Due to being tired and stuff I've put off writing about this for a couple weeks, and now it's rather old news and the LDS Church has already moved on to its next controversy, this time pissing off its right-wing members by distancing itself from Operation Underground Railroad founder Tim Ballard over alleged predatory sexual misconduct that's no worse than Joseph Smith's. But this news blew up in my circles a couple weeks ago, and I thought I should do my part within my maddeningly limited capacity to spread it further. As I said recently after watching The Last Voyage of the Demeter, how can I possibly be scared of this

when real monsters look like this?

These women were both arrested and charged with six counts of felony child abuse after an emaciated child with ropes on his wrists and ankles escaped from their secluded house and asked a neighbor for food and water. On the right is Ruby Franke, a Mormon mother of six who ran the YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which I had never heard of until this news came out, but which was apparently very popular among people who have nothing better to do than watch other people's families do normal family things. Granted, they weren't all normal. Ruby has some twisted ideas about discipline. Like a true Republican, she believes that things like food and beds are privileges, and appeared to take a sadistic level of pleasure in withholding them from her children to teach them lessons. She let her six-year-old daughter go hungry at school and took away her teenage son's bed for months. People raised concerns about her over the years and called Child Protective Services multiple times, but nothing happened to her and her channel's popularity continued. 

So of course many are wondering, is she a terrible person because she's a Mormon, or is she a terrible person who just happens to be a Mormon? The LDS Church covers up child abuse, silences the victims, and protects the abusers, but it doesn't condone child abuse as such. No normal member would think that what she did is okay. Yet the church does condition people to believe that their irrational or delusional thoughts come from the Holy Ghost, so that may have been a significant factor in her justifying her unorthodox methods. And frankly, it often frames trials and deprivations as God intentionally giving us "learning experiences." Heavenly Father, the perfect all-loving parent, allows billions of his children's basic human needs to go unmet every day so they can grow and become more like him. Why is it divine wisdom when he does it but child abuse when Ruby Franke does it?

The one on the left, Jodi Hildebrandt, is much worse. If Ruby Franke is Iran, Jodi Hildebrandt is Afghanistan. They entered into a close relationship after Ruby gave up her YouTube channel to join Jodi for a weird pseudo-therapy program called Connexions. A very close connection. There's been a lot of speculation that they're more than business partners and more than friends, and while it is homophobic to assume that raging homophobes like Jodi are closeted, it's hard to avoid that kind of speculation when she sits so close to Ruby and strokes her leg. Anyway, Jodi is a straight-up sociopath, pathological liar, and gaslighter who used her therapy practice to destroy marriages and families. She reminds me of a neighbor I used to have who claimed she could read people's auras and see the future, then drove people apart with lies and manipulation. In this case, her influence undoubtedly made Ruby worse. My understanding is that she was the one who actually carried out the physical abuse of Ruby's children that got her arrested, while Ruby was arrested for living in the same house and knowing about it and not doing anything.

Jodi is also Mormon, and in her case, the church has a lot more direct and obvious culpability. She isn't entirely in sync with it either - it's run almost exclusively by men, while she holds all men in contempt - but she worked with apostles such as Richard G. Scott to design its addiction recovery program, she was on its list of approved therapists, and she was recommended by countless bishops to help with so-called pornography addiction. The way she pathologized masturbation and portrayed anyone who did it once a month as an addict in Satan's grip was at odds with legitimate science and therapeutic practices, but very much at home with Mormon teachings. People assert, and I have no reason to doubt, that Mormon therapists throughout Utah, Idaho, and Arizona are still doing the same thing, though they aren't on the same level of pure intentional evil as Jodi Hildebrandt. I don't know who needs to hear this, but masturbation is a normal, healthy, and almost universal activity that evolved in our primate ancestors as much as forty million years ago. I think, too, that Mormon clients were more susceptible to Jodi's psuedoscience because they're taught to base their worldview on feelings.

