The Ghetto Guide to Cloth Diapers

Good evening, dear readers!

Day 19's prompt of the 21 day blog challenge actually fell right in line with a subject I had already written about back when I first resumed blogging. Some months back, I wrote a guide with the low income individual in mind regarding the use, acquisition, and care of cloth diapers in a cost effective manner. It was based on my own experience as a low income mother who needed an affordable and responsible way to diaper her child.

I got these Fuzzibunz diapers secondhand from a family at church. They've proved to be a huge blessing for me

Since I had something like this already written, I figured I would repost the original entries to answer the prompt from the challenge. I haven't quite been able to figure out how to do a proper repost of a previously written blog entry, but I don't have the time right now to sit down and edit the cloth diaper posts so as to condense it down to one entry.

As I mentioned above, I wrote the guide over the course of three posts. To save you the agony, I won't text-bomb your eyes by copy/pasting the entire contents into this one entry. Instead, I will link to them below for your convenience.

The Ghetto Guide to Cloth Diapers, Part I
The Ghetto Guide to Cloth Diapers, Part II
The Ghetto Guide to Cloth Diapers, Part III

I'm considering turning this particular series of cloth diaper posts into a free e-book to download and share. I'll need to do a bit of editing to pare down the length and maybe change around a few things, but it is something I've considered doing for a while. What do you think?

Thank you for reading this post and please don't forget to share, comment, and subscribe!

Life With Addiction

This is a topic that may be sensitive for some readers.

As I have alluded in past posts, my husband is a recovering opiate addict. While he experimented with drugs during his youth and early adulthood, he emerged relatively unscathed but with an appreciation for the effects chemical substances have on the body. It wasn't until his late 30s-early 40s that he became addicted to opiates. Contrary to the narrative pushed by the powers that be about addiction, my husband did not become addicted from recreational use. It was a result of health issues which left him in constant pain and unable to function without the relief of opiates. It didn't help that his family had a history of depressant abuse. When he lost his job for political reasons, his health insurance ended and he could not afford prescription opiates. He then turned to heroin to ease his pain. After a few years of using heroin, my husband finally enrolled in a methadone treatment program because it was covered by Medicaid and he was eligible for it.

It was not an easy transition for him. At the time, my husband was homeless, suffering health issues unrelated to his addiction, and using a combination of cocaine and cheap vodka to function because he had difficulty adjusting to the methadone lethargy ("haze", as he calls it). Since we're close to Mexico, drugs are cheap and of decent quality. Unlike many junkies, my husband did not turn to crime to get the money he needed to buy drugs. If he got a computer job, a monetary donation from someone or even selling something, he would use that. He occasionally continued to use heroin when he could not get to the clinic, and it wasn't until 2007 that my husband finally got used to the methadone enough that he could stop doing the drugs and commit himself full-time to the treatment program. The medically-supervised withdrawal period he had to undergo to enter into the clinic's treatment program was also rough on him, but he survived. He has not used an illicit substance since 2007.

This is my husband in 2004. He'd just become a full-blown opiate addict at this point

Before I met him, I looked down on anyone who used drugs as my middle-class upbringing dictated that I should. I'd been taught that drug addicts were the shit of the earth and that they deserved whatever misfortunes were handed to them because of their condition.

Meeting my husband changed all of that.

When I first met him in the church courtyard that fateful Sunday morning in October of 2011, with his scraggly appearance and grimy white netbook, my husband made it clear what his condition was. By the time of our meeting, his days of using drugs were behind him and he was clean for four years at that point. He was quite open with me about his opiate addiction, and showed no shame whatsoever about it. He made it a point to not be ashamed because, as he saw it, addiction was not a moral failing or some other sanctimonious belief. He saw it as a sickness, similar to diabetes, differing only in the legality of the substance being injected. That analogy forever changed my perception of the nature of addiction. If we go by the definition of an addiction being a physical dependence upon a chemical substance for the purpose of functioning normally, then the diabetic suddenly has alot more in common with the socially unacceptable junkie than they might be comfortable admitting.

His 50th birthday, 2012. He never thought he'd live that long

To this day, my husband still remains in his methadone program. He has been with this particular clinic for ten years now, and is quite satisfied with the treatment provided. Given that he's now in his fifties, my husband speculates that he might never get off methadone simply due to his age. We've been slowly working his dose down, but it's not easy. Methadone, contrary to what the US Government tells people, is slow acting and is actually more dangerous to wean off of. The only reason the government authorized its use is because methadone is regulated. Unlike heroin where you're taking a gamble every time you shoot up (even if you know the dealer), you know the exact strength and purity of your methadone dose.

Even though he is in recovery, my husband is still technically classified as an addict. He depends on the methadone to keep the chronic pain at bay. If he was to quit cold-turkey now, the withdrawal would kill him. This is why we have to incrementally lower his dose, weaning him off in baby steps. We have had some success too. My husband's dose has been lowered by 30mg in the four years we've known each other and been together. I would like for him to eventually not need the stuff, mostly for the sake of our children. My husband too would like to one day be totally clean. Given our proximity to Mexico, while most people here in my part of Arizona wouldn't care about drug use, getting completely off methadone would certainly lessen the stigma of having a drug addict for a father that our children would carry if we were to leave here and move elsewhere.

