it was that they could go back with that understanding and maybe answer some questions as how they ended up where they did. And they were been looking for answers.  But that's a part of it. You're looking for conversion. But they need to understand what is wrong. They need to understand the mechanics of what happened. And when you say, hey look, your cognitive faculties, that your intellectual will, are supposed to be ruling the roost here, and your passion is just exploded. And nobody, when you have a firebomb of anger go off, it's not going to be pretty for anyone. You've not had the formation to curtail any of that, just the opposite. And they've had no understanding of their own inner working. And if they had a little bit of this rational psychology of talk about what's going on, they might have a greater fighting chance. Not the least of which of course is dealing with drug addictions and drug problems and alcohol addictions and alcohol problems, and general family dysfunctions and things that lead to, as we might say, core wounds, profound wounds that cause a desire for need, for self exuding, as well as maybe even a type of rebellion. So you have all those things kind of going on. But they need real answers because they have to get out of this hole that they're in. Right, the spiral. They need real answers. That's kind of a hell. It is. And so when they see a light and you're saying something that sparks something true, and they're grabbing onto that, and they are assimilating this because they are trying to find their way. They're also trying to understand how they got there. You take that with an experience of, yes, we love and care about you. We know you did bad things. And we also love and care about the people that got hurt. Right, but we're here for you now. And but that's not enough. Well, imagine you, especially when you're going back to think about just one spot in time. And you're trying to make sense of that one spot in time that completely altered the trajectory of the rest of your life. You know, I think about the great book by C.S. Lewis, no pun intended, The Great Divorce. And in The Great Divorce, there's this place called Gray Town, which is either the sort of anti-chamber of purgatory or it's just permanent hell.  You can imagine it and you get it. But you get it and that none of it's actually real and you know it's not real, which makes it that much more of a hell. It's a projection of your own mind.  They can't see each other. They can't see each other. And yet they want communion. They were tormented by their desire. There's this image of Napoleon that they went out to go see, thinking that he'd be a really interesting individual to talk to these people that are in hell. And so they take the thousand year trek to go find him and he's just walking back and forth in this palace of Versailles that he's imagining that's sort of existent but not existent except in his mind. And he's walking back and forth saying it was Josephine's fault. It was the general so-and-so's fault. Stuck in the moment. He's stuck on that same moment of the loss of the Russian front. And that's where I could see these guys getting without the light of the gospel and the teaching of the saints, the doctors, the church to say, this is who you are and this is why this happened. And here's how to get out.  Right. And that's where it happens to me. It's an interior journey. You know, and I encourage them when they go back and say, look, do not lay out this big program in your in your mind about what you're going to do exteriorly. It's don't start there. Yeah. Start inside. Start on your interior. And start inside there, lay some roots and then look for strategic moments for that to have expression.  That's a good way to put it. But if you just start with a branch that has no roots and I think it's shot down, you're back to where you started. Yeah. Nothing good. No real change occurred. Which is us on the outside have this difficulty, right? That instead of changing something interiorly that we need to change to be able to get out of our personal little prisons and vices that we're stuck with and the spiraling mental cliffs that we go over, we can change our external environment constantly. Right. So it's never to deal with the interior life. Right. Just keep changing it externally, get a new plan externally, do something else externally. And as the saints say, it's one of the greatest forms of that sin we call sloth or achadia because it's this sort of constant frenetic movement like Napoleon. And it's also delusional in the sense that it allows you to maintain an illusion. Yeah. That you're making progress or you're, yes, exactly. As long as you post it. If you don't post it with a peace sign, it didn't really exist. Yes. Always post your delusions. So, well, you know. I was, I gotta say, the funniest thing about these sort of, everyone posting their pick of this, that or the other. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of those. Not the one they're taking a photo, of course. Right. But like take a picture of this for me or whatever else. Right. And you get to see the before and after. And the photo looks great. The reality before and after.  Exactly. For you especially. Yeah, I get it. Then you have to live with that. Everyone is staging a moment. Then you have to live with that saying that's not really my life. Yeah, that's not really my life. You know, it kind of reminds me and are we? Yeah. Okay, so this is kind of be my last thing. Okay. All right. Before we go. Before we go. So it all reminds me of phenol. Of what? Phenol. Okay. It's a chemical. Yeah, I don't believe in chemicals. I believe in the angels. That's a whole other podcast, isn't it? So when I was in an undergraduate chemistry lab, we were... Oh no, here we go. We were using a chemical. This is going to be a... Strap it in. No. Put your feet up, people. No, no. This is a good one. So we were using a chemical called phenol. Now, you know, college kids, we're not real keen on reading all the warnings. Yeah. You're just kind of like, what do I need to do when you dive into it? So somewhere in this middle of this three hour lab, where there's small quantities, but nonetheless quantities of phenol involved, the professor just announced, make sure that you read all these materials regarding safety, especially when handling a phenol. He said, because it will burn your skin. However, you should know that the first thing it does is dead in the nerve ending.  