After the arrests, Jodi's niece Jesse (they/them) came forward to share how she physically and emotionally abused them while their family was making them live with her for an extended time. Jesse's family didn't know the extent of what was going on and didn't want to. Jesse's family got upset with them for creating controversy by publicly criticizing Jodi over a decade ago. The LDS Church is not blameless for that. It teaches Mormons that "contention is of the devil" and that negative emotions come from Satan, so many of them are very immature about conflict and treat calling out unacceptable behavior as a bigger sin than the unacceptable behavior. I hope Jesse's parents and siblings have all seen this interview and done some soul-searching.

Then a formerly anonymous client, Adam Paul Steed, shared his story in greater detail than before. Jodi got her license suspended for a while in 2012 after she told the BYU Honor Code office things about him that, even if she hadn't made them up, would have been confidential. (Of course, the BYU Honor Code office has its own long history of crossing legal and ethical boundaries to persecute students, which a few years ago resulted in BYU's police department becoming the only one in Utah history to be threatened with decertification.) Jodi destroyed Adam's marriage by convincing his wife that he was a sexual predator and a threat to their children. The best part? She apparently did it on behalf of the late Elder Harold G. Hillam, a high-ranking Mormon and Boy Scout leader who held a grudge against Adam after his role in getting the statute of limitations for child abuse victims in Idaho extended and getting Boy Scout leaders who abused children removed. 

With the exception of Elder Harold G. Hillam, I wouldn't say that LDS leaders are personally to blame for this abuse. I would say that they actively fostered an environment where it could happen, and they proved themselves yet again to be horrible judges of character and no more "inspired" than anyone else. The LDS Church deserves the negative publicity this story has brought it and will bring it for years to come.

Content warning: I talk about breasts a lot. Not in general, but in this post, for reasons that will become clear. I also have no choice but to mention cocks.

Utah's uniquely gullible population has long made it the fraud capital of the United States. Almost immediately after I moved here twelve years ago, I got a text that claimed to be from Wells Fargo and requested my credit card number. I ignored it. A few days later, I saw a newspaper headline about this scam going around Utah, and I thought, "Wait, people actually fell for that?" Several years later, an Amway (more like Scamway) salesbro tried to recruit me after I sat next to him in a church foyer, and I asked all the questions and met with him multiple times because I was unbearably lonely. That was at the beginning of 2020. Then the funniest thing happened. So I share the following story not just because it's interesting, but as a warning to people who are dumber than me. Or just hornier. But that's kind of the same thing. Anyway, last weekend a profile by the name of Mary Chance followed me on Instagram, I followed them back, and they messaged me.

Of course I was immediately suspicious that a random French woman on the internet who looks like this would take such an unsolicited interest in getting to know me...

...but I couldn't immediately prove that the profile wasn't for real. I reverse searched a couple of their pictures, but all I got was different pictures of similar but different blonde women. I thought it was weird that they only had five pictures, all of them uploaded in 2021, four of them on the same day, the last one on December 25, yet lacking any kind of Christmas imagery or traditions that I'm familiar with...

...but on the other hand, that reduced the likelihood that a scammer had created this account and was still using it to scam people all this time later. It was probably a real account that recently got hacked. With that being the case, I feel a little creepy posting these pictures here, but anyone else who investigates the Mary Chance profile needs to be able to find this post. Here's another one.

More like Instascam. What I saw on the screen was almost certainly a prerecorded video. It was ridiculously pixelated, had no audio, and depicted a woman was very obviously not the same as the one in the pictures. I guess I was supposed to be too fixated on her upper torso to notice, or maybe the scammer just thinks all white girls look the same.

Our budding relationship escalated quickly.

I didn't used to have the slightest interest in women's breasts. Just like with Pokémon Go and Tiger King, all the hype only pushed me away, because that's the kind of person I am. I did like chicken breasts, though I was really more of a leg man. If I recall correctly, the first time I saw women's fully exposed breasts (not counting repressed memories from infancy) was in eighth grade Global Studies class. I heard the backstory later from veteran teacher Mr. Morrison. Allegedly, first-year teacher Mr. Twyman came to him and asked if he could borrow a video about Africa. Mr. Morrison said sure. Mr. Twyman just grabbed one. So we watched it in class, and we saw some kind of tribal ceremony with topless woman dancing. And I thought, That's it? Those tubes of fat flopping around are what all the other boys go crazy over? You've got to be kidding me. But that wasn't the most memorable part of the video. Some men dragged an obviously terrified goat to the front of the ceremony. The classroom got tense. Mr. Twyman reassured us, "It's okay, kids, the goat doesn't get hurt." That statement contained false or misleading information.