Will our child suffer because of her dad? Only time will tell

As it is, methadone comes with its own pitfalls. It's slow acting and will cause a "crash" (energy drop) a few hours after ingesting, only to pass about 20 minutes later. There is also a chronic lethargy that comes with being on methadone, which can make daily tasks harder to accomplish. Provided you stay with the program, one could argue that having to go to the clinic to meet with the counselor/case worker and re-up on the supply or go for the daily dosing is a pitfall in and of itself since one has to make accommodations for time and travel. Being a controlled substance, methadone has to be administered under medical supervision. As such, it also serves as a liquid ball and chain, making moves to other states or cities significantly more complicated since a new clinic must be found and patient relationship established. While methadone is a federally approved means of treatment and thus discrimination against someone who uses methadone for treatment purposes is illegal, it still can happen and methadone users can be at a disadvantage for finding gainful employment. One person might be afflicted, but the addiction touches everyone around them.

But, even with opiate addiction, life goes on as normally as it can. When he is able to get employment, my husband will go to work. He also does the honey-dos around the house as any man can when he gets around to it. We go places and do things as a normal family does, just with the noted exception that my husband has to take a chemical-smelling, dark pink liquid twice a day. Now that we have a child, my husband keeps the methadone locked up in a safe place so she can't get to it. Parents who own firearms or household chemicals do a similar thing.

Addiction is not just for Others. It can affect anyone and impact their families regardless of race, class, or background. I am sharing my experience with addiction to put a human face on a sickness that is horribly misunderstood and misconstrued by those with an agenda to push. Obviously, there are others out there whose experiences with addiction have been worse or better than mine. Addiction is multifaceted and the sooner it is recognized as such, the better work can be done to raise awareness and develop more effective treatments to combat it. Like everyone else who has an addict in the family, I did not seek it, but became an advocate for the addicted because I see how much suffering comes with this illness. Like AIDS patients in the 80s, addicts should not be treated as second-class citizens because of the circumstances that got them to where they are now.

If you or someone you know suffers from addiction, please don't hesitate to reach out for help. Here are some links you may find helpful.
http://www.recovery.org/topics/addiction-recovery-helplines/
http://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline

Slavery in the "Free Market"

Over the weekend, a friend of mine emailed me an article written by the friend of a friend, and it has gone viral among my network of friends. The article, written by an Israeli living in Jerusalem, is a well-written scathing critique about how the "free market" inevitably enslaves all those who participate in it in one form or another.

It's too long for me to post here, so I will link to it. But there was one quote that stood out from the whole piece.

We should take birth, life and death as they come, as was done by our ancestors. If we won’t stop this plague now, we shall see our children and grandchildren stripped for organ transplants to the rich bankers who want to live forever, if not bought and sold for the amusement of gay couples. We shall see children being manufactured and mass-produced for transplants, for war, for labour, as Aldous Huxley prophesied in his too-prescient book. God’s plans can be overridden only at a huge cost, a cost that will dwarf the override of Obama’s Iran Treaty.

This brought to mind a conversation my friend and I were having. My friend mentioned that while he was looking for a new job, he came across the website of a facility in Scottsdale (a wealthy suburb of Phoenix, AZ) that cryogenically froze dead people. That was not a typo-the same cryogenic freezing that you see in the movies is what this facility did (in the desert, no less!). I told him how weird I thought it was that people would want to freeze themselves in the hope of being resurrected in the future. Even with freezing to hold off the rot, you'd have to get a new brain, new nerves, basically be reprogrammed cuz if you were to be revived a millenium from now, you couldn't cope with what the world then would be like. My friend responded by saying that this sort of set up, where you could be wealthy enough to have yourself frozen and then have the failing parts changed out like a computer, is a recipe for damnation. Like fundamentalism, this utilitarian mentality spits in God's face because it tells Him "the souls You have created are not worthy of my acknowledgment! They aren't even worth life unless they have something materially to contribute."

Read the rest of this excellent piece here. It's well worth your time.

Melancholia

Tonight the ghosts of the past
Swim 'round in my head like a whirlpool
A life gone by and miscast
Fallen, disregarded, and cruel.

What began with such promise and riches
On to whom dreams and ambitions were pinned
Stay on the path and in leashes
Lest you become the Other and chagrined.

The fall from high up is hard
But the writing on the wall is clear
This old life, you must discard
An illusion, sustained by the financier.

To keep these creatures of comfort
One must work day and night
Hard work, no less, must assert
Your privilege, in a society Darwinite.

Good bye, middle class home and lifestyle
Good bye, luxuries of wealth
Good bye, existence juvenile
Good bye, retirement and health

I knew what I was getting myself into
When I walked away from it all
Disappointment, difficulty, make-do
Were sure to make trouble and stall

Charity is a two-way street
In both giving and recieving
Bottom-feeder, tick, deadbeat
Liberator, clever one, always scheming

Oh Melancholia, cruel mistress
Why do you trouble me now?
To remind you of illusions dangerous
And your freedom to preserve and endow

Will Someone PLEASE Turn off the Oven?!

Like the title of this post suggests, it's been hot as hell outside.

Being a desert dweller, having lived in this state since 2008, you would think I'd have gotten used to this hot climate by now. For each year that I've lived here, I've gotten better at adapting to the hot, dry climate, but even then, I don't think I will ever 100% get used to it. Everytime I try, something happens that exceeds my tolerance (like humidity!).

