Churchhoney

Who knows? But it's obviously got to be a lot easier to set up a creditable single-topic technical program than to get a whole college accredited. Those two things aren't even in the same ballpark when it comes to complexity. The outside group (AUtomotive SErvice Excellence) involved in the auto-diesel training appears to be national and looks pretty rational: https://www.ase.com/Home.aspx And here's what Crown says: "The Auto Diesel Technician Training Program is a two year training program designed to prepare students to become proficient, entry level technicians in both automotive and heavy duty diesel trucks with ASE certifications. "The student will receive comprehensive instruction from knowledgeable ASE Certified instructors who have over 50 years of combined professional experience. Thorough classroom and hands-on training using modern techniques and industry standard tools to troubleshoot and diagnose computer and electronic systems, engine overhaul, transmissions, brakes, steering, suspensions, electronics and all other systems and sub-systems for cars, light, medium, and heavy duty trucks. "Upon graduation from this course the students will be trained as entry level technicians in both automotive and heavy duty vehicles. Receiving training in both auto and diesel will increase the student’s marketability and opportunity in a competitive job market. "Students are required to have at least two ASE certifications by graduation. ASE (Automotive Service Excellence) certifications are the standard in the automotive and heavy duty industry, highly recognized and respected as a high standard of achievement. These certifications are offered several times throughout each year. "The two-year Auto / Diesel program is divided into four semesters, two fall semesters beginning each August and continuing through December, and two spring semesters beginning each January and continuing through May. While completing these Auto / Diesel courses, students will also be enrolled in selected Bible classes to instill a solid foundation for life. Bible courses are offered through Crown College of the Bible and qualifies the student to earn a Foundation for Christian Life Certificate."

We're Colonel Klink on this one. Except that we really do know nothing. There's a lot of conjecture but it appears no one has facts except the people involved.

I loathe Josh Duggar's fat, smug, smarmy hypocritical ass. Loathed it in its teenage form and now. However, I feel for him right now because, just like always, his biggest problem is his disgusting, arrogant, incredibly stupid and ignorant parents. When he was a teenager, they knocked themselves out proving to the world that the deeply sick molestation problem in their house was a mere nothing, thus setting their effed-up kid up for an even more effed-up adolescence and young adulthood than he might have had had they dealt with that problem as was required. And now they're taking the opposite tack, sending him into some sort of bizarre exile over the Ashley Madison crap that was, comparatively, nothing at all. Millions of people were exposed in that Ashley Madison hack. So I wonder how many of them anybody even remembers as having been involved? How many are being subjected to some kind of bizarre life ruin by their families? How many are now widely considered unemployable and virtually untouchable, by many in the public? How many were locked away doing six-month stints in ridiculous "addiction" bible camps that certainly accomplish nothing but driving their residents a little farther over the edge? And, once again, just like when Josh was a teen, all so Jim Bob and Michelle, two of the world's worst people, can preserve their cash flow via their "family brand." First they made a molehill out of Mt. Everest. Now they're making Mt. Everest out of a molehill. Everything JB and M touch goes ass-backwards. I can't believe I'm sorry for Josh, given what a jerk he is, but I am.

I'm sure they could. What a horrifying picture, though. What kind of grown man would allow this to be done to him? If he allows anything like this to happen just so he can keep sucking on JimBob's teat, he's even more spineless and idiotic than the rest of them.

Well, let's say this. They announce everything publicly that they think will make them look good or sympathetic... Josh -- not exactly in that category. Looking back over his long career as a messed-up person, he's kind of the king of the non-announcement in Duggarland, really. It'll be very interesting to see what they say when and if they finally get around to mentioning him again.....

Of course, Marjoe Gortner is an extremely bright guy, something that was evident even when he was a little child. .... Offspring of Jessa and Ben .... maybe not so much.

http://crowntradesandtech.com/programs/#auto

The Duggars or somebody they lease the plane to. There still doesn't seem to be any hard evidence that John David was actually flying the plane or that Josh was anywhere near it. .... They don't deem their air operations an actual business because of John David's flights because he's not a commercial pilot. If nobody but John David and Josiah flew those planes Duggar Aviation would be 100 percent a hobby. It's only a business because other people sometimes rent -- or at least could rent -- those planes to fly them themselves. That flight may have had something to do with Josh or it may have had nothing to do with any Duggar at all. The Inquisitr piece gives absolutely no source for anything it says and provides no evidence either, so in fact nothing is really known about where Josh is or why that plane flew to Rockford.

