Churchhoney

Well, I'd say I sort of believe this, but with a twist. I think that the "faith not acts" theology provides them with a very convenient excuse to behave in a way that's consistent with their key desires. What they really want -- because they're both very fearful and very lazy -- is to crawl into a hole away from everyone who might scare them and not do anything at all that requires effort. So embracing the belief that faith is the only thing that matters, not acts, you have the perfect excuse to act that way. Not only do you not have to work or engage, you're actually behaving in accordance with God's commands by refusing to do either. Nice how that works. I'm biased, though, since I think a heck of a lot of what we believe is really rationalization of what we want to do because of the way our brains are wired. ... Just like Boob's belief in having a million children for god really just provides cover for his personal desire to have a million children to satisfy his selfish gene's drive to reproduce and his personal ego. ... And I expect that I'm a liberal because I have pretty non-fearful brain that craves seeing what's on the other side of the mountain, so I like a looseness to life and an openness to other people that fearful people just can't tolerate.

Well, I just don't think Derick's a leader or an independent thinker of any degree. In the cat incident, for example, he clearly wasn't driving the bus. Seemed to me you could see him going along with it because it was what the cool kids are doing. (And, yes, he's probably awkward enough and enough of a kid and a slight misfit hungry for belonging to consider the Duggars the cool kids when he's in that group...) He sought out Jim Bob because he wanted some kind of mentor, for goodness' sake. That's the action of somebody who's looking for someone to lead the way, to me, to pick out a blustering, pushy famous guy as his special pal. It's not the move of somebody who's clear in his own mind and feels fully empowered to lead the way himself, in my opinion. So now -- I would say -- he's been accepted into a group that has fame and followers and as a result he's just fallen in with their ways. There's plenty of psychological evidence showing that at least most of us and probably all of us will do very very jerky stuff that we may not even approve of if we're feeling part of a group where that stuff is being done. And, honestly, I don't think you'll find very many people who can't dredge up incidents in their lives when they've gone along with the crowd in things that they would not have done on their own, if they're reporting truthfully. So my feeling is that Derick is going with the crowd psychology, because he's clearly a person who's not strong enough to stand up against it. And standing up against the Duggars would be quite a task unless you were willing to completely alienate them, which, as a kind of wimpy guy who's also a new in-law who has a baby in this family, he's clearly not. Nor would most people be this early in the game, if they'd gotten themselves into this situation, I expect. And in addition, of course, he's been hit with numerous other strange things that have almost certainly thrown him off balance -- the whole molestation mess and the free houses and then the loss of the show. If you're new in a situation, and a kind of weak person to begin with, having all that uncertainty is going to make it even less likely that you'd feel confident in charting your own course if it doesn't precisely fit with the course of your new tribe. He shares enough of their basic beliefs -- such as in missions and southern-Baptist-type stuff -- to kind of buy in to the basis of what they do. And, like many people who do share those beliefs, clearly, he's a bit in awe of both their fame and their absolute surety in the rights of their own position. So now he's being swept along. And being swept along with the Duggars means you grift. I'm not saying it's good. But I'm saying that I expect it's being done out of his personal weaknesses (he's not a strong guy or a leader) -- and in line with the follow-the-crowd tendencies we all have -- and not because it's an expression of what's actually inside him and what his real ideas and principles are, to the extent that he has such things. (And, again, I'd say that most of us, maybe all of us, have and hold fast to a lot fewer principles than we actually imagine we do.) I don't get the impression at all that he was raised to be a grifting crook or someone who kept women down (look at Cathy's career and her dress). But he was raised to be a conservative southern Baptist with a belief in missions. And at the moment, at least, that gives him enough common ground with the Duggars to cause him to drift along with the Duggar crowd, just as most kids and maybe even most of us adults do, a lot of the time. And to drift is to grift, with the Duggars. ... And to lie in your Twitter feed -- as when he said that Cross Church had commissioned them -- which I actually think may be the most outrageous thing he's done. At the moment, going along with that crowd probably feels good to him, at least to a large degree. Maybe that'll change down the line, or maybe he'll turn into a grifter himself. But at present I really don't think he's the head bitch in charge or even has come to fully understand what kind of crap he's actually doing. I think Duggardom is kind of a mighty wave and you might find yourself going along with it just because of its force, if you aren't a quite confident independent thinker. But who knows?

I think this is what comes of the Jim Bob-Michelle mindset in which their mere existence and presence before you constitutes a "ministry." Sickening, stupid, ridiculous and erroneous as this is, I think that they truly believe this by now and that they've passed it on to the kids. I'm sure it's what the kids have heard constantly. This is what idiotic arrogance looks like in the second generation, I guess, when it's become received wisdom. Of course everything you do in pursuit of your "ministry" is fine, since it's you, one of God's special people, and your fundraising itself has saving grace in it.