So like any sensible person, I adapt my habits. Any excursions for groceries or other stuff must be done either at sundown or in the very early morning. Since I'm not an early riser (despite my baby waking up at 6:30 AM on the dot every morning wanting to eat and then PLAY!), our outings are restricted to after sundown. While it sometimes sucks from the grocery shopping standpoint cuz the day's sales have typically cleared out anything worthwhile, gas and comfort-wise, I find it more tolerable. For the times we do have to go out during the day (mostly to church), we try to make use of whatever shaded parking spots we can find and limit our time out of a cooled environment as much as possible. Just common-sense stuff.

Hopefully soon, we here in the desert will get one final monsoon storm or two in these last few weeks of summer. The humidity from these storms makes things uncomfortably sticky, but it cools things off for a little while. Plus, you get cool pictures, like this one taken just north of Tucson

Taken in Marana, a cotton suburb north of Tucson, AZ. Picture found here

Come on, Autumn! I'm tired of this heat!

The Ghetto Guide to Cloth Diapers, Part I

Before Darija was born, my husband and I debated about whether to use cloth diapers or disposable ones. While disposable ones are readily available and have the perks of convenience (not to mention keeping pee off of baby's bottom better), the costs of buying packs and boxes of diapers every other week adds up pretty quickly. Cloth diapers, while notable for their eco-friendliness and long-term austerity due to being reusable, have a higher up-front cost and are guaranteed to result in higher water/utility bills due to the frequent laundering required of them.

So, what to do?

While we landed on a compromise of using disposables while out and about and cloth diapers at home, living in poverty has a way of educating you to take advantage of whatever life hacks you can find to stretch your limited resources further. I've found that the use of cloth diapers has been an essential part of keeping our baby care expenses lower than the average.

Like alot of millenials, especially ones with a conservative background like myself, I initially scoffed at the idea of cloth diapers. In my mind, cloth diapers had a stigma in that it was only for hippies, granola yuppies, and rich/middle class suburban stay at home mothers, while "real", hardworking, and/or impoverished people like me used disposables. But, after doing some research, I found it actually WAS more beneficial in the long run to use cloth diapers, environmentally and financially. Some of my mommy friends who'd used cloth diapers at church also encouraged me to use them as well. That, plus help from my husband who'd had experience in both childcare and cloth diapers, convinced me it actually WAS possible for a low-income mother like myself to keep my child adequately diapered and not go broke in the process!

But then came three big questions-what kinds of cloth diapers to acquire? Where do I find them? And can I afford to launder them without breaking the bank?

With those questions in mind, I've come up with a practical guide to cloth diapers for the low-income individual. Each of the three questions above will be addressed in a separate entry for this short series I'm calling The Ghetto Guide to Cloth Diapers. Cloth diapers shouldn't be something associated with the affluent segment of the population. They're for everyone regardless of income levels, and I can help you decide if this is a truly practical option for your wallet and your baby.

Let us begin.

On the Right

Having just returned to the world of blogging, I've had an opportunity to look at my past posts and see how I used to be. There is a most definite right-wing bent to my past posts.

My impression: What in the HELL was I thinking?!

The answer: I wasn't.

I grew up in a rabidly right-wing home, with family who treated Rush Limbaugh's words as Gospel and who never failed to malign anyone who was not conservative or who supported causes that were anything other than conservative ones. And even certain conservative causes, like the pro-life movement, were viewed with suspicion. Naturally, I fell right in step with such devotion. What reason did I have to think different?

Then while on hiatus from blogging, I did what most people never achieve in their lifetimes. I grew up.

And, in the process, I discovered how full of shit right wing America is. Xenophobia is one thing, disenfranchisement, military worship/warhawkism, and straight-up ignorance encouraged by festering Bible-thumping and apocalypse fantasies are other notable traits. But as if that wasn't enough, then came the insane claim that lowering taxes on the wealthy will magically produce jobs. I believed that lie until I began my working life a few months after I'd done the good deed and graduated from college with a degree. Despite having a degree, the only work I could find was a slave-level job in a call center, doing customer service for a major wireless provider.

A good Republican would say, "well, it's better than nothing! You need to work hard and find a better job or better yet, take a second job! Or, better yet, go back to school and get a degree that will earn you money!"

A person with a brain in their head says that there is something very wrong with this picture.

There is nothing like working in a dead-end industry like customer service to see just how bad capitalism, the rabid right with their insane cult-like devotion to Ayn Rand, Israel, and the super wealthy; and the castrated moderate right that calls itself left wing, have failed us. The best and brightest are maligned, while the mediocre and the conformist are held up as ideal; all the while singing in three-part harmony about how wonderful supply-side economics is and you better fucking support the troops!

The result has been a severe uptick in income inequality, more people turning to welfare and food stamps in order to survive, a spike in the cost of living, and two entire generations (mine and the one prior to mine) of working-age people who will never know what it was like to have job security and the income to sustain a middle-class existence.

But of course, nobody in the the government, both the rabidly right wing and the moderately right wing that characterize the Democrat party, will do a damn thing different. Their patrons stand to lose alot of money and influence if any of that should happen.

But now what about those poor people? You know, the ones who need food stamps and Section 8, and Medicaid? Fuck those leeches! CUT CUT CUT! If people die of starvation, who gives a shit-this is AMERICA where you don't need a handout from the government! You pull yourself up by the bootstraps and do it yourself!