As a college freshman, I confided to a friend whom I'd persuaded to be my free therapist because she was majoring in Psychology that I didn't care about the size of women's breasts. Right as I said that, I noticed for the first time ever that she was rather flat-chested, and I thought Crap, she thinks I'm talking about her. But she just smiled and shared the wisdom that she'd gotten from some old man: if they're big enough to hold up a strapless top, they're big enough. A couple years later, desperately wanting to be normal, I borrowed some issues of Women's Health from another friend (who claimed to not know why they were delivered to his house), and I stared at the (clothed) breasts inside until I found them appealing. I still can't believe that worked. It didn't work when I tried it with... other things. By the way, I wasn't impressed with the magazine's mixed message of "You're healthy just the way you are, but also you should look like these hot skinny models."

So when the scammer calling themself Mary Chance asked if I would like to see their beautiful breasts, the truthful answer was yes. I hesitated because the religion I spent most of my life in taught me that seeing her beautiful breasts would be sinful and that I should exercise moral courage by lying and saying no. But then, the religion I spent most of my life in also taught me that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were good people, and it also opposed every major social justice movement in American history, and it also broke the law in multiple countries to conceal its hoarding of obscene wealth, and it also protects child abusers, so I have a hard time caring very much about its views on morality anymore. Of course that just validates orthodox members' certainty that I left so I could sin without guilt, and/or that I fell under Satan's influence as soon as I did. Hence my noncommittal response.

The only other person who ever wanted to see my nice cock was a guy I used to go to church with. I certainly didn't believe that a random French woman on the internet who looks like those two different people would take such an unsolicited interest in seeing it. So there's the trap. The scammer gets footage of my nice cock, then shares it to the internet and demands money to take it off. Of the internet, I mean. Except even if I had been stupid enough to take the bait, I would have been too self-conscious, so it wasn't going to happen. For context, when they said "Drop you cam" I thought they meant turn it off, so I did, and then they turned theirs off, and I used that as an excuse to sidestep the question about whether I wanted to see their boobs.

Best Chance, apparently. I actually thought it just a little odd that a French woman was named Mary instead of Marie, but that didn't quite rise to the level of red flag, and maybe I committed a microaggression just by thinking it. Not all Hispanic women are named Maria either. Anyway, we switched over to Skype, and the quality of the silent prerecorded video somehow became even worse.

Now that there was a confirmed 0% chance of Mary Chance being real, I wish I'd been wittier and more assertive. I wish I'd said, "Respectfully, Mademoiselle, your breasts are more pixelated than the ones that appear for about ten seconds in the Naughty mode of the 1992 computer game Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender. As you can see, my video quality is normal for 2023, and sending you my high-resolution cock would hardly make a fair trade." Instead, I kept being nice and wishy-washy while the scammer kept being impatient and unhinged.

Sheesh, I haven't seen a fictional woman this horny since I had to read Carmen Maria Machado's stories for graduate school. I lied twice here. Skype wasn't frozen - though I thought the awful quality made that plausible - and my job interview wasn't for another fifty-three minutes, and it was over the phone. Except the scheduled phone call never came through, though the recruiter sent a screenshot confirming that she had made it, so that was the final straw for me with Republic Wireless. It served me well for a few years, but it turned to crap as soon as Dish purchased it. I did a few minutes of research and decided to switch to Mint Mobile. Though I can't yet vouch for its quality of service, it allows calling and texting over WiFi, a feature Dish got rid of that probably would have prevented my problem. It also has an online tech support chat, another feature that Dish got rid of. I can't imagine why anyone having issues with their phone might need a way to contact tech support besides calling them, and obviously neither can the brilliant minds at Dish. But here's the kicker: I'll now get 5 GB of data per month for $15 instead of 1 GB for $19.99. It will be really hard for me to even use 5 GB a month - no, I'm not going to say "Actually, it's gonna be super easy, barely an inconvenience," even though I wish I could, because it wouldn't be true, especially since my neighbor gave me access to xfinity WiFi hotspots to make up for the internet going out after he didn't pay his utility bill - but that's the lowest amount Mint Mobile offers, and it's still cheaper, so I'm not complaining. The recruiter let me reschedule the interview, so I deleted the passive-aggressive comment I was going to make about her not calling me.

