 on this computer. Hello and welcome to Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, January 8th, 2023. I'm Larry Rhodes or DJ Douter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host DJ Wombat. Hello, Wombat. Hey, I'm the Wombat. Hey everybody. Today's guest is Dred Pirate Higgs from Canada. Welcome. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faith. God's holy books that are superstitious. If you get the feeling you're the only non-believer in your town, well, you're just not. In Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, I'm hearing an echo. We have a group of over a thousand of us, the Atheist Society of Knoxville or ASK. And we'll tell you more about them after the mid-show breaks. So be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? Just Let Us Wear Hats. Just Let Us Wear Hats is the theme of today's show. And it's going to be led by a bunch of irksome stories brought to us by our own Dred Pirate Higgs. But before we go into that spicy sauce, let's throw up some spaghetti on the wall and lead us, if you will, in our daily or weekly invocation. Sure. Our noodley Lord, who art in a calendar, I'll daunte be thy noodles, thy blood be run, thy sauce be yum with meat, as it is with vegetables. Give us this day our garlic bread, and forgive us our cussing, as we forgive those who cuss against us. And lead us not into ketoism, but deliver us some carbs, for thine are the meatballs, and the sauces, and the grog, whatever and ever. Amen. Guys, I just got the holy hang grenade. I want to be able to do the invocations in sign language as Dred is doing them in English. Just for fun. See if I can pull that off. Maybe try that in the future. Larry, love to catch up with you. You told me you were playing a video game called Star Citizen. Star Citizen. Oh, I use the word plain loosely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got the bare minimum of RAM, which is 16 megs. Okay. Sorry. So it's a little choppy, a little slow. It's taking a while to get going. It takes almost a half an hour to load. Well, don't worry. It only took 23 years for him to get it developed. It's still in it. Yeah, and $500 million. So yeah, it's an interesting test. But I'm enjoying it so far. From a person who's played Eve and gotten pretty deep into it, are you feeling the similar vibes from Star Citizen? Like, do you feel like this could be the next thing? Well, the biggest difference between Eve and Star Citizen is the first person. You get to actually roam around inside the ship. You can get off the ship on any other planet. You can go into cities. You can go into forests. You can do hand-to-hand or first person combat. It covers pretty much everything. It has huge planets that you can just roam around on. And it's like a true space life job, Sim. Like, you're not there to save the universe from an alien threat. You are an engineer like many others and you're just chipping on rocks and you're selling on the rocks. What's interesting is, you know, like in Eve, if you want to shoot another ship, you just point to them and hit a button on this game. You can do that, but if you have a bigger ship with multiple turrets, you have to have people on those turrets. Real live people on the turret. On the ship, manning the turret. So, the battles get really intense and interesting. But enough of that. Okay, very, very cool. Very cool, guys. I do have a question about it though. Is it like a subscription thing you got to pay for? Yeah, it's about $40 for the software and $10 a month. But I figured I'd try it for a few months and see if I like it. And it's called what? Starship Citizens? Star Citizen. Star Citizen. Yeah, we are in the age of games that start with the word star and deal with space. But if you like, Larry, if you like that, if you like that game, there's another game by Bethesda coming out. I imagine maybe this year or next year called Star Child, which is the exact same premise. Exact same premise, but it has less resource requirements. Less resource requirements, no doubt. You can probably play it on most consoles and I would imagine if you need a streamlined version of like Eve, not as in-depth or complicated or less person intensive as Star Citizen, Star Child might be the one for you. So you at least have these gradient. And then if you don't even like that, there's another game called No Man's Sky, which in my opinion, it's everything you just subscribed, but solo and multiplayer, they just keep adding more stuff to it. It's really cool. It's a really good game. On my end, I just made a new song. I feel good about it. There used to be a time period where when I was making music, it would take me like four hours to make a brand new song and I'd pop it out on the internet and everyone would have a laugh at it and I'd have fun. And I'd get my creative pieces going. But over time, I'm taking the audio engineering aspect of it more seriously. And I'm realizing that there's a whole wealth of like tools that people use to make music sound good. That isn't just how well you can play an instrument. It's like compression, EQ, chain compressions, verbs, reverbs, echo, delays, gains, so many gates. There's so many things, so many terms. And when you like get into it, there's this like really nice community of people will help you listen to music and understand how to properly pin everything, how to properly pitch everything. Where is the peaks coming from and how to fix them appropriately so that the next time you make another