By the way, unless you have a means of supporting yourself, it's a wee bit hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Try it sometime.

The funny thing is, you look around Eastern Europe and Latin America, and you can clearly see where the politicians are bought and sold, where there's a tin-pot dictator calling the shots, where crony capitalists hijack the economy, where income inequality is extreme as all getout, where you're constantly under surveillance and the police act with impunity, and think "what a shithole that place is".

It's never occurred to you that we're right on par with those very shitholes you were observing. Perhaps even worse so because our media has done so well hiding what a plutocratic police state America has become.

I can see it right now. Someone from the right will read this post and go "this lazy, brainwashed liberal here is  bitter cuz she doesn't wanna work hard and would rather be a Communist!"

LOL. Communism is just the flip side of your beloved capitalism. One uses material goods for social control, the other reduces humanity to just a commodity to be bought and sold as needed. They both make material goods into god, treat economic activity as a mystical force, and assert itself as a religion (albeit a "secular" one).

I can also see said right winger go "if this communist here doesn't like Amurrika, she should leave".

A thought, I will concede, but a full-on revolt would be alot cheaper and involve less paperwork than moving internationally. Poverty has a way of keeping one tethered.

That, my friends, is why I shredded my Republican registration card and said to hell with you people. Now that I am free of the clutches of the right wing's idiot machine, I will not hesitate to speak out against the right for what they are-the REAL enemies of the state.

tamtam

Charity: Not in the Constitution

read it and weep. how far we have fallen from the intentions of the founding fathers!

Charity: Not in the Constitution

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tamtam

Lockerbie bomber praised, Savage hated?

my favorite columnist ellis washington takes a jab at the british isles for their "compassionate" approach to the notorious lockerbie bomber abdulbaset al-megrahi, all the while scorning them for blacklisting the conservative michael savage.

he should have titled this post "it is indifference", after a quote by the late elie weisel.

Lockerbie bomber praised, Savage hated?

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it's getting harder and harder nowadays to be who you really are. if you're a conservative, you've been marked. i too have been scorned for my views by my peers, but then again...who says that change comes from a cookie cutter?

peace!

tamtam

Catholic nurse ordered to help with abortion

is this kind of treatment in store for me when i finish college and go to work in a hospital setting?

Catholic nurse ordered to help with abortion

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tamtam

why we elect liars as leaders

i found this article on wnd.com. i thought it was a fascinating insight into the mind of a socialist-leaning regime.

Did you ever stop to wonder why most governments – no matter where on earth you look, or what time period you consider – tend toward being dishonest, predatory and tyrannical?

Iraq was one big torture chamber before America and its coalition partners liberated it. North Korea is a national concentration camp, where every citizen is the slave of a demented little dictator named Kim Jong-il (who may or may not still be alive – hard to tell in such a fantastically closed society). Zimbabwe, once a major breadbasket for all of Africa, has sewers clogged with aborted babies, an inflation rate of over 11 million percent, and its average life expectancy has been cut almost in half, from 57 to only 34 years.

Yes, I know, these are some of the worst governments on earth. But a great many other nations are not much better. Burma and Sudan are ruled by brutal military dictatorships and mass slaughter and genocide are normal there. The vast Middle East is made up largely of Arab-Muslim police states, almost two dozen of them, where Islam's strict, medieval Shariah law reduces everyday life to one of repression, cruelty and paralyzing fear at best – and at worst, terrorism, "honor killings" and death by stoning for relatively minor offenses (and sometimes for no offense) – all sugar-coated with a stiflingly rigid and intolerant religious code.

China, with a quarter of the world's population – 1.3 billion souls – is still at core a ruthless and suffocating communist dictatorship, despite its massive economic growth. Russia has deteriorated dramatically in recent years; its judicial system is almost dysfunctional, there's virtually no freedom of the press, and international human rights organizations report widespread abuses, including systematic torture of people held by police.

We could continue on with our tour, but we'd just find that most other governments on this earth, from the Far East to Africa to South America, are corrupt, predatory and power-hungry. Each typically perfumes its tyranny with an idealistic, utopian philosophy like communism or Islamic fundamentalism to help control the population. Even Europe and the United Kingdom, once the crown of Western Civilization, are firmly in the grip of secular (de facto atheistic) socialism, which suffocates their once-vibrant Christian culture and seduces their citizens into giving up their hard-won freedoms, independence and wealth in exchange for "cradle-to-grave" security.

That brings us to America.

The United States of America has a transcendent heritage of liberty rooted in self-government and personal responsibility, the result of a revolutionary 200-year-old "experiment" so gloriously successful it became a shining light in an otherwise mostly dark world.
Yet, in recent decades, we too have been seduced. Many of us have been taught in our universities that the "self-evident truths" the founders relied upon are just outdated and dangerous myths. The press routinely portrays values the founders considered to be evil (high taxes, unrestrained federal power, permissive sexual morals) as good, and good as evil. Same with Hollywood, which once showcased pro-American and patriotic themes, but now glorifies sex, violence and total moral confusion.

With this constant cultural subversion in the background, no wonder millions of Americans have gradually been demoralized into depending on government to solve all of their problems, fueling today's uncontrolled, cancer-like growth in government.