wHy DiD yOu Do ThIs To Me. So manipulative!

They had a rather odd work schedule for a hairdresser in Las Vegas, too.

dOn'T sAy AnY mOrE bAnAl WoRdS tO mE. I'm dying.

Mary Chance probably targeted me because I look lonely. They may have also noticed that I live in the fraud capital of the United States. ​I feel rather smug about how badly they misunderestimated my intelligence. If something like this happens to you, I hope you didn't need me to warn you that it's a trap, but if you did, you're welcome. Of course, in the near future, scammers will be able to use AI to generate flawless fake profiles with fake photorealistic images and high-quality videos that match and have audio and respond in real time. But they won't need to go to all that trouble to get footage of your nice cock, because they'll be able to generate that with AI too. I miss the good old days when the scariest technology was nuclear weapons.

The other night I had the great privilege of hearing Dallas Jenkins, creator of The Chosen, which I now remember I said a long time ago I would review on this blog at some point and then I didn't, do a Q&A session with Mormon Studies Chair Patrick Mason at USU. He was, as always, charming and funny and spiritually supercharged. He talked about giving his career to God after one of the biggest failures of his life, and how God has guided him since then. It's very clear from his stories and from the most recent results of his career that this guidance is powerful and frequent. I thought to ask myself on this occasion, what does "the gift of the Holy Ghost" include that he doesn't already have? I was taught that my church has exclusive access to this gift, which is bestowed at baptism; that the Holy Ghost can and does speak to people outside the church, but only we can have it as our constant companion. And in fairness, I don't know of any other religion that places nearly such an emphasis on personal two-way communication with God as we do. Evangelical Christianity, which Dallas calls his spiritual home, places far more emphasis on the authority of the Bible and even asserts that feelings are an unreliable guide to truth. Yet I would wager that he has a stronger and deeper relationship with God than the overwhelming majority of Latter-day Saints. And he's one of the people that Brad Wilcox thinks is only "playing church" because he doesn't "have God's permission."

He talked about how focusing on Jesus can bring down religious barriers, and how people of different denominations can disagree even about significant things, refuse to compromise on their own beliefs, and still be friends and collaborators. I wish his fanbase would get the memo. Last I checked, evangelicals in the The Chosen group on Facebook were constantly posting about how Latter-day Saints and/or Catholics aren't really Christians, and it was very annoying. I got more defensive of the Catholics because life is too short to care what idiots say about my church. I would call out Catholic-bashers and conclude with "Sincerely, not a Catholic." I also mentioned more than once that this holier-than-thou gatekeeping bullcrap just makes Christians in general look bad to everyone else, and is a contributing factor to the modern secular world's lack of respect for them. That didn't fix the problem, but it made some people really mad because they knew it was true. Anyway - focusing on Jesus. There can never be too much focus on Jesus. I came away from the event convinced as ever by this godly man that whatever else I may or may not believe at any given time, I believe in Jesus.

Dallas talked about some things from a writing perspective that of course interested me as a writer even though I've heard him talk about them before. For example, he portrays even Jesus' enemies as nuanced and complicated people, which is both realistic and good storytelling. We see why some of the Jewish leaders opposed Jesus. As Dallas puts it, Shmuel didn't just wake up one morning, twirl his mustache, and ask himself how he could make Jesus' life difficult. Judas, who's introduced in the last episode of Season Two, seems to just be a regular decent guy, as he must have been at one point. This show skillfully avoids the dogmatic us vs. them persecution complex approach that makes the first two God's Not Dead movies unwatchable (and makes my own church experience insufferable sometimes). Very few people do evil things just for the sake of being evil. Even Putin has realistic motivation for his evil deeds. I'm not saying lust for power is a good motivation, but it's a little different than waking up one morning, twirling his mustache, and asking himself how many war crimes he can commit just for fun. I thought about this principle again the following evening when I got Zoombombed for the first time.

