lost cause

Shifting your perspective on what it means to be lost and making a powerful distinction that will grant you the inspiration to see yourself differently.

Journal Prompt: What are you lost from?

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Episode Overview: 

Ryan King is a pastor in London, who also spends time in Ukraine. He shares what ethnic prejudice looks like in Europe and how that is similar and different than in the US.

Links & Show Notes:

Ryan’s article for us on the time he blogged about the lost cause and his dad confronting him over it. 

To learn more about United? We Pray, follow us on Twitter and keep exploring our website. Please consider rating the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and subscribe using your favorite podcast client to hear more!

Star Trek: Age of Discovery is a fan podcast for the Star Trek Universe shows, including Paramount + shows STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, STAR TREK: PICARD, STAR TREK: SHORT TREKS, STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS, STAR TREK: PRODIGY and STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS.

Subscribe to Star Trek: Age of Discovery in Apple Podcast by CLICKING HERE. Also, the show is available on Google Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and iHeartRADIO.

Email the show at startrekaod@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at @StarTrekAoD and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/StarTrekAoD/. Visit our website at http://startrekaod.net, where we offer additional articles on the Star Trek canon, interesting sidebar issues, and aspects of the show.

How to watch Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery is available exclusively in the USA on Paramount +. It airs in Canada on CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on CraveTV. Paramount + launch on Sky in the U.K., Ireland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria sometime in 2022.

How to watch Star Trek: Picard

Star Trek: Picard is available exclusively in the USA on  Paramount +. It airs in Canada on Space and streams on CraveTV. It is available on Amazon Prime everywhere else in the world.

How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is available exclusively in the USA on Paramount +. It airs in Canada on Space and streams on CraveTV. Currently, it isn’t available anywhere else in the world.

How to watch Star Trek: Lower Decks

Star Trek: Lower Decks is available exclusively in the USA on Paramount +. It airs in Canada on Space and streams on CraveTV. Currently, it isn’t available anywhere else in the world.

How to watch Star Trek: Prodigy

Star Trek: Prodigy is available exclusively in the USA on Nickelodeon after a premier run on Paramount +. It airs in Canada on Space and streams on CraveTV. Currently, it isn’t available anywhere else in the world.

2021 © Star Trek: Age of Discovery

EPISODE CREDITS:

Produced and edited by Gary Anderson

LINKS

Website: startrekaod.net

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Ken Fong and Ken Kemp review Fong's powerful conversation with Dr. Russell Jeung, named one of the Top 100 Global Influencers by TIME Magazine. Dr. Jeung is co-founder of Stop AAPI-HATE (Asian American hate). Conservative author, Jennifer Rubin's Washington Post article suggests that Evangelicals can never get what they really want. The recent Virginia election (Republican Youngkin defeats Democrat McAuliffe) brings the great divide into sharp focus. The two call up "dispensationalism" as a long-time filter for Biblical interpretation and "Biblical World-View."  The "Lost Cause" narrative drives much to this agenda. If this is all a failure of "discipleship" or "catechism" then what sort of discipleship would have made a difference? Replacement theory drives much of the fear of the loss of power.

Listen to Ken Fong - http://asianamericapodcast.com/

Become a Patron: http://patreon.com/beachedwhitemale

In this episode, Becky & Paul discuss the  sophomore album "Happier Than Ever" by Billie Eilish.  We were at very opposite ends of the spectrum with this album and had a heck of a lot to debate this episode!

Join in the conversation and let us know if you agree or disagree with our opinions!

TWITTER: @ratemybop

FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/ratemybop/

INSTAGRAM: @ratemybop

EMAIL: ratemyboppodcast@gmail.com

Buddy, Dylan & Simon review Billie Eilish's new album, Happier Than Ever. Their first experience with Billie's music, thoughts on the previous album, first impressions, an quick overall review and a track by track review/summary.

• 00.00.00 - Intro
• 00.10.42   - First Impressions and Overall Review
• 00.22.25  - Track By Track Review
• 01.54.45   - Outro

HOST

• Buddy Watson - @Buddywatson12
• Radio Watson - @RadioWatson_

GUESTS

• Dylan Blight - @vivaladil
• Explosion Network
• Simon Blackburn - @precisepath
• Take My Tone
• Liz Dexic

PLATFORMS

• APPLE      - bit.ly/RDWApple
• SPOTIFY - bit.ly/RDWSpot
• GOOGLE  - bit.ly/RDWPlay
• SIMPLEC - bit.ly/RDWSCast

Jefferson Davis was never president of all the United States, but he was president of half of them.