Power-hungry demagogues have always used basically the same methods: They demonize "the rich," implying they obtained their wealth by exploiting and stealing from the downtrodden; they stir up racial or tribal hatreds at every opportunity; they blame convenient scapegoats for problems they themselves have caused; and they promise universal peace and happiness if we'll just give them unlimited power over us.

But they win our support only by appealing to the basest part of us – anger, dissatisfaction, greed and especially envy. They know instinctively that if they can stir up and ignite these dark and addictive passions in all of us, they will seduce us away from our inner dependency on God, and instead create a massive voting bloc of people dependent upon them. The reward for this transference of fidelity is great power for them, and confusion, demoralization and ultimate bondage for us. In its purest form, this phenomenon is known today as Marxism, communism, socialism – the spiritual core of which is raw envy.

Communism, as we know, is atheistic – where the government is the only true god, the giver of blessings, the solver of problems, the dispenser of justice and mercy, the source of civilization's progress. Of course, the only "progress" it actually confers is from freedom to slavery.

And yet, this is exactly the appeal more and more Americans today have been conditioned to respond to, as we have progressively fallen away from the Judeo-Christian values that once animated our culture and institutions. The envy-based system Marx unleashed on the world is alive and well, and in different forms still dominates large parts of the world. In America, it has taken root in the once-noble Democratic Party.

As Americans have succumbed to this socialistic seduction, government has enlarged to its current incomprehensible size and has sucked much of the life and productive capability out of the nation, while feeding its uncontrolled growth.

For instance, here's how energy expert and scientist Arthur Robinson, Ph.D., explains this transformation, focusing on America's scandalous inability to provide for its own energy needs:
Why are American fuel prices so high? Why are food and electricity prices on their way to doubling? Why are economic conditions chaotic? The reason is simple. Americans no longer possess the freedom to produce the goods and services required to maintain their former standard of living. Taxation – both direct and indirect through currency inflation – runaway government regulation and government-sponsored-and-encouraged litigation have reduced the productivity of Americans below that required to maintain their way of life. This tyranny – this economic slavery – has been produced entirely by the federal and state governments of the United States.

There are no resource limitations, technological limitations or geopolitical reasons for the current energy shortages and high prices. These shortages and prices are solely the result of taxation, regulation and litigation that have stifled American energy-producing industries.
Government has also robbed Americans of their very substance by corrupting its money system. Almost a century ago, the U.S. Congress created the Federal Reserve System, handing over to a private banking cartel the crucial responsibility for the nation's money supply, which the people had specifically vested in Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Ever since, middle-class working Americans have seen the value of their money continually diminish – a clandestine form of theft – due to the Fed's inflationary, debt-based, "crank-up-the-printing-press" policies and the abandonment of the gold standard.

If you understand what money really is – it represents your life and substance, it's literally stored energy – you'll see that life itself is being stolen by government. As Texas congressman and money expert Rep. Ron Paul puts it: "From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the '70s, to the burst of the dotcom bubble … every economic downturn suffered by the country over the last 80 years can be traced to Federal Reserve policy."

As citizens struggle to earn enough to support their families and pay their mortgages, the government literally throws their money away. Yes – throws it away. The watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste annually issues its famed "Pig Book" that details the preceding year's wasteful spending by the federal government. You know, like giving $400,000 of your money to the Sparta Teapot Museum in Sparta, N.C., or $1 million for the "Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative" or $50 million for an "indoor rainforest" in Coralville, Iowa, or a thousand and one other wasteful and unconstitutional expenditures.

The level of squandering of taxpayers' substance is a wonder. As just one example, a recent audit showed the U.S. Defense Department wasted $100 million on unused commercial airline tickets it had purchased, never bothering to collect refunds even though the tickets were totally returnable and refundable.

And government doesn't just waste your money – it sometimes uses it to fund evil. Not too many years back, the public was less than thrilled to learn that the federal government was funneling their hard-earned tax dollars into support for obscene, perverse and blasphemous "art." There was the "homoerotic artwork" of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, featuring images too repugnant to be described here. Then there was Andres Serrano's "Pi-- Christ," consisting of a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine (as well as "Pi-- Pope," with the image of the pope in urine). And of course there was David Wojnarowicz's "Tongues of Flame," depicting Jesus shooting up heroin. All funded by you.

It's not just obscene art we've paid for; it's obscene politicians too. We have a never-ending stream of prostitute-loving governors and other "public servants": President Bill Clinton had a predatory sexual relationship with a White House intern barely older than his daughter. Then there was New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey who held a press conference, wife stoically at his side, to announce he was coming out as a "gay American," and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer who frequented high-priced prostitutes, and presidential candidate Jonathan Edwards who cheated on his cancer-stricken wife while accepting the "Father of the Year" award. The revelations are endless – congressmen preying on teenage page boys, frequenting prostitutes, "coming out" as gay, and betraying their sacred marriage vows.

All this corruption and outrageous behavior shouldn't be surprising. The fact is, a great many human beings are just plain dishonest and predatory, lying and stealing in a multitude of obvious and subtle ways. We all have selfish tendencies. For example, think about a typical male fixated on an attractive female walking down the street. Is this love? No, he just has exploitation and selfish gratification in mind. The point is: With virtually all of us beset by typical human flaws like selfishness, egotism, lust, envy, greed, anger, insecurity and the need for approval, how on earth do we expect the same flawed human beings to suddenly manifest great love and nobility when they get into government? Doesn't make much sense, does it? That's precisely why our founders wisely created a national government with very limited powers and lots of internal checks and balances.