How deceptive of a chemical is that? And we all looked down, half of us had blisters on our fingers, because that's it. And you realize in that moment, I wish I had had pain. Oh, this is a great topic. Maybe we should do it for the next one. This is a great topic. I wish I had had pain. It would have worn me. Yes, it would have worn me. And I would have been able to wash it off. This is a great, great... Kind of that whole idea of just leaving on the surface of things and keeping ourselves so preoccupied and busy that we're numb and we're not allowing ourselves to experience, maybe some pain that needs to be experienced, to look into some areas that need looking that are otherwise challenging to us. And it allows us to kind of circle around them or avoid them or skate above them. But it's a bit like that analogy of phenol. See, it wasn't that bad, right? No, it was real. It was a good chemistry lesson. Usually when we do, before we go, it's something like... Life-hearted. Food. No, I wanted to get this in because it was really in the previous topic. No, it's great. But let's bookmark that because, you know, I think I might have mentioned this in the previous episode, but even St. Thomas says this great line I found in the sentences once, where he says that, God is the author of pain. We don't want to say that because we think the pain of sin, which is not the author, we're the author of that one. But actual pain, of course, is the author. That's why you have endings on your tips of your fingers and your endings, etc. You need a certain modicum of pain to live in a world where you're going to bounce off against things. Feedback. You need feedback in a physical, real world. And tuning it out doesn't not make it go away. Things get worse. Yeah, awesome. So what's your... Before we go on... Well, I learned something today, and I'm dealing with the new building work that we're putting up soon, the chapel and all the other environments, etc. All these... How much you complicate my life? Yeah, I do. That's one thing. It's a complicated process, but I'm in the phase now. We're moving into construction documents soon, which means that there's just a meeting every single day about something. And today we were dealing with some HVAC problems. For those of you listening, HVAC means like air conditioning and heating. Yeah. So... I think most homeowners probably know what that means. Well, I never heard the word HVAC.  No, no. We didn't even wear home-made braces. Wait, wait, wait. We had like boilers and... That's true. You were up there. You know, up in the Northeast, like we didn't have HVAC. Geothermal is really cool. I won't be able to afford it. It's like four times the cost of normal HVAC. But basically it's a massive radiator underneath your land. So instead of putting the water into small coils, right, and changing the temperature. You're heating the floor. Yeah, but so... The building itself. Yes. Well, not just the floor, right? You can, even air conditioning.  Soil is kept at a cool temperature. It's hot outside. Warm when it's cold outside. And so you're just... You're putting it through coils in the ground that they put in. Oh, so you're cooling... You're cooling in the summer time you're cooling it. In the winter time you're warming it because it's warmer than the ambient air. So you spend very little. It's massively expensive to put in. To itself because it measures quite a lot of linear feet. Oh, it is. But it's really, really a cool idea. Plus you don't have these big units hanging out everywhere. If you spring a leak. Yeah, I was talking about that. But I just thought it was so cool that someone looked at a radiator or whatever the normal process is by which this stuff happens. Let's use the earth for that. Let's just use the earth for that. That's cool. Yeah, it is. I wish I could do it. So if you would just provide me with that extra cash, we're going to go geothermal and be very green. Are you talking to someone at the end of this? You. Someone out in the background. No, I'm talking to the vicar general right here. Yeah. So it's time to go. God bless you all. Oh, yes. God bless you all. Ciao now. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of From the Rooftop. For updates about new episodes, special guests, and exclusive deals for From the Rooftop listeners, sign up at rooftoppodcast.com. And remember, for more great ways to deepen your faith, check out all the spiritual resources available at tanbooks.com. And we'll see you again next time. From the Rooftop.


on this computer. Hello and welcome to Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, January 8th, 2023. I'm Larry Rhodes or DJ Douter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host DJ Wombat. Hello, Wombat. Hey, I'm the Wombat. Hey everybody. Today's guest is Dred Pirate Higgs from Canada. Welcome. 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 religion, religious faith. God's holy books that are superstitious. If you get the feeling you're the only non-believer in your town, well, you're just not. In Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, I'm hearing an echo. We have a group of over a thousand of us, the Atheist Society of Knoxville or ASK. And we'll tell you more about them after the mid-show breaks. So be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? Just Let Us Wear Hats. Just Let Us Wear Hats is the theme of today's show.  But before we go into that spicy sauce, let's throw up some spaghetti on the wall and lead us, if you will, in our daily or weekly invocation. Sure. Our noodley Lord, who art in a calendar, I'll daunte be thy noodles, thy blood be run, thy sauce be yum with meat, as it is with vegetables. Give us this day our garlic bread, and forgive us our cussing, as we forgive those who cuss against us. And lead us not into ketoism, but deliver us some carbs, for thine are the meatballs, and the sauces, and the grog, whatever and ever. Amen. Guys, I just got the holy hang grenade. I want to be able to do the invocations in sign language as Dred is doing them in English. Just for fun. See if I can pull that off. Maybe try that in the future. Larry, love to catch up with you.  Star Citizen. Oh, I use the word plain loosely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got the bare minimum of RAM, which is 16 megs. Okay. Sorry. So it's a little choppy, a little slow. It's taking a while to get going. It takes almost a half an hour to load. Well, don't worry. It only took 23 years for him to get it developed. It's still in it. Yeah, and $500 million. So yeah, it's an interesting test. But I'm enjoying it so far. From a person who's played Eve and gotten pretty deep into it, are you feeling the similar vibes from Star Citizen? Like, do you feel like this could be the next thing? Well, the biggest difference between Eve and Star Citizen is the first person. You get to actually roam around inside the ship. You can get off the ship on any other planet. You can go into cities. You can go into forests. You can do hand-to-hand or first person combat. It covers pretty much everything. It has huge planets that you can just roam around on. And it's like a true space life job, Sim. Like, you're not there to save the universe from an alien threat.   