Yeah, but pants are clothing "belonging to men" in our culture and skirts are clothing "belonging to women." You can't go around encouraging people to take on attributes of the other gender. From what I understand, that's as big an issue for them as modesty. A woman in pants might think she could be the boss the way a man is. A man in a skirt or something might take on some of those feminine characteristics. Can't have that. Gotta make sure that the women stay in their rightful place and that men don't go wimpy on us.

Oh, I'm sure the Duggars don't approve of vasectomies for their family. If there were vasectomies, how would Jim Bob's spawn ever become as numberless as the drops of water in the sea?

"You Are My Sunshine" is about a romantic love, though. It's not a lullaby. The second verse goes like this: "The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping, I dreamed I held you in my arms. When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken. And I hung my head, and I cried." It's an extremely popular love song of the older generation -- has been through several older generations. Possibly because, for the time, it's even a little bit racy. Hang around a nursing home some time. The residents love singing it, the men and the women both. It was a very very popular song back in the day and while it has that sad thread about it, it's really just a song they sing about love and its intensity and how we all want to hold on to our loves. I expect that a Duggar would post it because, when you live in the kind of very sheltered lifestyle they've had, you're a lot more likely to know these very old songs -- which older people actually sing around the house and such, not just listen to on the radio as younger generations do -- than you are to know more modern songs. The highly sheltered tend to know this really old stuff in popular culture, so I'd say it's pretty expected for her to post it.

It seems to be worse than that because I've never even seen Jinger call herself one. Maybe just having a massive number of siblings automatically makes you a midwife. .... Or perhaps even an obstetrician. Heck, having a couple of baby grands in the house automatically makes you a concert pianist.

Because even with producer-driven events, it's still the most boring show in the history of the world. My viewing of it has been very limited, but in my limited experience it also seems to have more repeated lines, scenes, etc., than any other show I've ever seen. So there isn't even enough boring Duggar stuff to fill up the time slot. I can't imagine being a producer trying to make them interesting. ... and yet...and yet...many fans .... Don't get it. At all.

So, uh, Ben is about to learn that man proposes and God disposes. At last, something that'll be good for him.

I suspect that the loneliness of a Duggar goes way beyond just missing some individual person. I expect that, although she didn't know it, she was crying less over Derick and more over the fact that, for the first time in her life, she'd had a serious taste of getting to know and enjoy being with some non-family member, somebody not speaking Duggar-speak but acting and talking with some spontaneity, somebody who responded to her with sexual and emotional attraction, and somebody who seemed to like her as an individual and not only as someone with a highly interchangeable heart for the Lord. I expect that first taste of knowing and being liked by somebody outside the clan touched a very deep hunger for connection and relationship in her and -- without realizing it -- she was actually terrified that she might still lose it and never glimpse it again and that's why she cried for months.

Yeah, I wonder this, too. It's kind of hard to imagine JimBob or Michelle being smart enough or concerned enough with actual theology outside of DON"T HAVE SEX UNTIL YOU"RE MARRIED! to notice or care, but he really is coming from a different place. Sometimes I think that JimBob is just so driven by his own desires and neuroses that he actually doesn't give a crap about theology at all and may have no idea what a Calvinist even is. But I do wonder. I also wonder to what degree the Seewalds were involved in Vision Forum, since that was a cult of personality, too. Did Ben's involvement with that help condition him at all to just joining a new personality cult? And I wonder about Derick, who doesn't seem to have been in a personality cult at all but just in Southern Baptist churches. I'm thinking that what seems to me to be his childlikeness has maybe just quickly made him into a Duggar out of the pure neediness of a nerdy social misfit, but I still wonder whether he notices anything different about their beliefs and approaches and whether any of it bothers him. It does seem odd that, to this point anyway, Ben and Derick seem to have fit into Duggarism so seamlessly when they both come from pretty different places -- and seem to have a continued commitment to their beliefs and/or churches of origin. And the Duggs come off as so dogmatic in some ways, but does their dogmatism actually extend to Calvinism or non-Calvinism or is it just dogmatism that spouts Gothardism only without them even realizing that some other theologies may conflict? I guess right now it seems to me as if they're all just a bunch of idiots who are drawn to neurotic enmeshment and may actually be too stupid, uneducated and personality- rather than idea-driven to even realize that there are differing theologies being preached within their their little expanded but still enmeshed group.