Dr. Solimar Otero of Indiana University was giving the Fife Folklore Honor Lecture entitled "Stories of Our Lives - Material Culture, Memory, and Narrative on the Bóveda," and I tuned in because I was bored and lonely. I half paid attention and half read a book. Half an hour into the lecture, someone screenshared pornography, and I cycled through six thoughts in about six seconds.

1. Ew, gross.
2. This is the most embarrassing moment of someone's life.
3. Ew, gross.
4. Wait, is my computer doing that somehow? If it is, I'll have to kill myself.
5. Ew, gross.
6. Wait, this is no accident.

My realization was immediately confirmed as someone started saying the n-word over and over and over again, and at least three people pasted it in the chat several dozen times each, rapid-fire. It was a blitzkrieg, a far more efficient invasion than Putin's. Someone said "If you make me the cohost, I can get rid of them," but for all I know he was one of them. It was very difficult to think under this barrage, but I tried to focus and come up with something to say that would make these Zoombombers understand that their lives were collectively more pathetic and less valuable than a mosquito's, and I failed to do so before the meeting closed. I couldn't just say any old rude or angry thing because that would play right into their hands. They wanted to get reactions out of people. And in the days since, I've grappled with the curious fact that this appears to be the entire extent of their motivation. The only reason I can think of for grown adults to ruin a complete stranger's Zoom lecture with pornography and racial slurs is that they just get a thrill out of being turds for the sake of being turds. They weren't well-written villains at all. And perhaps the greatest mystery of the universe, I thought to myself, is what Jesus saw in them that was worth dying for.

The following text was originally a Facebook post and subsequent comment by my friend Krista Taylor, which she has allowed me to share here for whatever good the meager reach of my blog will do for it. Thus it becomes my first guest post ever. Hailey Allen of "Perfectly Unhinged" suggested doing a blog swap a few years ago, but she's been too busy every time I subsequently brought it up, or maybe she just realized I stood to gain a lot more from it than she did. So this is the first. Would that it were under better circumstances.

If any of you have confidence in the court system it is unwarranted. They have blatantly acknowledged that Bradley (my husband) abandoned the kids and me at my mom’s house after Thanksgiving on Dec 1, 2019. Since he took the car and car seats we had to get car seats from the local police station so there’s a police report to verify that. Nevertheless the courts have still claimed that since it is Utah policy to ‘ensure both parents access to the children’ that Bradley gets custody since I was refusing his visitation.

According to Utah Commissioner Christina Wilson and Alyson Johnson, the children’s guardian ad litem, abandonment doesn’t constitute neglect or any other form of abuse of the children. The court also has a copy of a text that Bradley sent me saying that he had thought about sexually abusing our then 4 year old daughter but that he didn’t think he would because he didn’t want to cause her trauma. He sent that 2 months after abandoning us all. Clearly abandoning her doesn’t constitute causing her any trauma. Apparently spending months convincing the courts to send in a SWAT team to tear her away from her mom and grandma obviously isn’t going to cause her or her two brothers any trauma either.

He also goes on in the text about how beautiful I looked that night and how sad he is that we aren’t together and how he’s been struggling so much and looking at porn but he’s trying to stop. It’s very cleverly put together to elicit sympathy and simultaneously send me the message that if I don’t come back he’ll sexually abuse our daughter and who knows how many other people through his porn use. He had repeatedly claimed that I was supposed to give him sex simply because I am his wife even after he abandoned us and I refused. He had also repeatedly sexually abused me throughout our marriage including manipulating me into having sex prior to going to work by telling me that he didn’t want sex on his mind before he went to teach piano to his students. (Yes he is a piano teacher and if your children are taking lessons from him I would recommend stopping immediately for their safety. Although since he cares a great deal about his reputation I don’t know how far he would take it with a student or not.) But of course the text is carefully crafted so that idea is not explicit because then he might get in trouble with the court. I’m not sure there’s a better example of mental and emotional manipulation and abuse out there.