You can do that, but if you have a bigger ship with multiple turrets, you have to have people on those turrets. Real live people on the turret. On the ship, manning the turret. So, the battles get really intense and interesting. But enough of that. Okay, very, very cool. Very cool, guys. I do have a question about it though. Is it like a subscription thing you got to pay for? Yeah, it's about $40 for the software and $10 a month. But I figured I'd try it for a few months and see if I like it. And it's called what? Starship Citizens? Star Citizen. Star Citizen. Yeah, we are in the age of games that start with the word star and deal with space. But if you like, Larry, if you like that, if you like that game, there's another game by Bethesda coming out. I imagine maybe this year or next year called Star Child, which is the exact same premise. Exact same premise, but it has less resource requirements. Less resource requirements, no doubt. You can probably play it on most consoles and I would imagine if you need a streamlined version of like Eve, not as in-depth or complicated or less person intensive as Star Citizen, Star Child might be the one for you. So you at least have these gradient. And then if you don't even like that, there's another game called No Man's Sky, which in my opinion, it's everything you just subscribed, but solo and multiplayer, they just keep adding more stuff to it. It's really cool. It's a really good game. On my end, I just made a new song. I feel good about it. There used to be a time period where when I was making music, it would take me like four hours to make a brand new song and I'd pop it out on the internet and everyone would have a laugh at it and I'd have fun. And I'd get my creative pieces going. But over time, I'm taking the audio engineering aspect of it more seriously. And I'm realizing that there's a whole wealth of like tools that people use to make music sound good. That isn't just how well you can play an instrument. It's like compression, EQ, chain compressions, verbs, reverbs, echo, delays, gains, so many gates. There's so many things, so many terms. And when you like get into it, there's this like really nice community of people will help you listen to music and understand how to properly pin everything, how to properly pitch everything. Where is the peaks coming from and how to fix them appropriately so that the next time you make another song, it already sounds like studio stereo quality, but you're just made in your own bedroom. It feels really, really good to get better at that. And because of that, and that's the next thing that I'm learning out of place. When people say like, what's your favorite instrument? It's like my computer. But yeah, the last song I made was the ultimate of it. Let me see if I can fix my idea as I was talking about that story and tell you guys one last thing. I have made it six months my way last journey. I am now been maintaining my weight perfectly. I feel good. I have no fear of like going back up to the big weight that I was beforehand. Very good. I just feel good. It's feel good just maintaining and realizing that I can't maintain. And if anyone has questions on how they can be good at taking care of themselves and losing weight in the fight the healthy way that doesn't require them to subscribe to a dogma of like Judaism or Akins or God or whatever. Just like basic calorie deficit, you can start up Excel spreadsheet on your own. Count how much you take in, count how much you burn. Make sure you're at a deficit. That's it. And just keep it nice and simple. And you can do that on your own. You don't need a 14-week course. You don't need a guru. You don't need help. You can do it on your own. It was just the best thing. Yeah, bottom line tie I think is output must always exceed input. That's it. That's it. That's it. And if you want to eat more workout more, like it's literally that simple. Like it's the best thing ever. And when you do that, you feel empowered because you know you did it. Not someone else or trainer or program. It was you. It was you 10,000%. That makes me feel good. I feel like we give a lot of credit to God when we can really just give those credits to ourselves and realize that we have the power to have them that we want here on this earth. So, speaking of other things that deal with kicking God out of situations.  Wow, that's a really good segue. You can't wear that hat in this podcast. I'm sorry. Not unless you're Hindu or Sikh. I'm sorry. Well, so that's right. I should have been listening when I was talking. No, it's okay. I'm just saying you're not allowed to wear that hat in this show unless if you have a proper identification that you genuinely believe in your God or that you were a Sikh or Hindu, I'm sorry. Or can prove it. Well, yes, as you know, the battle is ongoing. And certainly my latest letter to the manager there of driver's licensing integrity and oversight at ICBC is a little sharp. And I've just, you know, trying to be polite and courteous and all the rest of it doesn't seem to achieve anything. So essentially making a threat to civil action is where I've had to take it. So but yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's ongoing. And of course, the drivers, you know, drivers licensing the branch there of ICBC, which is the insurance corporation of British Columbia said that they were not going to give me service, wrote a letter to my local driver's licensing branch to say use some service if he dares to wear his colander or his tricorn in an attempt to get his driver's license. Let's take a step back. Let's just take a step back and explain the situation for everyone who's coming. Well, let's first of all see if we can get rid of that echo. I hear everything that dreads saying twice and I'm afraid it's going to go out like yeah, I was hearing that too. And I haven't changed my setup at all. You don't have speakers going? I'll be honest, I don't hear any echo on my side. Okay, then go ahead. Let's see if it comes through on the recording. Okay, so the story behind this is if you hadn't know it as dread is wearing a tricorn hat. What do those look like? It's like a pirate hat with the three sides to it's like a triangle.  