I wonder whether this because, while they don't quite realize it, they're much more members of a cult/sect of personality than they are members of the Christian church or a Christian church. They don't pay a lot of attention to what most people would consider core ideals and traditions of Christianity or Protestantism or its smaller denominations even, and they even knock some of those things, because they're wholly caught up in a small fringe group -- what I'd call a destructive cult -- that only fully embraces the vision of one person, Gothard. .... And I think I'd argue that the Duggars are part of two such destructive cults of personalities -- Gothard's but also the very very small JimBob/Michelle cult of personality -- and maybe, over time, they've become more pure Duggarites than they are Gothardites. That's why it all is so legalistic, I think. They don't embrace most of the big-picture religious principles that the world has come to recognize as Christian (or even Protestant) over the years -- we're constantly noting this, on topic after topic. Instead, they're totally keyed into the little nitpicky idiosyncratic details that their cult leaders' neuroses have elevated into the really important things. In fact, they embrace those little details as being what importantly sets them apart from the larger group of which they also sort of claim to be members -- in this case conservative Protestantism. While cults like this generally tout themselves as true representatives -- and often as the truest representatives -- of the larger belief system of which they're offshoots (be it Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, etc.), in fact they often deviate from the ideals of the main religions by a huge amount, and they often go off the rails entirely into stuff that's very destructive to the group members, and sometimes even to people outside the group.

I think the complete over-the-top outrageousness of the FLDS probably is making it easier to leave these days than it is to leave less extreme situations like the Josh-Anna marriage, though. When you have multiple wives and "wives" aged 12 and massive federal investigations, making up your mind that you're right to leave gets a bit of a boost. In Anna's situation, she'll have to figure out that something that looks much nearer to normal -- plus something that's supplied her, in the past at least, with a way way better lifestyle than she may have ever imagined having previously -- is bad enough to justify defying God, your parents and your inlaws and walking out. Like the FLDS folks, she does have a sort of network she could escape to in her non-Gothard siblings, so I think that might help her make the decision to quit. But most of what she's experienced with Josh is stuff that gets written off as kind of normal and something that people can be forgiven for and reform from. So she'd have to come to see it in a different light to justify leaving. And that's gotta be quite hard to do in her situation. I'd like to see her leave. Heck, I'd like to see Josh leave. But being fairly well off financially within the marriage and in a situation that looks kind of close to normal are both barriers to people getting out, I think.

I'm sure they're all horribly lonely. But they don't know that that's what they feel. I mean, how could they be lonely when they're so utterly surrounded at all times by the greatest family on earth? And all the misunderstood and unacknowledged feelings that they have are just going to bite them in the ass again and again, in different ways, depending on their different underlying personalities. It's extremely sad. I had a similar upbringing, differing mainly in that because I went to school I was allowed to read some books, and I'll be a hideous social misfit and emotional cripple until my dying day because of it. When you add the "no reading" thing plus the exquisitely evil delusions of the reality-tv life that the Duggs have also experienced, there's no way they aren't sick, hopeless messes in pretty much every way you can be. And it's all very well to say, 'Well, now they're grown up it all becomes their own responsibility and they should snap out of it,' but that's like telling a Chinese foot-binding victim that she should just get regular-shaped feet now that she's mature. That door has closed.

