Reflections on the occasion of my birthday.

Keep your children in the real world. Yes, it’s a messy, dangerous place. But at least you can look your opponent in the eyes, know who you are fighting, and defeat him.

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It was my birthday yesterday! What did I do? I went to a spin class in the morning. I’m a certified spin instructor and I taught up until recently, but now I enjoy the ride. I spent the weekend with my daughter and my grandsons. It was wonderful. I have so much to be thankful for.

I tried to get this piece out yesterday but, somehow, the day got away from me. So, here are some reflections on the occasion of my birthday, mostly about our children because it is so much on my mind.

June 6th is a day of freedom-fighting, upheaval and controversy so it’s a perfect day for me to have come kicking and screaming into this world. Here are two of the most momentous moments from history that happened on this day:

The 6-Day war in 1967. A war between Israel and its Arab neighbors that reshaped the modern Middle East. My family just happened to be in Egypt right before the war, and we barely escaped over the mountains into Turkey before the borders were closed. I celebrated my 11th birthday in Ankara.

D-Day, the name given to the June 6, 1944, invasion of the beaches at Normandy in northern France by troops from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries during World War II.

I almost didn’t make it to the age of one, let alone being here now, at the age of 67.

As a newborn I was very ill. The doctor wasn’t sure but thought it was meningitis. One night he told my parents there was nothing more that could be done. Most likely I die before morning. My dad held me in his arms all night long and prayed for me to live. By morning, the fever was gone, and I fully recovered.

My dad loved telling me that story, letting me know how much my parents loved me and how powerful prayer can be. On the other hand, it put me under a lot of pressure. “God has let you live for a reason. You need to find that reason and obey His call.” This I was reminded of over and over.

I didn’t want that pressure. Especially as a teenager. I just wanted to be like other kids, but somehow, I never could, and I spent a lot of years in conflict about this.

We all need to remember that life isn’t just one moment. We have been conditioned over the years by master manipulators to think that we need results now. We want the quick fix. We think that winning means having a bigger house or an extra car, the latest in technological devices. Or we think it means being given recognition for our good works, winning an award, having the biggest church with the most members, being first in a race. Yes, of course, it’s good to work hard and achieve results, I’m not saying it isn’t. But what is it that really matters when all the extraneous stuff is taken away and we stand stripped and bare before our Maker?

My dad and I used to run together, and he would say to me, set a goal for yourself and achieve that goal, but don’t make it unrealistic. And don’t get all puffed up with pride if you do achieve it. It’s by God’s grace that you achieve anything! The person who wins a race because they are blessed by God with a natural talent and a body made for racing is no more a winner than the person who comes in last, but who perhaps overcame a terrible illness and never gave up but kept on going. In a way, that person who came in last is stronger and more deserving of praise, at least in God’s book, because they faced so many more obstacles.

Teaching “High Risk Offenders”, boys facing life sentences for serious crimes, at Barry J. Nidorff Juvenile Hall, Los Angeles.

I have a lot of compassion for everyone, not just those who appear deserving of compassion. I raised my children as a single parent on the “mean” streets of Los Angeles suburbia and I saw the clear distinctions between rich and poor, privileged and unprivileged and how the system truly is designed to keep certain classes of people “in their place” and not allow them to succeed.

Many Christians take on a holier-than-thou attitude about raising their children. They will say if children don’t turn out well, it’s the parents’ fault, because their children turned out perfectly well and that proves it. And well done for raising your children in a godly environment. But don’t judge other people until you walk in their shoes. If children doing well in life is all thanks to the parents, then most children in the world don’t stand a chance. Such reasoning would mean children do not have a will of their own. It would mean we are all the product of choices people made before us and we can never break that mold. It would mean that those good parents, too, are just the product of the parents that came before them, so how can they have anything to boast about? They didn’t do anything special; they were just lucky to be born in the right environment. It would mean that all children with terrible parents are then doomed to failure. And what’s the definition of a good parent or a terrible parent anyway, or a good or a bad child? Life is (hopefully) long and we all have lessons to learn and journeys to map out. There are a million different reasons why a person makes the choices they do, and we do not have the wisdom to judge. Only God can do that.

In this drug culture we now live in, those who get sucked in by the street and become addicts are looked down upon while those who get sucked into Big Pharma and become its slave are looked at as okay. One is legal drug addiction, and one isn’t.

Having started a creative writing program for incarcerated youth in Los Angeles in the 1990s, I have seen every possible story of tragedy you could imagine. I taught in all the juvenile halls in the county and in the camps and many rehab facilities. I worked with children who came from the most horrific family situations and were facing life sentences. Today, some of them are doctors and lawyers, teachers, others are married and have children of their own, working at ordinary jobs just like anyone else. They were given a second, or maybe a third or a fourth chance and they got it together.