Fantastic flying spaghetti monsters. So it's not an analogy. It is a pirate hat. It is what it is. And that's right. And the cool thing about it is I can completely see dreads face. I have no issue recognizing him from because if he was wearing a turban, the exact same amount of this face would still be exposed. And so what's interesting in a lot of states in America, I would imagine all of them and also in Canada, which is a bit more surprising considering I was hoping that they'd be more liberal on this idea or more progressive is better term is that they have a rule that says you can wear a head garb if you are particular, if you are religious. However, they also over stipulated to say these are the approved religions that you're allowed to wear head garbs for. And that's the line that I find to be troubling because it's not up to the government to decide which religions get special credit or access to certain things and which ones don't. It's a very dangerous precedent to set. So in dreads case, he's wearing a hat where I can see his face and a Hindu might be wearing a turban where I can also see his face, yet the turban gets to wear his religious head garb when he goes to take his driver's license and dread cannot. And that is offensive to me because it is special choosing by the government based on religion when they shouldn't have one, the authority to do that. And to any care because they're just a company that sends out plastic cards so you can drive and do exactly what is their concern? What's the major harm? Why are we investing our tax services? Not me particularly, but you dread in this safeguard. Like what is this help? Who does this help other than marginalized groups of people who are on a particular list? That's the part that really offends me. So, Dred, you've actually consistently been going to the driver's license board or places to get your licenses.  I imagine there's a firearm private detective. Could you might talk about it? Yeah, absolutely. So I currently have my Canadian firearms possession acquisition license, which is issued of course by the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And so that uses what is called facial recognition technology. And of course, facial recognition technology meets a standard now internationally. So where headgear does not interfere with facial recognition technology, it's considered irrelevant. That is the case of course with Sikhs and Hindus who wear turbans and Muslims. I know some Muslims wear turbans. But what is interesting in this case is the pretense that ICBC makes this accommodation for those whose religions prohibit them from removing their headgear. Now as we all know, religion is a choice, except perhaps if you're a woman. And that I see as really the only people who are prohibitive from removing their headgear, as we can see from instances of murder in Iran recently. Right. And of course, the same thing has actually happened in Canada where a woman was murdered by her brother and her father taking off her jab and using to wear it. I think this is back in 2012.  Right. And then exclude everyone else that can't demonstrate the same thing. On another idea, like you don't do a driver's license once a year. I imagine it's like once every five years.   So there's no real litmus test on while he genuinely believes it and he's a Sikh. It's like, no, you can just be brown and get away with it. Well, that wasn't actually a point I made as well to them to say, you know, there are people who would do just that in order to fit in with their, with their, you know, social circles or their cultural heritage, you know, there's nothing to say that a person, and in fact, recently, one of our Pastafarian crew showed me a photograph of a license that a person used for ID, where it was, he was a brown man, and he was wearing a black tube and to emblem, you know, emblematic of being a Sikh. But apparently, either he didn't have his turban with him, or, or just like the look, you know, but it wasn't question at the time. So like, it seems, it seems a fairly arbitrary application of a very ill-formed policy. Dred, you could walk into the, not saying you should, but I'm saying you could technically walk into the driver's license board with a yarmulke on and no one would bat an eye. If you don't know on the radio, Dred, while blazing in the Canadian sun, I imagine, is, could be passable as a Western Jew, more or less, you can wear a yarmulke and people will be like, oh, that's fine, go on ahead, just have fun and take your picture and walk out and be like, one, I'm not Jewish, two, I don't believe in this God, and three, you let me clearly wear religious garbs if, whether I believe in it or not, you still let me wear this one, but you won't let me wear the one for the God I actually do believe in. What is your malfunction? Stuff like that. And so, what I really appreciate what you're doing is that you are stirring pot and helping people recognize that the, the idea that religious injustice occurring is not just something that's conceptual or something that atheists make up, it's institutionalized, it's ingrained in our society, it's held by authoritarian figures, it's mandated in laws, and it's something that is clearly explicit that we can point out and demonstrate through practice, and it's still ongoing because the, the other, the alternative is for the, the group that has the advantage to give up some of that advantage in the favor of treating people like more humanely. And I feel, well said, such crazy thing. One thing I'd also like to point out too is, is like, when we do the global atheist news, many of the points are taken from Iran and Indonesia and all these pot beds of religious discord and activity, where we have to recognize that violence is not only physical inform that it could be psychological violence, you know, which is of course the kind of a violence that's, you know, practiced by, you know, Catholic priests on altar boys, or by priests on residential school children, by taking away their culture and their language in favor of whatever the religious belief of the, of the residential school facility is. And of course on women, you know, women in different cultures and in different parts of the world, but certainly in Canada, you know, we're not seeing all this, you know, rioting and whatnot that you see in Iran. Right. But it doesn't mean that the same things aren't happening here. Right. Correct. Just not making the international news because it's not 50 people, it's one. Well, I would argue that one woman being killed by her brother and husband or brother and father for not wearing a piece of clothing in accordance with some religious tenant is an outrage in equal power and proportion to 50 or 100 or 1000 people being killed for the same reason. So two points. One, the injustices that are going on overseas are in tandem going on here, just under different brands. And the reason why