What we need to understand here is that it's not just deranged psychopaths like Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe that give us tyrannical government; regular politicians and bureaucrats do it too. As long as they're unprincipled and self-serving, more inclined to preserve their job, personal advantage, wealth and comfort than to risk it all by championing the public good, evil will end up running rampant in that society.

I know this sounds pretty negative, but we really need to understand why it is that governments just about always end up playing god and controlling our lives.

Let's pause again and reflect momentarily on the core reality of our lives. Are you ready?
There really is an omniscient God, and He really does create human beings whose intended destiny is to discover ultimate fulfillment by being obedient to His leading in all things. And our life goes badly – and is supposed to go badly – if we rebel against His will and defy His laws, which are not only found in the Holy Bible, but are also "written" clearly inside each of us.
If we fail to find this inner fidelity to the One who created and sustains us and directs our paths, then we automatically designate someone or something else to fill that necessary role: We will worship another god. Moreover, when we are in rebellion against the true God, we need lies and deception to keep our pursuing conscience at bay – and people who enjoy power are all too eager to step up and play that role for us.

That's right: We elect liars as leaders because we actually need lies if we're rebelling against God's inward leading. Lies do a great job of "serving" us with an illusion of worth and righteousness (that's why we believe them compulsively), as we rebel against the real God, Who is always revealing our faults to us – except that most of us don't want to hear it.
Since bad government relies so totally on persuasive lying, let's take a look at that phenomenon. There's more to it than you might think.

Why politicians lie, and why we believe them

In "The Marketing of Evil," I explore many powerful manipulation techniques used to alter Americans' attitudes toward everything from abortion to divorce to homosexuality. But there's one technique that reigns supreme as the king of all propaganda weapons – lying. To make evil look good – and good appear to be evil – you have to lie.

The power of lies is not so much in the little "white lies" that are part of the fabric of most of our lives. It's in the big lies. It's paradoxical, but we're more likely to believe big lies than small ones.
How can this be? Wouldn't the big, outrageous lie be more easily discerned and resisted than the small, less consequential lie? You'd think so, but you'd be wrong.

There's a dark magic in boldly lying, in telling a "big lie" – repeatedly, with a straight face and with confidence and authority.

One of the greatest liars of the last century – Adolf Hitler – taught that the bigger the lie, the more believable it was.

During World War II, the U.S. government's Office of Strategic Services – a precursor to today's CIA – assessed Hitler's methods this way:

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Hitler himself, in his 1925 autobiography "Mein Kampf," explained with eerie insight the fantastic power of lying:

… [I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes. ...

Truly the words of an evil genius. But let's bring this explanation down to earth: Suppose, just prior to Election Day, one candidate accuses his opponent of immoral or illegal behavior. Even if the charges are totally false, and even if the accused candidate answers the charges credibly and effectively, "the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it." In plain English, no matter how effectively the accused answers the charges, some people will still believe he's guilty, and many others will still retain varying degrees of doubt and uncertainty regarding the accused, who may well lose the election due to the cloud hanging over his head. This, as Hitler said, is the magic of lying that "is known to all expert liars in this world. …"

The "doubt-inducing" quality inherent in a "big lie" is actually more powerful even than Hitler explained in "Mein Kampf." Let's say someone tells you a real whopper – like, "Your husband/wife is cheating on you. I saw it with my own eyes." Although it's totally untrue, the big lie has the ability to upset you in a way the little, everyday white lie doesn't. And when you get upset over anything, guess what? You feel a little bit of guilt for being upset, a little angry, a little confused, perhaps a little fearful – and voila, all those conflicting emotions cause you to be unable to think straight, and you can easily end up compulsively believing the lie. To put it another way: When you're upset, the lie takes on a mysterious quality of attraction and believability, as though a protective force-field has temporarily been disabled, allowing the lie to enter your mental inner sanctum.

Hitler's principle is exactly what unprincipled leaders everywhere bank on to get their way with the public.

Using lies to create a crisis

One of the most creative uses of lying – and a key tactic for bending a population to your will – is the creation of a crisis. Now, anyone even superficially familiar with the history of the political left has heard references to the strategy of creating crises as a means of transforming society. You've probably heard of the "Hegelian dialectic," a key Marxist technique whereby an idea ("We need more gun control laws!") generates its opposite ("No, we don't need more gun laws, we just need tougher sentencing of criminals!"), which leads to a reconciliation of opposites, or synthesis ("OK, we'll compromise by passing new gun-control laws, but watering them down somewhat"). This is how socialist progress is achieved "peacefully" – through conflict or crisis – and always in the direction of greater socialism.

The problem is, this "crisis-creation" talk just sounds so wicked, so foreign to us, that it's hard to believe our fellow human beings, no matter how confused or messed up, could actually engage in such a practice. But it's not only true; it's actually a common part of everyday life.