I think that it's the over the top delight you mention, plus the fact that these people are very very young-teenager-like because they're so sheltered from the world and so focused on purity and are required to see everything in black and white, plus the idea that when you're in one of these godly arrangements it's your duty to loudly advertise to the world how great and perfect it is so that everybody else will know and realize that they should follow suit. The carrying on about the relationships doesn't strike me as being much different from the equally over-the-top endless carrying on they do about all their other little Gothard-y stuff, like the endless harping about everything being a new "precious" "season of life" and how every single one of them has a "heart for the Lord" and a "servant's heart." They never talk about anything normally. Pretty much every topic has some saccharine, over-the-top phrases attached to it that they just say over and over and over again. Like the 100-percent interchangeable and yet still ridiculously overblown birthday wishes they give. I doubt that any of them is even capable of normal talk about anything. They've certainly never heard normal talk. And they're constantly coached and pushed to talk just like their parents -- and the wonderful leaders at the various Gothard-indoctrination camps -- I'm sure.

Yeah, but the Duggar kids have no way of knowing that. They don't have any friends to talk to, except a few "long distance relationship" "friends" that they see super-occasionally (with full chaperonage) who have been brainwashed into the same delusions they have, they don't read or explore the internet or watch tv or movies, and since birth they've been constantly pumped full of the notion that their parents' way actually is what love and relationships are all about. Plus, their family has been given a prominent tv show -- and they've been told by their parents that this is because of how wonderful their "principles" are and how important to God it is that these ideas be spread across the world -- and they have at least hundreds of thousands of fans who are constantly writing on the internet about how the Duggar way is the perfect way and God's way. Plus, as I think has been clearly established by now, they (or at least the ones we've seen attain teenagerhood and beyond at this point) just aren't very bright. So how would they ever know that this stuff they believe is wrong? Yeah, Jill is delusional, but I find it really difficult -- impossible, actually -- to blame her for that. Under the circumstances, I don't see how she could possibly be otherwise.

Yeah, according to the absolutely baseless theory they use to describe their system. But since their system is really just made up out of whole cloth as an additional way to control and limit people, it ends up having the exact opposite effect of what their pretend theory suggests it will (as anybody who actually thought it through for half a second would figure out). It's so ironic that they busily forbid fantasy when literally everything they preach is total fantasy, based on nothing but Jim Boob's and Gothard's desire to run other people's lives for their own purposes and their own delectation. Truly, these kids have just about no chance of comprehending reality at all, after what they've been told about it. If a handful of them are really smart, maybe in time they can figure out how nonsensical the stuff is that they've been basing their lives on. But so far no Duggar kid looks very smart at all.

He's a big-time Calvinist, it appears. The Duggs didn't seem to be, but Ben has a lot of Calvinist stuff going on. Vision Forum had Calvinist leanings, and I gather the Seewalds were involved with it for a while at least.

I think it's more than the immaturity, too. Because their living patterns are so unusual, it's easy to forget that these people grew up in a family in which husband, wife and all the kids (even Grandma) might as well be sewn together. They're together all the time. Nobody ever goes out without others in their company, father doesn't seem to go out to work much and when he does it seems likely he takes a bunch of people with him, kids don't go to different schools or even into different classrooms, almost nobody goes out to work at any place other than home and when they do they haul along a sibling or two or a parent as an "accountability partner," etc. And they also are preached at constantly that this is the way that things should be. There's a level of togetherness and enmeshment and so on in their lifestyle that's just off the charts compared to the way most people live. So they find it literally unthinkable to be doing things as individuals or to be alone in a house or whatever. It just doesn't happen in the world they've always known. And they believe that it's unnatural and wrong for people to be on their own. I don't think it's at all surprising that they fear aloneness and separation. It'd be more surprising if they didn't, given the way the family lives and its beliefs.

You're probably quite right about Ben, but I hope not. He still is awfully young, and he's also been awfully sheltered (plus he's pretty dim). I'm still hoping that he's as self-righteous and arrogant-seeming as he is partly because life hasn't yet met him and smacked him in the face and kicked him in the balls. And I'm hoping for the smacking and the kicking to begin, although disgusting TLC has thwarted me with their crap "specials." Wish they'd learn that there's nothing at all "special" about these people. And then maybe some of these people, such as Ben, could learn that, too.