This is what you get when you deliberately create a culture in which women are never considered the owners and proprietors of their own bodies and themselves. "Daddy has their heart" so he protects their "purity" and then he hands them off to another "headship." So of course entitled Smug-Josh doesn't understand about rape. How can you rape something that used to be somebody else's appendage until that person gave it to you to be your appendage. It has no meaningful agency. And it totally belongs to you. Talk about your rape culture.

Derick's mother believes both those things, so I kind of suspect he believed it too, pre-Duggar. A part of him probably believes it still, I expect.

One reason why I think he should have done it is that he would have ended up with a different woman! ha Remember -- he was out of college for a while before he went after a Duggar bride. If he'd been busy learning stuff at the FBI or in a masters' degree course in criminology or something, he probably wouldn't have dreamed up the idea of calling Jim Bob! Yeah, I sort of have this view, too. Although I still wonder whether he didn't eye the Duggars at least partly because they seemed to be a family to whom a connection might help him gain some prominence in the mission field.

YOu and me both. Although I do also kind of wonder whether the whole law-enforcement idea wasn't part of his emotional response to his dad's death .... and then as that receded the idea passed and he went back to some older idea of being a missionary or something.

Actually, I have it on very good authority that accountancy is one of the most sought-after specialties by law-enforcement agencies at all levels around the world today. The pursuit of organized crime, especially cyber crime, and white-collar crime (although it's less targeted) absolutely requires people who can combine a law-enforcement mindset with sharp accountancy skills. Law-enforcement agencies would prefer to have people come to them having studied both criminal justice and accountancy, I'm told, but they often are ending up bringing in just accountants and training them up on the forensic side. So he wasn't off the mark on that at all. He should have done it.

Yeah, the question of who the sponsor/employer was is definitely the one still hanging out there. The fact that he mentioned none in his LInkedIn entry suggests to me that the employer doesn't want to be named because of visa issues, which are probably fudged for most everybody who works for it -- whatever it is. But who knows, I guess. As for the money -- maybe he worked some crappy job in the year between college and Nepal and was able to use that in combination with money from his family? There is still that unknown year in there with no jobs that anybody is reporting. Maybe he worked in fast food or something just to raise money without getting entangled in any kind of career job because he knew he intended to go to Nepal the next year? And maybe they accept some people just as general factotums who observe the missionary work but aren't yet on the track because they don't have the right education to start the real program? That's probably also something that no U.S. group would admit, because they should probably be hiring locals to do the non-mission-related work.

I assume because Nepal has long been such an adventure-travel/hippie-travel/voluntourism/, etc., destination, Nepal appears to have given birth to a lot of, shall we say, rather casual educational institutions that provide you with a credential that will get you a "study visa." You have to attend classes but not be a full-time student, basically. So Derick could easily have attended one of these schools, because it seems that a lot of people do. In addition, there is something called a "research" visa that can also provide an extension to your tourist visa. Officially, you're not allowed to work under a student or research visa, it appears, but work visas are really hard to get so lots of people are working under the other kinds of visas anyway, according to four interesting blog posts about visas on this website. "Work visas for foreigners are somewhat rare here in Nepal, largely because the rules for granting one create a very high and difficult barrier for employers and employees. For this reason, many thousands of foreigners working in Nepal (most commonly with aid organizations) are doing so under student visas or research visas." So Derick was breaking the law by working but tons of other people are doing it, too, and the aid organizations that don't want to staff up with locals obviously ignore and probably even encourage the practice. Maybe that could also explain why he doesn't list an employer on the LInkedIn -- because by employing people without work visas the organizations are breaking the law. http://thekathmanduo.blogspot.com/2011/08/like-whoa-nepal-visa-woes-part-1.html http://thekathmanduo.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-to-get-student-visa-in-nepal.html

Chad Gallagher. He's a Huckabee political advisor (for ages) and runs (or at least ran) Huckabee's PAC. (and in the latter job he demonstrated that he knows a lot about skimming off for your family members funding that others may -- or may not -- have intended for different purposes) So -- perfect for the Dullards' godly aims.

Damn these women in public service with the lesbian agendas.

Good point. He doesn't say what he made decisions about, to whom his decisions applied, or describe the quantity or quality of decisions made. .... Essentially, his statement could apply just as easily to the workday of a newborn infant. It'd be kind of genius if there were the slightest chance that any would-be employer would take it at face value.

Well, I think it probably has. ... I kind of blame it on the world being so virtual now. What this phenomenon reminds me of is the (many many) people who apparently imagine they're doing something for a cause by sending out a tweet with a hashtag .. Maybe the ease of communication -- and getting your "good deeds" easily telegraphed to everybody on the planet via instagram and the 24-7 maw of online "media" that might pick it up -- makes it seem that doing very little constitutes doing something really huge and significant? #WorldPeace #EndPoverty #BeatCancer #HurrahForChrist Look at all the causes I've worked for today! And so on.