song, it already sounds like studio stereo quality, but you're just made in your own bedroom. It feels really, really good to get better at that. And because of that, and that's the next thing that I'm learning out of place. When people say like, what's your favorite instrument? It's like my computer. But yeah, the last song I made was the ultimate of it. Let me see if I can fix my idea as I was talking about that story and tell you guys one last thing. I have made it six months my way last journey. I am now been maintaining my weight perfectly. I feel good. I have no fear of like going back up to the big weight that I was beforehand. Very good. I just feel good. It's feel good just maintaining and realizing that I can't maintain. And if anyone has questions on how they can be good at taking care of themselves and losing weight in the fight the healthy way that doesn't require them to subscribe to a dogma of like Judaism or Akins or God or whatever. Just like basic calorie deficit, you can start up Excel spreadsheet on your own. Count how much you take in, count how much you burn. Make sure you're at a deficit. That's it. And just keep it nice and simple. And you can do that on your own. You don't need a 14-week course. You don't need a guru. You don't need help. You can do it on your own. It was just the best thing. Yeah, bottom line tie I think is output must always exceed input. That's it. That's it. That's it. And if you want to eat more workout more, like it's literally that simple. Like it's the best thing ever. And when you do that, you feel empowered because you know you did it. Not someone else or trainer or program. It was you. It was you 10,000%. That makes me feel good. I feel like we give a lot of credit to God when we can really just give those credits to ourselves and realize that we have the power to have them that we want here on this earth. So, speaking of other things that deal with kicking God out of situations. Dred, would you mind talking to us about, oh, wait a second. Wow, that's a really good segue. You can't wear that hat in this podcast. I'm sorry. Not unless you're Hindu or Sikh. I'm sorry. Well, so that's right. I should have been listening when I was talking. No, it's okay. I'm just saying you're not allowed to wear that hat in this show unless if you have a proper identification that you genuinely believe in your God or that you were a Sikh or Hindu, I'm sorry. Or can prove it. Well, yes, as you know, the battle is ongoing. And certainly my latest letter to the manager there of driver's licensing integrity and oversight at ICBC is a little sharp. And I've just, you know, trying to be polite and courteous and all the rest of it doesn't seem to achieve anything. So essentially making a threat to civil action is where I've had to take it. So but yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's ongoing. And of course, the drivers, you know, drivers licensing the branch there of ICBC, which is the insurance corporation of British Columbia said that they were not going to give me service, wrote a letter to my local driver's licensing branch to say use some service if he dares to wear his colander or his tricorn in an attempt to get his driver's license. Let's take a step back. Let's just take a step back and explain the situation for everyone who's coming. Well, let's first of all see if we can get rid of that echo. I hear everything that dreads saying twice and I'm afraid it's going to go out like yeah, I was hearing that too. And I haven't changed my setup at all. You don't have speakers going? I'll be honest, I don't hear any echo on my side. Okay, then go ahead. Let's see if it comes through on the recording. Okay, so the story behind this is if you hadn't know it as dread is wearing a tricorn hat. What do those look like? It's like a pirate hat with the three sides to it's like a triangle. Well, you know, and I mean, we, yeah, we consider ourselves pirates as the chosen people of the postipharians. Fantastic flying spaghetti monsters. So it's not an analogy. It is a pirate hat. It is what it is. And that's right. And the cool thing about it is I can completely see dreads face. I have no issue recognizing him from because if he was wearing a turban, the exact same amount of this face would still be exposed. And so what's interesting in a lot of states in America, I would imagine all of them and also in Canada, which is a bit more surprising considering I was hoping that they'd be more liberal on this idea or more progressive is better term is that they have a rule that says you can wear a head garb if you are particular, if you are religious. However, they also over stipulated to say these are the approved religions that you're allowed to wear head garbs for. And that's the line that I find to be troubling because it's not up to the government to decide which religions get special credit or access to certain things and which ones don't. It's a very dangerous precedent to set. So in dreads case, he's wearing a hat where I can see his face and a Hindu might be wearing a turban where I can also see his face, yet the turban gets to wear his religious head garb when he goes to take his driver's license and dread cannot. And that is offensive to me because it is special choosing by the government based on religion when they shouldn't have one, the authority to do that. And to any care because they're just a company that sends out plastic cards so you can drive and do exactly what is their concern? What's the major harm? Why