Consider this non-political example and how it illustrates the power of a crisis to mold people to the deceiver's will: In a very sad child-abduction case, a little girl was approached after school by a man she didn't know. He claimed her house was burning down, that her parents were busy putting out the fire, and that he was a friend of the parents who had asked him to pick up their daughter and take her to them. The crisis – and the emotional upset the girl experienced over the thought of her house being on fire and her parents in danger – drowned out her normal caution about getting into a car with a stranger. You guessed it: The stranger was a predator who had concocted the lie for the sole purpose of tricking and upsetting the girl into going with him so he could brutalize and murder her.

This tragic story makes an important point: A crisis throws us off our guard, upsets us and inclines us to make decisions and accept "solutions" we normally would reject.
Politically, the strategy is to create a crisis, or exploit a real one, by throwing people into a mode where they can be redirected toward a predetermined "solution" – whether it's imposing "carbon penalties" on businesses in response to fears of global warming, or a trillion-dollar taxpayer-funded corporate bailout in response to a sudden "financial meltdown," or draconian gun-control laws in response to a rash of school shootings. We're talking about solutions people would normally reject, but now in a crisis accept, and as a result establish a new baseline of what is normal – which becomes the starting point for pushing the nation still further leftward in response to the next "crisis."

Let's look at a few examples of fake "crises." They're all around us:

Small towns and cities across America pull a certain stunt with depressing regularity around election time. They claim that if taxpayers don't vote in favor of a new tax levy, they'll be forced to eliminate or drastically cut back police and fire protection – two items the people actually want from their government. I once lived in a town where the city council and city manager decided that the way to force voters to approve their new tax levy would be to threaten to completely eliminate police protection within the city limits between midnight and 8 a.m. No joke. This was a crisis of their own creation and for their own obvious purposes. After all, the city council members and their budget committee could have re-prioritized their budget to cut back on street sweeping, park maintenance, library hours, raises and benefits for themselves, or other things less crucial to the public safety and welfare, and gotten by on the existing tax base without leaving the citizens vulnerable to criminals every night. As I said, this is a common tactic in cities and towns up and down the turnpike.

The radical environmental movement's primary modus operandi is the creation of crises where none exist. The "spotted owl" crisis in my home state of Oregon is a great example. Environmentalists claimed the northern spotted owl was dying out because of commercial logging of old-growth forests where the birds nested. So in 1991 a compliant judge halted logging in Oregon's national forests, causing the loss of about 30,000 jobs, an 80 percent reduction in timber harvesting, a consequent decrease in the supply of lumber and sky-high prices. I remember – I was there. However, it wasn't owls that environmentalists were in love with; they were in love with stopping loggers from harvesting any trees in Oregon's old-growth forests. The owls just provided the needed "crisis."

Oh, here's the rest of the story. Long after Oregon's timber-based economy was crippled by the court-ordered logging ban, the northern spotted owl population inexplicably continued to decline. Surprise! New research showed logging in old-growth forests wasn't a problem at all. The real problem, it turned out, was competition from another larger and more aggressive species of owl that liked the same habitat and food as the spotted owl.

The truth is, ever since "socialism" lost its luster as the salvation of mankind (because it has never actually worked anywhere), the environmental movement has become one of the most powerful, modern battering rams of the left for advancing the same socialist agenda. And of course, the biggest environmental cause of all is global warming.

Today, a generation of children worldwide is being brainwashed into believing they face imminent doom – monster hurricanes and tornadoes, polar ice melting and raising ocean levels, leading to catastrophic flooding, tidal waves and other cataclysmic events. Many have been forced to sit in classrooms and watch Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," in which he claims the oceans may rise by 20 feet, leading to worldwide devastation. Not to be outdone, NBC reporter Meredith Vieira warned on national TV of the oceans rising – are you ready? – 200 feet. Thus, while the kids suffer from doomsday nightmares, grown-ups respond to the "crisis" by clamoring for "solutions" offered by the environmentalist crisis-creators.

And yet, not only is there absolutely no scientific basis for either NBC's 200 feet or Gore's 20 feet figure, in reality tens of thousands of scientists have gone on record stating their belief that man-caused global warming is a fake crisis. Indeed, as of this writing, more than 30,000 American scientists, including over 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a petition stating: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

Another legacy of phony environmental crises is our fear of nuclear power. In truth, nuclear energy is clean, homegrown and abundant, and its safety record is extremely good. Many other nations – including France, Russia and Japan – have long taken advantage of this amazing power source. But irrational fear, in response to an environmentalist-created "crisis" mentality, has long gripped the American consciousness and contributed greatly to our dangerous national dependence on foreign energy sources.

The "Fairness Doctrine" is a freedom-destroying solution to a crisis that doesn't exist. With the exception of talk radio and certain online and cable TV news offerings, virtually the entire news media establishment is overwhelmingly left-of-center. Yet some congressmen and senators claim there's an unfair conservative bias in the media (talk radio) that demands "balance" by legally forcing radio stations to provide air time to "opposing views" – that is, to the left-leaning views that utterly dominate the rest of the information media.

Racism is largely a manufactured crisis in America today. So-called "black leaders" like Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton are long-time professional race-baiters who thrive on stirring up racial suspicions and hatreds. In reality, America is probably the least racist nation in the world. Yes, we had slavery, but that ceased a century and a half ago when we sacrificed more than 600,000 American lives in the Civil War (more than in all other American wars combined) to exorcise it from our nation. Yes, we had segregation – but we long ago repented of this and made it illegal. Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s led by Martin Luther King, Jr., the vast majority of Americans – hundreds of millions of normal, middle-class citizens – believe deeply and wholeheartedly in the color-blind America King envisioned.