they aren't in media news, my opinion, here's some opinionated news is because news is entertainment on television primarily. And people don't like being challenged often. They rather just be entertained. And what's entertaining is to say the bad guys are over there and there's a whole ocean separating us. Let's feel good about ourselves here by looking at the bad stuff way, way, way over there. And when you ever turn that vision on us and show like the January 6th right or insurrection, the events or the institutionalized racism or or protests that are going on, or the stuff that you are going through. One, if they did that more, you would realize you're not the only person who's feeling that way because I can tell you there's a lot of times where I feel like marginalized and I feel like am I the only one it's no. And when the protests are happening, it made me feel like, oh my gosh, there's other people who I finally feel the same way I do. We can collaborate and figure this out. But when you are the only one who you can see who's experiencing this, that this empowers you as well. And I feel like that's part of the the agenda as well. It's like we don't want to give too much attention to Dread Pirate's problem because then other people who have this similar problem might band up and be like, Hey, this is a problem. Well, you know, I've been at this for six years. Yeah. And you know, I know there's lots of people and you know, most of the certainly the vocal ones, the comments I hear are, what's the matter with this guy like me, right?   It's such a trivial thing. Yeah. And that is really part of the part of the point is that it's not as trivial as everyone might think. Right. When the boots not on your neck. Institutionalized bigotry is institutionalized bigotry. Right. No matter what form it takes, it's it is what it is. And it has to stop. And that's what I stand for. When the boots not on your neck, it's just a shoe. So why would you care about it? Right. Right. That's right. It's footwear. Yeah. But it's like it's the same thing. It's location, location, location. Once you put that on your neck, it becomes a thing that you want other people to pay attention to. And you'll do anything to get it off of it. Larry, what do you think? Well, I was kind of wondering, I don't know the Constitution or the laws in Canada. Excuse me, where'd you at this from? But do you have anything like no religious tests for office or no religious test for anything? I mean, is that codified? It is. And in fact, it's enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms updated in 1984, Section 2A and 2B. And that's right there under number one. You know, it says the right to religious belief or lack of belief and the right to religious expression. Okay. So therefore, the government should not be in a position or put itself in a position to dictate whether you believe or not or test you whether you do or not. Right. Yeah. Well, and this was part of the point I had tried to make even with human rights tribunal, who said, well, they don't argue cases of constitutional law and or charter. They don't make charter arguments. And it was like, well, but you're supporting the BC Human Rights Code, which is the child of that charter.  Wow. And that's exactly what they do. That's exactly what they do. One of the problems of religion is that they tend to dehumanize their enemy so that they can then persecute or sideline them and give them limit the rights. And the craziest thing is once they have those privileges that they've taken away from other people, it's not like they share them equivalently with their followers.  But what does anyone else get from that other than the people in power continuing to marginalize others and feeling more ingrained to be able to take that power away from other people? Like that offers nothing beneficial to society. And the saddest thing is, is you are documenting this in such a way that in my opinion, and you're in your in your candor with the government bodies are so responsible and intelligent and well spoken and well said and just clearly outlined with all your problems that you would think for just one instance, you just have a person who sees and it'd be like, right, OK, you can take a hat come in on seven o'clock. We'll take a picture of you with a hat on. It's OK. It's no big deal. But instead, they're like, well, I have also read the laws and and then they just start spouting off other nonsense. What I would love to see you do is make those just like a YouTube video of just the letters that you're getting and just document this for history's sake, tag it all with your Pasifarian keywords. That way, you know, other people looking up can find it. It makes me really, really sad when I have to see history in motion. But I feel like this is one of those events. This is one of the things where it's here's clearly the side of good. Here's clearly the side of corruption. Keep fighting. Keep going. This will support you. I think when we come back after the second break, we'll talk about what it looked like ideally when you get everything you want. And you'd be surprised. It's not that much. Great. And it actually helped everybody. But Larry, why don't you take us out? Sure. This is the digital Freethought Radio R. Stay tuned for the second half coming up after this break on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Hello and welcome back to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour, second half of the show. I'm Dodder Five and we're on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPFM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's take just a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 21st year and we have over a thousand members. We have weekly in-person meetings every Tuesday evening. Look for us at Knoxville's Old City at Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria. We're inside at the high-top tables or if it's a really pretty day, we'll be out on the deck. We also have a Tuesday evening Zoom ASK meeting. And if you'd like to join us, email us for details at askanatheist at Knoxvilleatheist.org or let's chat SE at gmail.com. You can find us online at meetup.com, Knoxvilleatheist.org or just Google Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. We'll come up. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to Meetup and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. One bet where you want to pick up. So we were talking about the injustice that occurs, not just overseas and not just with jobs, but within the, I would say, not continental to the United States, but America in general, because Canada is still America, whether they like it or not. And it's happening here. It's happening here. And while they say, hey, listen, you guys have to wear this religious credit scarf or this to get certain rights in the U.S., we're doing the exact same thing, too, to our own or in the America in general. And I feel like Dred Pirate, while your story isn't as popular, it's just as concerning. And when I see that happening and being promoted by, in writing by government bodies, it's just one of the scary things where I think back to the license plate situation that's happened here in the U.S., where if you are not religious, your license plate starts with three letters. And if you are religious, your license plate starts with three numbers. And now you can just drive down the street and be like, oh my gosh, this is a rule. You don't know about that? That's not a thing. That's not a thing. That's a real thing. That's a real thing here in Tennessee. That's the thing in Tennessee. So if you are secular, your license plate starts with letters. If you're religious, your license plate starts with numbers. And it's as clear. You can see it from 50 yards away. And you're just like, why did we make this a thing? This is such a bizarre situation. And I don't end the end top of that would be like, well, if your license plate starts with numbers and you're religious, you get to drive five miles faster. Like that would be the sort of insanity that would be really difficult. Yeah. Well, Judd's probably wondering, how do they know if you're religious? You get to choose when you buy your plate, whether you want to in God, we trust on it. And if you put, yes, I want to God, we trust, then it starts with numbers. If you choose not to, then it starts with letters, which makes it, you make sure wonder why would they do that? That your car would be, you'd be able to pick out the non-religious people at a distance of 50 yards. All right. That's insane. I did not know that. Yeah, I'm going to add some more granularity. That's not everywhere. That's just in certain states. It's in Tennessee. At least in Tennessee. Yeah. I don't know about any other states right now. So I would say this, here's some more granularity. The state official license plate starts with letters. That is the default option. However, when you sign up for a license plate, you can select a vanity plate that looks like a mock of the issue one at no extra cost and it's advertised on the form. And so it's an option for you that's handed out. There's a lot of vanity plates that you can get like autism, supporting hunting, cancer awareness, but you have to pay for those. What the state does is offer a free religious vanity plate, but it does not have the standardized template for format. Exactly. Format for letters and numbers. What they did is just swap them and they look so similar that they look like state issued. And so what happens is a lot of people pick the vanity plate that's the Christian version of the state version of their plate and then they put it up. And so you have a bunch of vanity plates that look like state plates and then you have just standard state plates. And some of the state plates that are non-religious, those people are in fact religious. They just don't want the state to be supportive of their religion. They just want to either have a bumper sticker or, you know, keep the status neat. A little fish. Exactly. Whereas every single one that's religious, that's a religious person. So what else can you say about it? Well, you could say that there might be non-religious people who haven't come out of the closet, having about the pressure from their family, their society, the church, whatever, because they don't want to stand up for it or their workplace and face the discrimination. And here's the bizarre thing. So I love taking numbers. We had a Bujo on last episode. He was a PhD in civil engineering. He loved this. I was talking about with him. I looked at every single county and we looked at the percentage of religious plates to non-religious plates. And of course, it's not a surprising trend. The more rule and smaller the county, the higher the percentage of religious plates.  Just when you push people into more prosperity, more prosperity, you're going to find that they aren't as religious. That's a very telling kind of crutch. It's harder to have in and out groups in a urban setting. In a rural setting, people gravitate because they've studied the township or the county or whatever and discovered, you know, wow, that's mainly Catholic or there's a Baptist county or whatever, so they can gravitate there. Whereas the city is pretty hard to do that. Right. And so the counties that have less than 10,000 people, counties, not cities, counties that have less than 10,000 people, they're like 99% religious. But like the ones that have over half a million people or 700,000 people like Davidson County, where Nashville is located, huge counties that have hundreds of times more people, 13% religious plates. Right. When we were doing the math, we found that a starling large number of people in Tennessee are, in fact, using the state issued non-religious plates just by default, just by pure number alone, it's staggeringly high. It's like 20% are total are religious people. Everything else is non-religious. And that's Tennessee. Yet Tennessee is just through gerrymandering, very, very conservative. And I'm like, okay, well, this is a mind blowing propagation, then, because we have so many people here who are at least would be willing to understand concerns from a secular point of view and think and prosper and promote science. Yet we've staggered or stacked the deck so much against them politically that we are still in a red state. However, we are leaking. We are very much leaking out. And like all the large counties are leaking out into these smaller ones, or whenever small counties can't support themselves, and they have to commute into the larger communities to like get jobs or whatever for like the next generation, they come back home, they suddenly become less liberal as a result of the fact that family members are seeing the light and getting outside of their own neighborhoods, too. So I don't expect the trend that we're on to go backwards. If anything, we're going to just continue to go forward. And my big concern from last episode was we are pushing ourselves towards, in my opinion, the next enlightenment, where we recognize that we don't need to have this religious crutch supporting ourselves as we continue to appreciate and better understand science and be able to have better access to higher qualities of information and explanatory systems. And I'm hoping that gives us better empathy for your situation as well, too. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, you know, and I've said this, I think a number of times is where it almost seems that the religious right are kind of doing that last gas before they start to go under. Because the writing is clearly on the wall that religious affiliation is on the decline. And throughout, as you say, America, Canada and the United States, both in Mexico, I'm sure, I don't know, maybe. But I was going to say, because you had mentioned about my security license, and that recently, while last year already by now, I had changed my designation, I included the private investigator designation. And that's what you have to, of course, change your card. So they give you an opportunity to upload a new photo. And of course, the photo I uploaded was one depicting me in my tricorn. And it was accepted and I was issued a card with my photo depicting me in my tricorn. Yeah. And it was three months later, I got a letter not from some staff or some underling, but from the highest authority, the registrar of that ministry, who said, you either give it back, or we're going to review your license, which of course is government speak for take it away and screw you over essentially. And so I had to submit that particular instance now is before the BC ombuds person, the office there, because again, I document everything. So it's so very clear that I've gone through all the steps in order to argue my point that the last person to whom I could actually make a complaint was the registrar. And it was the registrar himself through that old trickle down effect that was the source of the whole discrimination in the first place. So the ombuds person's office has taken on the case there, of course, in a backlog. So it's been a while since I've had any communication, but there, you know, they are assigning an investigative team to it. With respect to the ICBC stuff, I, as you may know, and as I pointed out in my video, that I had obtained, I asked for made an FY request for you of information request, and had returned to me 691 pages of mostly redacted inter-office email. And so the point, of course, I make is that, you know, you can say that you're trying to accommodate people of religious belief who are prohibited from removing the egg gear, yet the policy itself, you won't share with me. And the things that go to inform the policy are sealed behind redacted documents. Right, right, right. So, of course, I'm protecting other bigots so they can continue. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, that are completely morons or cowards or a combination of all three. Exactly. And so I've successfully applied to the office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner here in BC to have those documents unsevered. And the the office has demanded from ICBC all those redacted or unsevered documents, all 691 pages of it. And of course, my rationale in asking for that information in the first place was to see what is informing their policy decisions and what's going on.  Let's just make some stuff up and we'll show him what's who's boss here. Right, for no good reason other than like, think about three months past. So like, if it happened today, we wouldn't have this conversation till March, right? Like, we'd just be sitting pretty and someone says, I'm going to cause a problem for this one guy because I can, right? Not because I'm afraid of whatever you can do to me, but because I feel like I can.   I used to be for 11 years. He tells us a story. We play disc golf with him all the time where you can have two fire departments. One puts out 50 fires a year. The other one puts out one fire year. The one that puts out 50 isn't necessarily better than the other department because you can't control how many fires you're going to get in a year. So you don't use that as the criteria to determine how good of a fire department there are. Sometimes when there's no fires and the fire department doesn't do anything, they're still doing a good job. It's the people that go out of their way to cause a problem.  Let me cause 49 other fires. So I could be the number one fire department. There are some people in the world who take that criteria and flip it upside down and make it a problem. And for people who three months after the fact are still clearly didn't hurt anybody, clearly benefiting society through their licensing. And you said, I'm going to take that away just because they're wearing a hat I don't like. That is causing a problem rather than resolving a problem. And you have to think if that is an elected official or if that's a privileged position that some guy got, that is effectively a person with a hammer who's looking around and seeing everything as a nail and just trying to figure out a way to use his hammer anytime he possibly can. It's a power trip at the end of the day. Absolutely. I feel scared sometimes. Listen, I can tell you what the license plate situation we had here in the U.S. or in Tennessee at least. I feel more paranoid now if I ever were to be pulled over just due to the fact that my license plate clearly would indicate that I'm not religious and most likely a lot of the cops here are. Depending on which which county you're going through to. Oh, yeah. Some of them are as high as like 98%. Oh, yeah. Religious plates. Right. I'd be really scared. I'd be like, oh, this is another thing I have to worry about now. Like, what is the situation of Ian, right? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, you know, yeah, I guess there's a there's an app on your phone that you can set your iPhone up so that if you're pulled over, you just say, hey, Siri, I'm being pulled over. And it all of a sudden, see, Siri just came on. But it sets your phone up so that it goes dark but records everything. Ah, interesting. It's a clandestine recording app in the event that you get pulled over. So the cop doesn't know that. What's the name of the app? I can't remember. My son told me about it. I haven't actually checked it out. Well, that's likewise terrorizing because you should be able to record in public. You should be able to record in public, even if it's your own arrest. And cops who are like, don't record me right now. Those are the ones who are terrifying. But even cops in the US, due to Black Lives Matter now have bodycams on them in the state of Tennessee, which I figure is one of the top three things that we should have had to begin with. You should always be documented as a person of power when you're interacting with citizens. And to think that that wasn't a rule otherwise is outlandish. And I love the fact that you are continuing to document this threat. Here's my recommendation. I want to start off. I want to end us at least on a good note. Here's my recommendation