are we investing our tax services? Not me particularly, but you dread in this safeguard. Like what is this help? Who does this help other than marginalized groups of people who are on a particular list? That's the part that really offends me. So, Dred, you've actually consistently been going to the driver's license board or places to get your licenses. And you actually have a couple of licenses that allowed you to have your TriCon hard on. I imagine there's a firearm private detective. Could you might talk about it? Yeah, absolutely. So I currently have my Canadian firearms possession acquisition license, which is issued of course by the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And so that uses what is called facial recognition technology. And of course, facial recognition technology meets a standard now internationally. So where headgear does not interfere with facial recognition technology, it's considered irrelevant. That is the case of course with Sikhs and Hindus who wear turbans and Muslims. I know some Muslims wear turbans. But what is interesting in this case is the pretense that ICBC makes this accommodation for those whose religions prohibit them from removing their headgear. Now as we all know, religion is a choice, except perhaps if you're a woman. And that I see as really the only people who are prohibitive from removing their headgear, as we can see from instances of murder in Iran recently. Right. And of course, the same thing has actually happened in Canada where a woman was murdered by her brother and her father taking off her jab and using to wear it. I think this is back in 2012. But I mean, you know, what, you know, how is it up to the government, any government, you know, especially our more Western governments to say that we are going to accommodate a extreme religious position on the treatment of women? Right. And then exclude everyone else that can't demonstrate the same thing. On another idea, like you don't do a driver's license once a year. I imagine it's like once every five years. So if you're a Hindu and you get your picture on this year, you can become an atheist tomorrow, not wear your turban for the next four years. And then at the last week, before you need to renew your license, be like, you know what, I kind of like that turban again, just put it on just for kicks and you can still get your license done, whether you genuinely believe in the God or not, or not just because you look like it and you decide to wear the hat, you can. So there's no real litmus test on while he genuinely believes it and he's a Sikh. It's like, no, you can just be brown and get away with it. Well, that wasn't actually a point I made as well to them to say, you know, there are people who would do just that in order to fit in with their, with their, you know, social circles or their cultural heritage, you know, there's nothing to say that a person, and in fact, recently, one of our Pastafarian crew showed me a photograph of a license that a person used for ID, where it was, he was a brown man, and he was wearing a black tube and to emblem, you know, emblematic of being a Sikh. But apparently, either he didn't have his turban with him, or, or just like the look, you know, but it wasn't question at the time. So like, it seems, it seems a fairly arbitrary application of a very ill-formed policy. Dred, you could walk into the, not saying you should, but I'm saying you could technically walk into the driver's license board with a yarmulke on and no one would bat an eye. If you don't know on the radio, Dred, while blazing in the Canadian sun, I imagine, is, could be passable as a Western Jew, more or less, you can wear a yarmulke and people will be like, oh, that's fine, go on ahead, just have fun and take your picture and walk out and be like, one, I'm not Jewish, two, I don't believe in this God, and three, you let me clearly wear religious garbs if, whether I believe in it or not, you still let me wear this one, but you won't let me wear the one for the God I actually do believe in. What is your malfunction? Stuff like that. And so, what I really appreciate what you're doing is that you are stirring pot and helping people recognize that the, the idea that religious injustice occurring is not just something that's conceptual or something that atheists make up, it's institutionalized, it's ingrained in our society, it's held by authoritarian figures, it's mandated in laws, and it's something that is clearly explicit that we can point out and demonstrate through practice, and it's still ongoing because the, the other, the alternative is for the, the group that has the advantage to give up some of that advantage in the favor of treating people like more humanely. And I feel, well said, such crazy thing. One thing I'd also like to point out too is, is like, when we do the global atheist news, many of the points are taken from Iran and Indonesia and all these pot beds of religious discord and activity, where we have to recognize that violence is not only physical inform that it could be psychological violence, you know, which is of course the kind of a violence that's, you know, practiced by, you know, Catholic priests on altar boys, or by priests on residential school children, by taking away their culture and their language in favor of whatever the religious belief of the, of the residential school facility is. And of course on women, you know, women in different cultures and in different parts of the world, but certainly in