And yet Sharpton, Jackson and others have thrived for decades on literally creating the perception of racism where none existed – for their own benefit. From the fake rape claims of Tawana Brawley to the fake rape claims against the Duke lacrosse team-members – the false accusation of racism remains a powerful weapon of the left.

Similarly, charges of rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and hate-crimes in the U.S., leveled by groups like the ACLU and CAIR, constitute a totally fake crisis. Actually, Americans have demonstrated extraordinary restraint and magnanimity toward Muslims since the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent revelations of widespread Islamic antipathy toward America. In fact, according to a 2006 FBI report, between 2001 and 2006 anti-Islamic hate crimes in the U.S. decreased by 68 percent!

We could go on and on – fake crises are everywhere. People who want to manipulate and remold us are always creating crises, small or large, real or imagined, to use as leverage. That leverage, to be precise, is our emotional upset and our resulting inability to think straight and make sensible decisions. Repeat: Just upsetting us through any means whatsoever constitutes a mini-crisis – by means of which we can be manipulated. Although being upset by some injustice or cruelty seems like a "small" crisis in the scheme of things – it is the basis for all other crises, even the largest.

If you think about it, this process of remolding us through crises is a perversion of what God does with His children. He creates a crisis – or perhaps more accurately, allows a crisis to develop in our lives because of our ignorance of His laws – which cries out for resolution. Our marriage and family are in crisis, or our health is in crisis, or our finances are in crisis – and yet if we are sincere, truth-loving souls, that crisis mysteriously has a way of maturing and changing us, and we end up growing in His direction.

You might well wonder what kind of person could be so deranged that they'd create a phony crisis for the purpose of exercising power over others. But this shouldn't be hard to comprehend. For one thing, lots of us are so troubled and insecure that we develop an unhealthy need to be needed by others – a very common syndrome. Consciously or unconsciously, we tempt or corrupt people into becoming dependent on us, so as to fulfill our unhealthy need to be needed.
Moreover, consider that if you are consumed by pride – in other words, if you're a big egomaniac – you actually have a subconscious need or desire for other people to fail. Why? Because your own sense of worth is based on comparing yourself with other people, and particularly with cultivating others to look up to you. Unfortunately, this need for adulation can be fulfilled only if you weaken and fool other people into depending on you for their happiness.

So, if you're a dishonest, ambitious and manipulating politician like so many, even though you haven't murdered anyone, haven't committed genocide, haven't put people feet-first through a plastic-shredder like Saddam Hussein, you're still spreading evil and misery throughout the land.

If this syndrome describes you (whether in politics or in your marriage or at your workplace), you may not be aware of the forces working through you. Oh, you may occasionally catch a fleeting glimpse of it, but you quickly escape from this painful, humiliating realization. For a fraction of a second you see it, but then it's gone.

But let me ask anyway: Have you ever seen another person lose his temper, or fail in some other way – and felt a very slight, perverse sense of satisfaction? Or, when someone has done really well and received credit for it, or made a lot of money, or just expressed an obviously brilliant idea, have you ever noticed a subtle feeling of envy rearing its head inside you?

It's OK. Most everyone has experienced feelings like this at some point – perhaps often. But if you're a sincere soul and you are willing to observe these base feelings emanating from the dark side – and if deep down you really don't agree with those feelings – then in a very real sense those feelings are not you. In a sense, there are two of you, the real you being the observer who is chagrined over the dark thoughts and feelings rising from the deep. Watching those thoughts and feelings honestly leads to repentance and real change.

However, many people are not so sincere. And these type of thoughts and the dark forces behind them come to dominate their lives, albeit unconsciously. So without being a Saddam Hussein, but just being a prideful, selfish, denial-based person, you can do terrible things to other human beings – deceive them, betray them, enslave them. You can destroy lives and civilizations.
And this, once again, is exactly why we have limited government in America – because power corrupts, and now we know why.

By the way, what we're talking about here – the tendency for government to be lying and predatory – didn't start with Karl Marx. It has ever been with the human race. More than 2,000 years ago, the great orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero foretold the decline and fall of the Roman Empire with these words, which exquisitely described the ravages wrought by lying politicians:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

When all is said and done, we elect liars as leaders because we need lies. And we need lies because we haven't found God.

Lies that fulfill us in a wrong way are offered to us constantly, in every area of life: If our marriage in trouble, there's always "the other woman" or "the other man" who will embrace and reassure us that we're great people and that our spouse is the problem. But their lying "solution" only makes things immeasurably worse. If we're depressed or full of rage, but not really interested in understanding ourselves, we have experts eager to prescribe drugs to mask our symptoms – a false "solution" without repentance and hope of real change. Or we can bypass the doctor and go to the liquor store or criminal drug dealer to procure another wrong "solution."

William Penn said it all: "If man is not governed by God, he will be ruled by tyrants." Freedom apart from God is just an illusion of pride. This is because when we are at war with our conscience, something has to sustain our denial, our secret war against the still, small voice of Truth within – hence our need for lies. And government, in the form of other prideful human beings, is only too happy to oblige.

John Adams, a principal crafter of our Constitution, and later our second president, understood this very well, writing: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

But the Bible puts it most eloquently and succinctly of all: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty." (2 Corinthians 3:17)

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