Follow Davis as parlays his status as a Mexican-American war hero into a political career as a fiery southern radical, serves as Secretary of War, get's his dream job as general of the confederate Mississippi armies, and days later gets the job he never asked for nor wanted - President of the Confederacy. We'll take a close look at the major decisions he made that helped shape the outcome of the Civil War

While we're at it, we'll also look at the Myth of the Lost Cause - a bit of pro confederate revisionism that has tinted how we remember the Civil War in the friendliest way possible for the confederates who started it.

Bibliography:
1. Embattled Rebel - James McPherson
2. Abraham Lincoln – David Herbert Donald
3. Grant – Jean Edward Smith

THE PUNISHER, is a comic book character who is an ex-military, badass vigilante. He is all dark and broody, and smashy and gunsy.

In 2019 the Punisher death’s head skull logo became conflated with the police movement ‘blue lives matter’ and ‘the thin blue line.’ What we want to do, is not only recognize where this comes from, but how it works in our society, despite it’s myriad contradictions.

PART I:
becoming the punisher

Did you know that baby birds, shortly after their eyes open, instinctually know the shape of a predator bird’s silhouette? They are born with this knowledge. When a non-predator flies over, they just keep on chirping and pooping, but the second a predator’s silhouette comes into view they shut up and scrunch down. This is called the Hawk/Goose effect.

Now, police, once wearing brown or light blue, have almost uniformly shifted to black. Pair this up with bulky body armor, sunglasses to prevent reading the eyes, monosyllabic encounters, and a utility belt laden with human submission tools, and we see the shaping of a predator. 

Here, we begin to engage with the aesthetics, the construction of symbols and a form that signals something… in this case power and violence. 

In his comic Strip, “About Face,” Nate Powell maps out this transition of the militarized “eternal warrior” as “forever innocent,” linked to fighting for “lost causes” of the past, like Vietnam or the Confederacy. This misspent youth fighting other men’s wars means they are ultimately innocent, and used. 

Upon returning home from an unpopular war, they bring back the military signs as “a shield against shame and trauma.” As Powell says, with the cooptation of punisher’s death head logo “power lay in its apolitical mass appeal, cool stuff to buy, while functioning to normalize a paramilitary, proto-fascist presence.” … equally, the flag is rebranded, as the “thin blue line”, now a

“fully masculinized militarized icon, eager to make way for an authoritarian future.” 

Nate Powell

Stripped of symbolic color, it’s black and white redesign, remarketing, and re-branding… some might say desecration… asserts any spectrum is weakness. It now signals “allegiance” (or a higher moral code) that is aggressively above the rule-of-law.

PART II:
bureaucracy 

Now, the real gift of a vigilante, is he gets things done with none of that fussy red-tape of bureaucratic legalization. 

Red-tape? How does you paperwork hold up to my tactical knife? 

Equally, people have lost their place in the system, and the future is moving beyond them and their skills. To take action, to get results, is to be USEFUL. This dream of action is a dream of freedom.

But when the bureaucracy in place is to prevent coercion and abuse by civil servants, yet the police see themselves as warriors and sheepdogs embrace the contradictory vigilante symbol… one must pause and consider the implications of this desire portrayal.

What we see is that those promoting the punisher flag align with a morality and allegiance ‘beyond the law’ and are merely shackled by the law, not servants of it. With the darker implication being that once the shackles are removed… dissenters are in for a world of hurt.

PART III:
empty symbols

This a more Baudrillard conception of the world.

The world since modernity has exploded, or broken apart the complicated rich histories of all things. It can now travel lighter, and faster, but the means to get that speed was to remove the cumbersome baggage linking it to authentic ideals. The ‘process’ is liberated from ‘meaning,’ thus the process is a simulation without governing ideals, leaving it in a state of indeterminacy or uncertainty. 

From this place, any meaning can be attributed, but equally (now that it is not weighed down with all that meaning and ideals that you have to reference) the symbol moves faster, dispersing outwards to proliferate, maintaining only the superficial aspect. In this simulated state Baudrillard shows that “evil” and “good” coexist, losing meaning as well without difference.

Anything that has lost it’s idea is a man without a shadow. Disconnected from reality, and running ahead with rampant virility.

So, when you see a punisher skull, with a thin-blue-line flag, with trumps hair or a MAGA hat, saying ‘blue lives matter’ all smashed into one thing on a cop car…  ~ well, the accumulation of multiple effects is actually a disappearance of causes. (similar to good and evil coexisting.)