Anyone who has that demon of drugs on their back—and it got there when they were a child, through no fault of their own—and who overcomes that demon deserves so much respect. And those who cannot overcome, who are we to judge them? Jesus certainly didn’t. We should judge the companies who have always tried to rope children in with their marketing strategies, cigarette companies, for example, who know if they can capture an impressionable child young, they have them for life.

This is what is happening in every aspect of society now. In the pharma industry, in the tech industry, you name it. They are capturing our children and making them into slaves of the system.

Once a child gets in the system, be it through legal means, like coming under the care of a psychiatrist and being prescribed drugs, or illegal means, like getting caught on the street with drugs and being put into the correctional system, either way, it turns out the same, except society has been conditioned not to see it that way. The parents of the child under the care of a psychiatrist, therapist, psychologist, whatever, are looked at as responsible. They have the money to pay for premium insurance, or if they don’t, they work hard and pay the fees, believing they are doing the right thing. On the other hand, the parents of the child who finds their “medication” on the street, or the one who maybe starts out by stealing it from their own parents’ medicine cabinet, is entrepreneurial and then starts selling it to his peers, is looked down upon.

I’ve seen every kind of scenario, trust me, and it would surprise you to know what really goes on with kids once they walk out that door of their parents’ home into the big, wide world of America’s cities.

In my essay The Chinafication of the Western World, I write about how the powers-that-be made sure the real world became so dangerous for our children, especially during Covid, that parents gladly kept their children locked away at home and on smart devices, thinking that it was much safer. It wasn’t. The drug dealer or pedophile that once stood on the street corner is now luring your child inside a chat room or on the dark web.

Do you know the difference between the dark web and the deep web? If you don’t, you should find out. The surface web is all the information that search engines like Google will find for you. But that is only about 0.03% of the Internet. Just because Google can’t find it (or keeps it hidden from you) it’s still there in the World Wide Web; it’s just in the harder-to-access depth of the web.

Technology is the language of our children. It is second nature to them to search and increasingly, nothing is hidden from them. Childhood is no longer a place of protected innocence.

The dark web websites are “not indexed by search engines and are theoretically possible to visit with complete anonymity. The dark web is not the same thing as the deep web. In fact, the dark web is only a small fraction of the deep web, which you could almost compare to an ever-expanding universe in itself. The dark web contains mostly benign sites, such as password-protected e-mail accounts, certain parts of paid subscription services like Netflix, and sites accessible only through online forms.”

Well, they say mostly benign but here’s a quote from my essay about it:

In 2018, I interviewed two young women who had spent a lot of time at my house in their teenage years. The result was two articles for NAILED magazine called The SFV Interviews: Growing up a Girl on the Mean Streets of LA Suburbia.

Kashmir

Here’s Kashmir, describing the San Fernando Valley:

The SFV is a place that still triggers my PTSD when I return. A place where I have never had a single female friend that hasn’t been stalked, molested, assaulted, sexually cyber-bullied, or raped.

Heroin is absolutely rampant in the SFV. Ecstasy and coke are the least of your worries, and they are ever-present as well. Date rape is mundanely common and yet women are still in constant competition with each other rather than forming a sisterhood. LA glamour is this huge priority. It is constantly strived for, while also publicly rebuked. It’s a show.

Any parent who told their children high school wasn’t a beauty pageant in the SFV lied.

Kashmir spoke those words only three years ago, before everything shut down, promising us safety. Before COVID forced us all into boxes where we could lie to our hearts content and live inside our lies, growing ever more comfortable, knowing we would not have to face real people or look them in the eyes and explain ourselves.

Locked up, at least our children were safer, we thought.

Except that in 2021 alone, sex trafficking cases surged 185% in Los Angeles.

In 2020, 600,000 Americans went missing. What happened to all those people?

All this and more pales in comparison to the fearmongering of the media over the Covid-19 crisis with its variants that kept on mutating into ever more virulent strains. The world really isn’t safe now. Not even a little bit. Not even if parents do everything right to protect their children, it will never be enough. The air is not good to breathe. Your neighbor cannot be trusted. Nor your own family, because they might carry the virus into your home and give it to you.

What loving parent wouldn’t want to save their children from all of that?

If you could be assured that your children would never be raped; never be pimped out for porn or prostitution; never be wooed into a gang; never be convinced to slam heroin into their veins so that forever after they had a demon on their back; or even if they could simply opt out of the relentless boredom of working in an office under fluorescent lights the way that you once did, wouldn’t you do whatever it took to spare them all of that agony?

If it meant giving up your children, mind, body and soul, to the State, wouldn’t it be worth it to know they were safe?

If you knew that your child could live in a world protected by the State, but the price of that protection was having them injected with an experimental drug, would you do it?

If you knew that an invisible Quantum Dot 'Tattoo' could be used to ID your vaccinated child, so that even beyond their health status, you were assured of where they were and what they were doing, and that they were always topped up with whatever medication they needed, would you do it?

You could rest easy, knowing that instead of being out on the dangerous city streets, your children were in a Metaverse of their own making. No matter what happened in there, it couldn’t harm them. They were well protected.