Based on the text I also asked for a protective order from the Idaho courts here in Rexburg, “America’s Family Community” or “Zion” as many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints like to call it. But Judge David Hunt decided that not only was there not sufficient reason to grant a protective order he turned around and granted Bradley the writ of assistance that required the police to enforce the Utah custody orders. Previously I had shown the police Bradley’s text and they had been refusing to enforce the Utah orders for months because he is clearly a danger to the children.

What could possibly be more manipulative and abusive than subtly threatening to sexually abuse my children? But sure let’s pretend that he’s a safe person simply because the court said so and throw me in jail for daring to stand up for my kids against the court.

But don’t worry the courts told Bradley that he has to keep the kids at his parents’ house so according to the court they’re safe because his parents and sister haven’t reported anything. Never mind that his parents are the ones who have taught him to be abusive in the first place and they have been funding his attorney and everything else all along. They take great pains to ensure that they maintain a good looking but not too good reputation like these kinds of people do. https://www.flyingfreenow.com/liar-liar-pants-on-fire/... But don’t worry as long as things look good on the surface the kids are obviously safe and healthy. Clearly his parents did such a great job raising Bradley that they should be in charge of raising even more kids. And if he’s not really safe for him to be taking care of the kids himself then why in hell should they not be with me? Obviously it’s all for the kids. That’s our tax dollars and justice system at work for us all. They’re really working hard to protect everyone and keep us all safe.

Obviously there’s no reason to suppose that the courts could ever make a mistake about that since they care soo much. Except for more than 600 children who have been murdered by abusive fathers in the last ten years because the courts insisted on visitation regardless of clear safety risks for the kids. But who really cares about them? The court is just another industry to make money and divorce impoverishes women and children and enriches men. So pander to the men because they have the money. How dare I have the audacity to say that Bradley can’t call and repeatedly ignore them or make them cry over the phone as he was doing before I cut off all contact? They sent in a freaking SWAT team and literally ripped my baby out of my arms and carried my other two children crying and screaming out of the house, this while they arrested my mom and I for refusing to hand the kids over to Bradley because he is abusive. So yeah the courts definitely care a lot about the kids. And justice. Oh and did I mention that since Bradley abandoned us if I went back to our house to get my stuff the police told me that I could only take essentials? But if Bradley threw our stuff out on the road the police couldn’t tell him what to do with “his” stuff? But at least the courts wouldn’t like it if he did that. So by abandoning us he stole our house and our things. He did bring some of them back because that makes him look better but he managed to trash plenty of the stuff in the process. He told me that he wouldn’t take the kids away from me. He also told me that the kids are my life. He has spent the last year working toward taking them away from me through the legal system. Yay for him he’s succeeded! But of course telling me that they are my life and then taking them away doesn’t constitute mental or emotional abuse. How blatant can he make it that he hates me? But of course that’s all fine and dandy because it makes people more comfortable to sweep it under the rug than to face the truth. Obviously Bradley and I just have communication issues. Frankly I was stupid to ever marry him after all the bs my mom went through with her divorce. It’s no wonder that so many people are scared of marriage. They’d be naive idiots not to be terrified of it.