Canada, you know, we're not seeing all this, you know, rioting and whatnot that you see in Iran. Right. But it doesn't mean that the same things aren't happening here. Right. Correct. Just not making the international news because it's not 50 people, it's one. Well, I would argue that one woman being killed by her brother and husband or brother and father for not wearing a piece of clothing in accordance with some religious tenant is an outrage in equal power and proportion to 50 or 100 or 1000 people being killed for the same reason. So two points. One, the injustices that are going on overseas are in tandem going on here, just under different brands. And the reason why they aren't in media news, my opinion, here's some opinionated news is because news is entertainment on television primarily. And people don't like being challenged often. They rather just be entertained. And what's entertaining is to say the bad guys are over there and there's a whole ocean separating us. Let's feel good about ourselves here by looking at the bad stuff way, way, way over there. And when you ever turn that vision on us and show like the January 6th right or insurrection, the events or the institutionalized racism or or protests that are going on, or the stuff that you are going through. One, if they did that more, you would realize you're not the only person who's feeling that way because I can tell you there's a lot of times where I feel like marginalized and I feel like am I the only one it's no. And when the protests are happening, it made me feel like, oh my gosh, there's other people who I finally feel the same way I do. We can collaborate and figure this out. But when you are the only one who you can see who's experiencing this, that this empowers you as well. And I feel like that's part of the the agenda as well. It's like we don't want to give too much attention to Dread Pirate's problem because then other people who have this similar problem might band up and be like, Hey, this is a problem. Well, you know, I've been at this for six years. Yeah. And you know, I know there's lots of people and you know, most of the certainly the vocal ones, the comments I hear are, what's the matter with this guy like me, right? You know what, he's an idiot. He's, he's stupid. It's such a trivial thing. Yeah. And that is really part of the part of the point is that it's not as trivial as everyone might think. Right. When the boots not on your neck. Institutionalized bigotry is institutionalized bigotry. Right. No matter what form it takes, it's it is what it is. And it has to stop. And that's what I stand for. When the boots not on your neck, it's just a shoe. So why would you care about it? Right. Right. That's right. It's footwear. Yeah. But it's like it's the same thing. It's location, location, location. Once you put that on your neck, it becomes a thing that you want other people to pay attention to. And you'll do anything to get it off of it. Larry, what do you think? Well, I was kind of wondering, I don't know the Constitution or the laws in Canada. Excuse me, where'd you at this from? But do you have anything like no religious tests for office or no religious test for anything? I mean, is that codified? It is. And in fact, it's enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms updated in 1984, Section 2A and 2B. And that's right there under number one. You know, it says the right to religious belief or lack of belief and the right to religious expression. Okay. So therefore, the government should not be in a position or put itself in a position to dictate whether you believe or not or test you whether you do or not. Right. Yeah. Well, and this was part of the point I had tried to make even with human rights tribunal, who said, well, they don't argue cases of constitutional law and or charter. They don't make charter arguments. And it was like, well, but you're supporting the BC Human Rights Code, which is the child of that charter. And, you know, so I mean, how can you say you don't serve the greater good or that you make somehow an exit for yourself by saying, well, we only look at the human rights code and you don't quite fit in there. Wow. And that's exactly what they do. That's exactly what they do. One of the problems of religion is that they tend to dehumanize their enemy so that they can then persecute or sideline them and give them limit the rights. And the craziest thing is once they have those privileges that they've taken away from other people, it's not like they share them equivalently with their followers. It's just only for their select few and all the masses vicariously sucking off that heat, you know, it's hey, we will make sure this group can't, you know, take a picture or behave as humanly as you. But what does anyone else get from that other than the people in power continuing to marginalize others and feeling more ingrained to be able to take that power away from other people? Like that offers nothing beneficial to society. And the saddest thing is, is you are documenting this in such a way that in my opinion, and you're in your in your candor with the government bodies are so responsible and intelligent and well spoken and well said and just clearly outlined with all your problems that you would think for just one instance, you just have a person who sees and it'd be like, right, OK, you can take a hat come in on seven o'clock. We'll take a picture of you with a hat on. It's OK. It's no big deal. But instead, they're like, well, I have also