You do not see yourself as deprived. Far from it. You are thankful for your circumstances. You are thankful because the State has convinced you that the real world is too dangerous to live in. The scientists and educators, the government officials and influencers that you trust so completely have told you so. This is all for the good of the planet and for the good of humanity. If you didn’t do your part, climate change would destroy everything. Disease would ravage the human race.

Individuals going rogue are what’s wrong with the planet. If everyone would just comply, how perfect the world would be.

Right now, as I write this, the entire human race is being convinced of this mindset. Every successful lie has a modicum of truth. Yes, the world is dangerous. But we have always lived by faith in a messy world, taken our chances when we crossed the road, born our children in pain and prayed they would be okay, watched them fall and get up again; learn and sometimes not.

But now, the meaning of life has been turned upside down. The risks far outweigh the rewards. Allow the State to take care of you so you never again have to worry about unpredictability. Let your children play on their technological devices. That is where you can be sure they are safe.

But now those evildoers are inside children’s bedrooms late at night when their parents are asleep. They are living inside devices and influencing children’s minds.

Online abuse of children is exploding across the internet.

Online child-on-child abuse is often associated with cyberbullying. However, that is only a part of it. Ofsted explains that it can also include:

• physical and sexual abuse

• sexual harassment and violence

• emotional harm

• teenage relationships abuse

• grooming for sexual or criminal exploitation

On the internet a child can be anything. They can hide behind a persona that they create. So can an adult who wants to exploit them. The line between reality and fantasy is fading fast and all of the ways truth is being disrupted in the real world is a bridge towards leading children into a fake world where anything goes.

Take heed with this lawsuit against Reddit, an online platform that many children know very well.

According to CNN:

On May 30th, the Supreme Court declined to take up a case from a victim of sex trafficking who sought to hold Reddit, an online platform, responsible for hosting images of child pornography on the website.

The dispute was the latest targeting a section of federal law that offers broad immunity to online platforms. Earlier this month, the court handed Google and Twitter a victory preserving their ability under the same law – Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – to avoid lawsuits stemming from terrorist-related content.

In the case at hand, the woman identified as “Jane Doe” in court papers was joined by parents of minors who say their daughters were coerced into providing sexually explicit images that were later posted on the site.

The lawyer charged that the website “creates a thriving platform for child pornography and sex trafficking” and that it “knowingly benefits from child sex trafficking through its receipt and distribution of child pornography.”

According to the UN:

“Traffickers are currently using technology to profile, recruit, control and exploit their victims as well as using the Internet, especially the dark web, to hide illegal materials stemming from trafficking and their real identities from investigators.”  

The illicit proceeds from this highly profitable crime are also being laundered online through crypto currencies, which makes it easier for traffickers to receive, hide and move large amounts of money with less risk of being detected.  

Today, the Internet provides easy access to a much larger group of potential victims because traditional physical and geographical limitations no longer exist.

Traffickers create fake websites or post advertisements on legitimate employment portals and social networking websites. 

This is why I repeat over and over again, keep your children and your grandchildren in the real world. Yes, it’s a messy, dangerous place. But at least you can face your opponent, look him in the eyes and fight to defeat him. You can refuse to give these devices to your children, no matter how much they stomp their feet and complain about it. You can take them out of public schools and make the needed sacrifices to teach them at home, if you cannot afford private schools.

All of this isn’t necessarily the answer, either I’m sorry to say. At some point, as children get older, they need to be educated to the truth of what is happening because unless you live in a fortress or the middle of the jungle, they will be exposed to it. Our children need to be the ones who grow up into internet warriors who know how to fight inside the machines because that is the language they speak. Perhaps this is what the future holds. We need to start now. Courses should be created to educate our children and parents should not hold back on exposing the truth to them when the age is right to tell them, because innocence is being taken away from not just children of “bad” parents, but from all children.

This is my message on the day of my birth. The day of many momentous occurrences in history.

Like Tucker Carlson’s first episode on Twitter. Yes, that happened yesterday.

Okay, you might say, that doesn’t quite compare with the 6 Day War or D-Day. But Tucker’s firing from Fox was momentous. It was critical in ushering in the death of free speech, which I talk about in my essay Biden Totalitarian Regime (BTR). I quote CNN saying, "...holding on to Tucker Carlson comes with more risk than reward. Carlson is not a team player, and in fact is uncontrollable."

I urge us all to become “uncontrollable.

I confess to an ever-clearer premonition that conservatives are being herded into Twitter like sheep to the slaughter, thinking they will find freedom, when in reality they will wake up to realize they’ve been captured in a prison of their own making and it’s too late to find a way out. Or perhaps the earthly gods, like Elon Musk, have done such a good job with their illusions and delusions that most will not realize they are in a prison at all. And people like me who tell them otherwise will only make them increasingly angry.

Well, these are my reflections on the occasion of my birthday. Thank you for reading and for listening. God bless you all. And if you haven’t yet, please subscribe!