Indeed. And then along comes Marjorie. For all the ways that JB and M messed up their kids' lives, reality tv added layers and layers of mess to it. Layers of mess and a cherry on top. Horrible to think that you couldn't trust anyone you were seeing to actually want you for yourself -- especially when you are very much just a regular person with no actual cause for your celebrity. At least if you're a famous actor or politician or beauty queen or something, ambitious would-be partners actually pursue you because of some talent you have or something you did. With the Duggar kids, the whole draw is likely to be their utterly unearned (and maybe unsought, at least initially, for some of them) celebrity.

I guess this scenario should have occurred to us all back when we first knew that Ben is a would-be (kinda scammy?) preacher/televangelist and Derick a would-be (definitely scammy) missionary/runner of international missioncation group. A little too coincidental that the two guys who persevered to snag the Duggar girls were both guys with some of the few career ambitions that a Duggar connection might conceivably boost. They both saw themselves climbing to career heights on the shoulders of Jim Bob, Jessa and Jill. Interest in Jessa and Jill was secondary to their ambitions, I'm thinking, even in the case of horny Ben. Maybe if they'd stayed there Jim Bob would have made them keep paying the utilities and taxes or something? ... You'd need a ton of donations for that.

Duggar Dung: A Shitload of Courtships Because that'll be about the size of it.

Didn't I read somewhere that TLC has recently been at the very bottom of cable ratings? Maybe they're as desperate these days as Duggar Generation Two?

Not only had he graduated. I think he'd graduated a whole year before he went. .... In a tweet shown in that article, though, I think he called it a year-long "study" visa. Perhaps that's different from a "student" visa? Or maybe he was actually "studying" missionarying with some group? Or Nepal lets you use that type of visa for language study or something? ... It's also very curious to me that they seem to show his LInked In -- and it doesn't mention any organization he was working for in Nepal. (although I haven't looked at his real LInkedIn so maybe the article just didn't copy that part, so I could be wrong about this ..) If there is no employer listed, though, what kind of resume doesn't list an employer unless you're freelance in some capacity -- but since when can you be a freelance volunteer coordinator? Maybe he's trying to hide the name of some shady employer?

It's also not clear to me what the actual "operations' or "programs" of their nonprofit is being portrayed to be. I wonder what, exactly, they tell all the dupes at Cross Church and so on at their fundraisers? Because aren't they currently kinda sorta working for the S.O.S. guy's scam ...er ... mission (or volunteering, I guess -- although, in another lie, they clearly played that as working for the guy when they talked up Derick's new opening opportunity in the mission field...)? So do they plan to split off from him at some point and start their own missioncation enterprise? Or is their nonprofit set up just to fundraise for his organization? Or what? You know you're really an idiot grifter when you don't even have a plan for your own scam. And I kind of think they don't.

It would be nice to think that they actually could get into trouble for their bullshit, but I really doubt that the IRS would spend their increasingly limited time on these people Especially since they claim to be doing religious work, which tends to be given even more of a pass because the feds don't want to wade into the extremely risky politics of it all. And there's obviously huge huge leeway given to stuff like "administrative expenses" for all nonprofits, too. Just look at how very very little the nonprofit rating groups say is actual program spending in the vast majority of nonprofits. And how few of them ever get even investigated, let alone fined or shut down. The rules are there, but enforcement is largely a joke in the nonprofit sector, has been for years and is only becoming more of a joke with time, as I understand it... And these guys are the epitome of small potatoes. Because I still can't imagine anybody gave them very much money -- and with all this stuff coming out, the amounts are likely to dwindle from a never-very-high peak.

Can somebody explain how Jim Bob's church is actually set up? Does he have a real nonprofit that's their church? What's the name of it? Is it officially his? Or somehow owned by their whole "congregation?' Or is it kind of imaginary? Or what? ... Maybe they not only needed a church for visa purposes but wanted one with a congregation big enough -- and as-yet-untapped-by-Duggars -- to use for a lot of fundraisers? I'd assume that Jim Bob's church is really small and consists of leghumpers who already give their all to various Duggars?

I'm sure they would, although I don't know that I'd call that better editing -- just editing for a different purpose. TLC is supposed to be about outlandish, freakshow-ish situations that make you say, Ohmygosh what's that about? And UP is supposed to be about inspiring wonderful Christian families you should aspire to emulate. So Josie licking the counters and Jim Bob's mini-golf humpmobile would have to go.

Maybe it's chickens coming home to roost? Whatever it is, I like it.

Well, doing stuff that your visa doesn't allow is certainly illegal. But it's not clear that they're actually doing that at present. And the countries they may have done it in certainly have much better uses for their administrative time than chasing down these two-bit losers. .... When it comes to the money -- I guess you can pretty much ask anybody you want for cash, and if they give it to you it's their problem, right? ... There might be some tax issues regrading the non-profit. But they can say there that the money goes to support the missionaries -- and if you're running a missionary non-profit, I think that would pass muster, don't you think? The IRS isn't going to go around trying to figure out which "mission" work it should and should not deem acceptable. .... So my guess is -- All they're losing is their reputations. ... Of course, their reputations were all they had.