read the laws and and then they just start spouting off other nonsense. What I would love to see you do is make those just like a YouTube video of just the letters that you're getting and just document this for history's sake, tag it all with your Pasifarian keywords. That way, you know, other people looking up can find it. It makes me really, really sad when I have to see history in motion. But I feel like this is one of those events. This is one of the things where it's here's clearly the side of good. Here's clearly the side of corruption. Keep fighting. Keep going. This will support you. I think when we come back after the second break, we'll talk about what it looked like ideally when you get everything you want. And you'd be surprised. It's not that much. Great. And it actually helped everybody. But Larry, why don't you take us out? Sure. This is the digital Freethought Radio R. Stay tuned for the second half coming up after this break on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Hello and welcome back to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour, second half of the show. I'm Dodder Five and we're on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPFM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's take just a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 21st year and we have over a thousand members. We have weekly in-person meetings every Tuesday evening. Look for us at Knoxville's Old City at Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria. We're inside at the high-top tables or if it's a really pretty day, we'll be out on the deck. We also have a Tuesday evening Zoom ASK meeting. And if you'd like to join us, email us for details at askanatheist at Knoxvilleatheist.org or let's chat SE at gmail.com. You can find us online at meetup.com, Knoxvilleatheist.org or just Google Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. We'll come up. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to Meetup and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. One bet where you want to pick up. So we were talking about the injustice that occurs, not just overseas and not just with jobs, but within the, I would say, not continental to the United States, but America in general, because Canada is still America, whether they like it or not. And it's happening here. It's happening here. And while they say, hey, listen, you guys have to wear this religious credit scarf or this to get certain rights in the U.S., we're doing the exact same thing, too, to our own or in the America in general. And I feel like Dred Pirate, while your story isn't as popular, it's just as concerning. And when I see that happening and being promoted by, in writing by government bodies, it's just one of the scary things where I think back to the license plate situation that's happened here in the U.S., where if you are not religious, your license plate starts with three letters. And if you are religious, your license plate starts with three numbers. And now you can just drive down the street and be like, oh my gosh, this is a rule. You don't know about that? That's not a thing. That's not a thing. That's a real thing. That's a real thing here in Tennessee. That's the thing in Tennessee. So if you are secular, your license plate starts with letters. If you're religious, your license plate starts with numbers. And it's as clear. You can see it from 50 yards away. And you're just like, why did we make this a thing? This is such a bizarre situation. And I don't end the end top of that would be like, well, if your license plate starts with numbers and you're religious, you get to drive five miles faster. Like that would be the sort of insanity that would be really difficult. Yeah. Well, Judd's probably wondering, how do they know if you're religious? You get to choose when you buy your plate, whether you want to in God, we trust on it. And if you put, yes, I want to God, we trust, then it starts with numbers. If you choose not to, then it starts with letters, which makes it, you make sure wonder why would they do that? That your car would be, you'd be able to pick out the non-religious people at a distance of 50 yards. All right. That's insane. I did not know that. Yeah, I'm going to add some more granularity. That's not everywhere. That's just in certain states. It's in Tennessee. At least in Tennessee. Yeah. I don't know about any other states right now. So I would say this, here's some more granularity. The state official license plate starts with letters. That is the default option. However, when you sign up for a license plate, you can select a vanity plate that looks like a mock of the issue one at no extra cost and it's advertised on the form. And so it's an option for you that's handed out. There's a lot of vanity plates that you can get like autism, supporting hunting, cancer awareness, but you have to pay for those. What the state does is offer a free religious vanity plate, but it does not have the standardized template for format. Exactly. Format for letters and numbers. What they did is just swap them and they look so similar that they look like state issued. And so what happens is a lot of people pick the vanity plate that's the Christian version of the state version of their plate and then they put it up. And so you have a bunch of vanity plates that look like state plates and then you have just standard state plates. And some of the state plates that are non-religious, those people are in fact religious. They