on how to solve this problem. Just let people wear hats. Just make that the rule. Like don't make the you can make a secondary rule saying, hey, don't have anything offensive, like offensive slurs or like body parts on it. Like you can't come in with like a hat that's literally like boobs and be like, I worship those. Like that's I it's not a religious thing. We're not telling you not to wear it because we disrespect religion. We just feel like that's on our offensive list, which is not at all based on your religion. It's just you can't wear hats with boobs on it. That's that's a that's a a a prudish policy, but it's not a big bigotry based policy. So just say, hey, you can wear hats if you want to just to make an offense. And if it is, put the sensor bra on or whatever. And we take a picture. Just don't cover your face because we need to see your face. It's a practical rule. That's it. And then after that point, you don't have this marginalized bullying that's going on other people and you have a rule that can better apply to everybody. Why what is the problem with that? Dredd, what do you think? Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, and it's interesting that that should be the case. It is to a certain extent, in BC, women can wear headbands. There's there's actually a whole sheet on what criteria you have to meet in order to wear some hair accessories. And so I actually made an attempt to have a headband above the hairline meeting the criteria, but it just had the image of the flying spaghetti monster on it. They they said, nope, we don't care. Even that rule, you can't use our own rule, which we allow for other people. We don't for you. What about tattoos? How about tattoo? Well, yeah. So I did, of course, my current license has me with a temporary tattoo of the flying spaghetti monster in prominent form on my forehead. Yeah. They can't do anything about it. Can't do anything about that. It was so I've been thinking maybe next time I lose my lose my license, like drop it or can't find it. I get one of those temporary tattoos that says frack ICBC. Listen, you don't have to get down to their level. I like the path that you're on. I like the path that you're on right now where it's just FSM. I was thinking like, if you were ever to do another step, it would either be and listen, I don't I again, I wonder about the the underlying messages behind this, but you wear a yarmulke that you wear a yarmulke or a turban that has the FSM pattern on it, or or something that's closer to one or their more approved religions and then be like, by the way, I don't actually believe in this. God, I'm just wearing a hat, which you're allowing me to. That seems bizarre. Like you didn't have a problem with it then. So if anything, if there was ever a litmus test of them being in their own butts, it's you have to be approved religions. Like I'm not even this religion. I'm just wearing a hat. Oh, well, I'm wearing a hat, but you can't wear a hat because you're not one of the approved religions. Like you are up in your own. Yeah, no, you know, and this is the thing, you know, when I said that, I mean, you make they made the claim, of course, that that that their decision says, please note that I see BC's decision was made after looking at all the submissions, the facts and the law, they don't say it's based on it. Yeah, I have no citations. There's no citations. It's clearly not based on anything. They're just saying, yeah, we learned. It's just posturing. It's just posturing. Right, right, right. And I want I wish lawyers would take this up more enthusiastically. I know there's not a lot of money behind it, but I wish there was like a lawyer who would like walk you through all this and like absolutely collate all this. So just continue to document and keep sound blasting. We'll continue to do it on our end to my my final thoughts would be in the same way how fines crimes that you commit where the penalties of fine are really only for poor people, because rich people don't really have to care about fines. Laws that exist in this nature, really, where they only affect very marginalized groups are just to add more authority and posturing for those who are in positions of advantage. And I think it makes the it sets us up for the worst parts of the human condition where we like to have a pecking order. And at the end of the day, the fact that you can deny the human rights that Jed has to to respectfully conduct himself as a human being who's a possible believes in a pacifarian God, compared to a guy who believes in a a snake that is by Senutus, or something like that, or a six armed blue God with an elephant or something like that. Like the fact that you can do that is really upsetting, but also speaks to the idea that it doesn't make your God any more real. And if anything, it only demonstrates that he's more of a tyrant. And you and you are embodying that tyranny through him or her or it and making it even less likely that atheists would be more inclined to take you seriously. It just puts you further into the the basket of terrible ideologies and bad examples of dogma dogma in action. So Larry say that's right. Crazy. That's crazy. And I think what we'll have is the the demonstration. This will be hopefully the dying throws of religion before we're all done at the end of the day. Dred anything you'd like to plug before we're done? Yeah, of course. I have my YouTube channel, Mind Pirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T on YouTube. And you just click in at Mind Pirate and you'll come to my channel. I record this Sunday mornings when I'm on at 7 a.m. PST and Global Atheist News at 11 a.m. on Sundays as well. Pretty cool. I'm let's chat. You know what? In the comment description, I'll put a link to the song that I just made. I feel good about it. And also look up some Pasifarians and subscribe to some Pasifarians on YouTube. There's a great community and two, way more than you would anticipate. So find them and realize around the world. They're all around the world and and the more attention we can give to them, the better because the news may not do you a favor in that regard. Larry, anything you would recommend? Well, my content can be found at digitalfreethought.com. Excuse me. Be sure to click the blog button for our radio show archives, Atheist songs and many articles on the subject of atheism. My YouTube channel Handle is at Doubter 5 and you can find my book on atheism called Atheism What's It All About on Amazon. So it's there. Thank you, Dredd, for showing it.  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 we'll see you next Wednesday night at 7 o'clock on WOZO Radio. Say bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.