Furthermore after seeing and experiencing plenty of abuse throughout my life I don’t know whose “genius” idea it is to force kids to go back and forth between parents in high conflict cases. But when there is abuse even if you haven’t confidently identified who the abuser is sending the kids back and forth just allows the abuser ample opportunity to further abuse the victim and children and potentially frame the victim. That has got to be the most dangerous position for the kids to be in. And it’s all court sanctioned. It’s heinous. “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” -Elie Wiesel The courts have repeatedly and blatantly reaffirmed to me that they will give Bradley custody until I agree to allow him back into our lives. I can not live with myself and do that. I have tried allowing visitation and it was brutal to stand by and allow his mental and emotional abuse of my children to continue. They need to know that they matter and they are worth protecting. They need to know that I will not condone or enable his abuse. I will be arrested and thrown in jail but I will not voluntarily allow him to abuse them. How could any genuinely loving mother do any less for her children? How can we pretend that as long as the parents divorce and the mother can get out that it’s ok for the children to be tossed back and forth between parents and denied any stable home? What has our society come to? Why in the face of such clear abuse were the only choices that I was left with to go into hiding or be arrested and thrown in jail for protecting my children?

If you have the chance to “help” anyone with a custody case or who is going through a divorce please make sure that you are actually informed and listening and genuinely helpful. People need real help not a bunch of lame excuses and pretenses that the courts “care” when it’s really just about money to them too. Whether or not you believe me or care about my case, this is a big issue and it desperately needs to be addressed.

Please pray for my children and please look for ways to help those around you through these horrible issues.
https://stopabusecampaign.org/.../family-court-custody.../

Link about psychological abuse escalating to murder:
https://m.huffpost.com/.../us_5bbf5299e4b0bd9ed5578fe6...

Don’t worry the police have thrown big bad scary grandma and mom in jail for trying to set safe boundaries for children. https://www.eastidahonews.com/.../woman-jailed-after.../

Although they suddenly decided to drop her $25,000 bail to zero after she spent two weeks in jail. Watch out! She’s loose on the streets again! She just might do something like tell people about how dehumanizing the jails are and how much of money making industry that they are too. Oh and the police officer who claimed that she landed a strong punch is lying but the newspaper didn’t want to print our side of the story. She attempted a punch but couldn’t see well because they had knocked off her glasses so she missed. I overheard the police officer claiming that it hurt about as much as brushing his teeth.

Please share this. People need to know. #outthem #domesticviolence #domesticviolenceawareness

Addendum: For whatever it’s worth psychologically speaking based on the research that I’ve done as horrible as sexual abuse and other abuse is, neglect is even more psychologically damaging. So to disregard abandonment, which is the ultimate act of neglect, is heinous. Especially since he later claimed that I am physically abusive and then asked the courts for joint custody. What kind of father abandons his children, particularly with someone he claims is abusive and then claims that that person should still have them half of the time?

How in the world am I supposed to figure out how to cope with a society where the police and the courts are the ones kidnapping my children to hand them over to our abuser? Why do “father’s rights” so obviously take precedence over our basic safety? Since when did “father’s rights” include the right to abuse children? Oh and a writ of assistance is used for property. Think about that. What it really boils down to is that the court simply views my children as property.

I don’t know about you but I am really looking forward to when the prophecies about the cleansing of the world before the Second Coming of Christ come true. This society has lost all sense of morality and decency and as a society we deserve to be utterly destroyed and swept off the face of the earth when we treat our innocent children in such a heinous fashion.

Also please keep in mind that sexual predators and abusers routinely pretend to love their victims in order to entrap them and manipulate them. That is how Bradley convinced me to marry him and that is how he has succeeded in getting the courts to kidnap the children for him. How is it helpful to the children to continue lying to them and pretending that he loves them when his actions clearly show what a lie that is? Believing that lie was the most damaging thing that I have ever done. Choosing to continue to believe it in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary nearly made me lose my mind. I spent years of my marriage just trying to get through one more day of that hell. Who benefits from believing that lie? Because it certainly isn’t my children. I’ve been the child in a divorce and accepting the fact that my dad didn’t love me in spite of his claims to the contrary was freeing. Likewise recognizing Bradley’s lies has also been freeing and standing up to them has been immensely healing. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

And how many of you will even believe me? How many of you will blame me because it is too uncomfortable for you to believe that the courts and the police are so corrupt?

“We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What will you believe?

Evil and abuse and oppression rely on and thrive in secrecy and a code of silence. Will you look the other way and allow it to grow? Or will you shine a light on it?