just don't want the state to be supportive of their religion. They just want to either have a bumper sticker or, you know, keep the status neat. A little fish. Exactly. Whereas every single one that's religious, that's a religious person. So what else can you say about it? Well, you could say that there might be non-religious people who haven't come out of the closet, having about the pressure from their family, their society, the church, whatever, because they don't want to stand up for it or their workplace and face the discrimination. And here's the bizarre thing. So I love taking numbers. We had a Bujo on last episode. He was a PhD in civil engineering. He loved this. I was talking about with him. I looked at every single county and we looked at the percentage of religious plates to non-religious plates. And of course, it's not a surprising trend. The more rule and smaller the county, the higher the percentage of religious plates. Whereas the biggest ones, the ones that are a hundred times larger, are at the lowest end of that spectrum because there's just more diversity, more income. Just when you push people into more prosperity, more prosperity, you're going to find that they aren't as religious. That's a very telling kind of crutch. It's harder to have in and out groups in a urban setting. In a rural setting, people gravitate because they've studied the township or the county or whatever and discovered, you know, wow, that's mainly Catholic or there's a Baptist county or whatever, so they can gravitate there. Whereas the city is pretty hard to do that. Right. And so the counties that have less than 10,000 people, counties, not cities, counties that have less than 10,000 people, they're like 99% religious. But like the ones that have over half a million people or 700,000 people like Davidson County, where Nashville is located, huge counties that have hundreds of times more people, 13% religious plates. Right. When we were doing the math, we found that a starling large number of people in Tennessee are, in fact, using the state issued non-religious plates just by default, just by pure number alone, it's staggeringly high. It's like 20% are total are religious people. Everything else is non-religious. And that's Tennessee. Yet Tennessee is just through gerrymandering, very, very conservative. And I'm like, okay, well, this is a mind blowing propagation, then, because we have so many people here who are at least would be willing to understand concerns from a secular point of view and think and prosper and promote science. Yet we've staggered or stacked the deck so much against them politically that we are still in a red state. However, we are leaking. We are very much leaking out. And like all the large counties are leaking out into these smaller ones, or whenever small counties can't support themselves, and they have to commute into the larger communities to like get jobs or whatever for like the next generation, they come back home, they suddenly become less liberal as a result of the fact that family members are seeing the light and getting outside of their own neighborhoods, too. So I don't expect the trend that we're on to go backwards. If anything, we're going to just continue to go forward. And my big concern from last episode was we are pushing ourselves towards, in my opinion, the next enlightenment, where we recognize that we don't need to have this religious crutch supporting ourselves as we continue to appreciate and better understand science and be able to have better access to higher qualities of information and explanatory systems. And I'm hoping that gives us better empathy for your situation as well, too. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, you know, and I've said this, I think a number of times is where it almost seems that the religious right are kind of doing that last gas before they start to go under. Because the writing is clearly on the wall that religious affiliation is on the decline. And throughout, as you say, America, Canada and the United States, both in Mexico, I'm sure, I don't know, maybe. But I was going to say, because you had mentioned about my security license, and that recently, while last year already by now, I had changed my designation, I included the private investigator designation. And that's what you have to, of course, change your card. So they give you an opportunity to upload a new photo. And of course, the photo I uploaded was one depicting me in my tricorn. And it was accepted and I was issued a card with my photo depicting me in my tricorn. Yeah. And it was three months later, I got a letter not from some staff or some underling, but from the highest authority, the registrar of that ministry, who said, you either give it back, or we're going to review your license, which of course is government speak for take it away and screw you over essentially. And so I had to submit that particular instance now is before the BC ombuds person, the office there, because again, I document everything. So it's so very clear that I've gone through all the steps in order to argue my point that the last person to whom I could actually make a complaint was the registrar. And it was the registrar himself through that old trickle down effect that was the source of the whole discrimination in the first place. So the ombuds person's office has taken on the case there, of course, in a backlog. So it's been a while since I've had any communication, but there, you know, they are assigning an investigative team to it. With respect to the ICBC stuff, I, as you may know, and as I pointed out in my video, that I had obtained, I asked for made an FY request for you of information request, and had returned to me 691 pages of mostly redacted inter-office email. And so the point, of course, I make is that, you know, you can say that you're trying to accommodate people of religious belief who are prohibited from removing the egg gear, yet the policy itself, you won't share with me. And the things that go to inform the policy are sealed behind redacted documents. Right, right, right. So, of course, I'm protecting other bigots so they can continue. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, that are completely morons or cowards or a combination of all three. Exactly. And so I've successfully applied to the office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner here in BC to have those documents unsevered. And the the office has demanded from ICBC all those redacted or unsevered documents, all 691 pages of it. And of course, my rationale in asking for that information in the first place was to see what is informing their policy decisions and what's going on. Because if, at the end of the day, they are, you know, cheerfully and interoffice, you know, having their own fun and just saying this guy's in that job and just bullying people. Let's just make some stuff up and we'll show him what's who's boss here. Right, for no good reason other than like, think about three months past. So like, if it happened today, we wouldn't have this conversation till March, right? Like, we'd just be sitting pretty and someone says, I'm going to cause a problem for this one guy because I can, right? Not because I'm afraid of whatever you can do to me, but because I feel like I can. And I'm reminded of a story that we had some firemen come over and you used to be dreaded. Are you actually a fireman? I used to be for 11 years. He tells us a story. We play disc golf with him all the time where you can have two fire departments. One puts out 50 fires a year. The other one puts out one fire year. The one that puts out 50 isn't necessarily better than the other department because you can't control how many fires you're going to get in a year. So you don't use that as the criteria to determine how good of a fire department there are. Sometimes when there's no fires and the fire department doesn't do anything, they're still doing a good job. It's the people that go out of their way to cause a problem. It's like, oh, I only put out one fire this year. Let me cause 49 other fires. So I could be the number one fire department. There are some people in the world who take that criteria and flip it upside down and make it a problem. And for people who three months after the fact are still clearly didn't hurt anybody, clearly benefiting society through their licensing. And you said, I'm going to take that away just because they're wearing a hat I don't like. That is causing a problem rather than resolving a problem. And you have to think if that is an elected official or if that's a privileged position that some guy got, that is effectively a person with a hammer who's looking around and seeing everything as a nail and just trying to figure out a way to use his hammer anytime he possibly can. It's a power trip at the end of the day. Absolutely. I feel scared sometimes. Listen, I can tell you what the license plate situation we had here in the U.S. or in Tennessee at least. I feel more paranoid now if I ever were to be pulled over just due to the fact that my license plate clearly would indicate that I'm not religious and most likely a lot of the cops here are. Depending on which which county you're going through to. Oh, yeah. Some of them are as high as like 98%. Oh, yeah. Religious plates. Right. I'd be really scared. I'd be like, oh, this is another thing I have to worry about now. Like, what is the situation of Ian, right? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, you know, yeah, I guess there's a there's an app on your phone that you can set your iPhone up so that if you're pulled over, you just say, hey, Siri, I'm being pulled over. And it all of a sudden, see, Siri just came on. But it sets your phone up so that it goes dark but records everything. Ah, interesting. It's a clandestine recording app in the event that you get pulled over. So the cop doesn't know that. What's the name of the app? I can't remember. My son told me about it. I haven't actually checked it out. Well, that's likewise terrorizing because you should be able to record in public. You should be able to record in public, even if it's your own arrest. And cops who are like, don't record me right now. Those are the ones who are terrifying. But even cops in the US, due to Black Lives Matter now have bodycams on them in the state of Tennessee, which I figure is one of the top three things that we should have had to begin with. You should always be documented as a person of power when you're interacting with citizens. And to think that that wasn't a rule otherwise is outlandish. And I love the fact that you are continuing to document this threat. Here's my recommendation. I want to start off. I want to end us at least on a good note. Here's my recommendation on how to solve this problem. Just let people wear hats. Just make that the rule. Like don't make the you can make a secondary rule saying, hey, don't have anything offensive, like offensive slurs or like body parts on it. Like you can't