Through an excess of functionality, it is rebranded with a murderous vitality. Still, devoid of clear ideology, it manifests a rebellious urgency and the need for movement, progress, and affiliation… this is drawn from the most superficial levels and now manifested as the deepest motivation, an allegiant belief. 

In short, its contradictory messages empower an anti-logic, an obstinate rejection (abreaction) of the status quo and the rules of communication. It signals, like a dark superhero, a willingness to win through pain and loss… a sacrificial dark knight tilting at windmills. 

What does matter is it clearly bonds wide swaths of our population. The punisher+think-blue-line mash-up is the culmination of reductionist superficial appearances over functional, idea driven processes, like policy reform.

Yet, that comes from somewhere: a failure in the system. The bricolage ethos manifest in allegiant loyalty and vigilantism expounds a moral truth “beyond the rule of law,” and it speaks of a dark desire rising and swelling. 

Beware paramilitaries. The next step is the authoritarian state. 

Timothy Snyder

Today I tackle the hot button issue of Confederate monuments and memorials. Where do they fall in our overall discussion of the importance of remembering the dead? What do they symbolize? Why and how were they erected? And most importantly we discuss why the time for them to exist is over.

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The Cost of the Confederacy, December 2018, Smithsonian Magazine

A civil war cracked off in the New World that would last four years and rip the Republic asunder. For more than 1400 days, brother fought brother, father killed son, friend cut down friend. Not for a minute did the suffering stop, whether for the soldiers or the noncombatants. Disease, privation, hunger, petty violence, rape, and pillage roamed the land from the swamps of S.C. to the P.A. forests. From the Mississippi to the Mountains of Appalachia, 10k and more battles were fought of every size, from glorified bar brawls to clashes of cataclysmic scale. By its end, over a million lives had been snuffed out and millions more ruined. The butcher's bill on both sides included lowly privates and brilliant generals, statesmen and lawmakers, farmers, women, shopkeepers, teachers, children, slaves, a president, and everyone in between.

"In every battle, there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins." - Grant's statement is not just a bit of battlefield wisdom. He could just as readily have been describing North and South in the lead up to the American Civil War. Or throughout the War itself. Or any of the thousands of battles that took place during the War. Lincoln, self admittedly no military man, understood the dogged nature needed to win the drag em out drop em down type contest that this War was going to become. "Our success or failure at Donelson is vastly important and I beg you to put your soul in the effort" he wrote to his Western commander. Finding the type of man that would attack even after he thought he'd already lost proved difficult, but not impossible. It was on the rivers of the Western theater that the War would shift for good. Where the man and the mind Lincoln and the Union most needed would mature into a singular force. Let's go back to February 1862, to the winding calm of the Cumberland River. New bizarrely beetle-like and inky black but deadly ironclad beasts are chugging upstream to pound two forts into submission. One will fall quickly, and with little fight, the other will take days and see savage combat. Where a determined Brig General is preparing to show his family, his country, and himself that he's no failure, he can, in fact, succeed, maybe even excel. Where a group of cold but confident confederate soldiers is readying to defend their new country no matter the cost. Let's go back to the battle of Fort Donelson.

Listen on

Spotify

iTunes

Sources - Grant by Ron Chernow and The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville  by Shelby Foote and The American Civil War: A Military History by John Keegan

Music:

Battle Hymn of the Republic by The U.S. Army Band

When Johnny Comes Marching Home by Air Force Band of Liberty

Americana - Aspiring by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1200092

Artist: http://incompetech.com/

Art - Melhak @ Fiverr

In this episode of Meeting Midway, Pastor Jennie talks about Luke Chapter 15. In looking at this portion of scripture, Pastor Jennie reflects on how the church must pursue those that are in need in our world and not those already at the table. Like the shepherd who looks for the one lost sheep, the church should be the community that goes outside of it's walls looking to affect the one. Pastor Jennie speaks to our current context in this message and highlights themes of adoption, family, and love. After Pastor Jennie's message, Lysbeth Hamlin shares her family's story of fostering two children and later adopting them, and Rev. Marita Harrell shares the story of Wellroot Family Services (formerly known as The United Methodist Children's Home) in preparation for a special offering for Wellroot.

Meeting Midway is a podcast of Midway United Methodist Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. You can find us on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MidwayUMChurch/), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/midwayumc/), and on our website, [www.midwayumc.org](http://www.midwayumc.org).

Service Times:

Traditional (Historic Chapel) - 8:30AM

Acoustic (Historic Chapel) - 9:45AM

Contemporary (Modern Sanctuary) - 11:00AM