I watched a clip from "Cuties" the other day to see what all the fuss is about. It made me feel like I should be in jail. I am well aware of the director's stated purpose for creating this movie, but I don't believe that any amount of context could possibly justify the existence of the footage I saw. If sexualization of 11-year-old girls is such a big problem (which I don't doubt), then surely the director could have achieved her desired shock and outrage by creating a documentary about the sexualization of 11-year-old girls that already existed, instead of sexualizing 11-year-old girls to prove that sexualizing 11-year-old girls is wrong. When all is said and done, regardless of the intentions behind it, she created something for pedophiles to jack off to and I'm baffled that it was legal. I'm baffled that a cameraperson can zoom in on the rear end of a twerking 11-year-old girl for any reason and not go to jail.

This week the university brought some completely unnecessary extra stress into my life by trying to make me pay $8,300.64 instead of the $595.34 that I actually owed. Somehow they forgot that I've been a Utah resident since 2012 - a fact they should be well aware of since I did my bachelor's degree here under the same ID number I have now, not to mention they never bothered to ask - and charged me $10,787.48 non-resident tuition instead of the $3,082.18 resident tuition that's covered by my graduate instructor tuition award. I lost considerable sleep over this which rendered me mentally incapable of doing almost any homework on Friday, and didn't get so much as an apology for their attempt to swindle me, and the only reason I didn't tell them to get bent is that I don't want to jeopardize my employment. But I still showed them. They didn't say sorry for making the mistake so I didn't say thank you for fixing it.

All this sleep deprivation I've been experiencing since late August for no legitimate reason just feels so gratuitous. It feels like God is saying, "Graduate school is too easy for you, so I'll make up some extra crap to make sure you can't enjoy it."

​On the plus side, my neighbors' dog no longer wakes me up because they seem to have gotten rid of him. He was always out in their fenced backyard, obscured from view, and when I moved in over a year ago he barked every freaking time anyone whatsoever walked past the fence, because apparently he hadn't gotten used to the existence of this apartment complex that's been here at least since the eighties. One night he was barking while I tried to sleep, and I yelled at him a few times to shut up, and he didn't, so I went outside to throw rocks at him. But before I could find any rocks, he shut up. And after that night, instead of barking at passersby he just tried to jump the fence. He still barked at occasional random intervals but if it continued for more than five seconds I yelled at him to shut up and he did. I held no personal ill will against him. I reserved that for his owners, who never lifted a finger to prevent him from being a nuisance to the entire block. Until they recently got rid of him. I don't know why the change, but it may have something to do with this note I left a couple weeks ago.

I wasn't going to sign it "your very tired and pissed off neighbor" but I had extra space and wanted to use it wisely. And I'm glad they believed my bluff about the police. The only reason I would contact the Logan police would be to tell them to go choke on a cactus, but I wasn't sure about the legality of threatening to break the dog's neck.

The girls next door - that is to say, in this apartment complex, on the opposite side from the house where the jerks with the dog live - continue to be loud, but last Sunday they tried to make it up by dropping off zuchinni bread and a card.

Following the example of their predecessors, of course I told the police to tell them to never be nice to me again. (That joke only works if you know what I'm referring to and forgot that I just said the only reason I would contact the Logan police would be to tell them to go choke on a cactus.) Seriously though, I took them up on their offer to party the next day when I had to wait two hours for my laptop to update, but they were busy doing homework and only had time for a game of Uno. I felt very misled. I came over again on Friday because the loud one was screaming so much that I had to make sure she wasn't being murdered. She was just getting too worked up over a game of Sorry. Whatever her quirks, though, at least she probably isn't a delusional pathological liar like one of her predecessors I could mention.

Although I'm done with dating for the foreseeable ever, pandemic or no pandemic, that didn't stop someone in Uganda from trying to play matchmaker.

I appreciate the sentiment, really. There's just a slight cultural difference at play here, like the time he found the profile of some college student in Georgia, decided he was in love with her, and wanted me to add her and set her up with him. I'm not one to assert that my culture is "the right way" to do things, but that just wouldn't have worked. So I just stall and change the subject when these things come up.