come in with like a hat that's literally like boobs and be like, I worship those. Like that's I it's not a religious thing. We're not telling you not to wear it because we disrespect religion. We just feel like that's on our offensive list, which is not at all based on your religion. It's just you can't wear hats with boobs on it. That's that's a that's a a a prudish policy, but it's not a big bigotry based policy. So just say, hey, you can wear hats if you want to just to make an offense. And if it is, put the sensor bra on or whatever. And we take a picture. Just don't cover your face because we need to see your face. It's a practical rule. That's it. And then after that point, you don't have this marginalized bullying that's going on other people and you have a rule that can better apply to everybody. Why what is the problem with that? Dredd, what do you think? Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, and it's interesting that that should be the case. It is to a certain extent, in BC, women can wear headbands. There's there's actually a whole sheet on what criteria you have to meet in order to wear some hair accessories. And so I actually made an attempt to have a headband above the hairline meeting the criteria, but it just had the image of the flying spaghetti monster on it. They they said, nope, we don't care. Even that rule, you can't use our own rule, which we allow for other people. We don't for you. What about tattoos? How about tattoo? Well, yeah. So I did, of course, my current license has me with a temporary tattoo of the flying spaghetti monster in prominent form on my forehead. Yeah. They can't do anything about it. Can't do anything about that. It was so I've been thinking maybe next time I lose my lose my license, like drop it or can't find it. I get one of those temporary tattoos that says frack ICBC. Listen, you don't have to get down to their level. I like the path that you're on. I like the path that you're on right now where it's just FSM. I was thinking like, if you were ever to do another step, it would either be and listen, I don't I again, I wonder about the the underlying messages behind this, but you wear a yarmulke that you wear a yarmulke or a turban that has the FSM pattern on it, or or something that's closer to one or their more approved religions and then be like, by the way, I don't actually believe in this. God, I'm just wearing a hat, which you're allowing me to. That seems bizarre. Like you didn't have a problem with it then. So if anything, if there was ever a litmus test of them being in their own butts, it's you have to be approved religions. Like I'm not even this religion. I'm just wearing a hat. Oh, well, I'm wearing a hat, but you can't wear a hat because you're not one of the approved religions. Like you are up in your own. Yeah, no, you know, and this is the thing, you know, when I said that, I mean, you make they made the claim, of course, that that that their decision says, please note that I see BC's decision was made after looking at all the submissions, the facts and the law, they don't say it's based on it. Yeah, I have no citations. There's no citations. It's clearly not based on anything. They're just saying, yeah, we learned. It's just posturing. It's just posturing. Right, right, right. And I want I wish lawyers would take this up more enthusiastically. I know there's not a lot of money behind it, but I wish there was like a lawyer who would like walk you through all this and like absolutely collate all this. So just continue to document and keep sound blasting. We'll continue to do it on our end to my my final thoughts would be in the same way how fines crimes that you commit where the penalties of fine are really only for poor people, because rich people don't really have to care about fines. Laws that exist in this nature, really, where they only affect very marginalized groups are just to add more authority and posturing for those who are in positions of advantage. And I think it makes the it sets us up for the worst parts of the human condition where we like to have a pecking order. And at the end of the day, the fact that you can deny the human rights that Jed has to to respectfully conduct himself as a human being who's a possible believes in a pacifarian God, compared to a guy who believes in a a snake that is by Senutus, or something like that, or a six armed blue God with an elephant or something like that. Like the fact that you can do that is really upsetting, but also speaks to the idea that it doesn't make your God any more real. And if anything, it only demonstrates that he's more of a tyrant. And you and you are embodying that tyranny through him or her or it and making it even less likely that atheists would be more inclined to take you seriously. It just puts you further into the the basket of terrible ideologies and bad examples of dogma dogma in action. So Larry say that's right. Crazy. That's crazy. And I think what we'll have is the the demonstration. This will be hopefully the dying throws of religion before we're all done at the end of the day. Dred anything you'd like to plug before we're done? Yeah, of course. I have my YouTube channel, Mind Pirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T on YouTube. And you just click in at Mind Pirate and you'll come to my channel. I record this Sunday mornings when I'm on at 7 a.m. PST and Global Atheist News at 11 a.m. on Sundays as well. Pretty cool. I'm let's chat. You know what? In the comment description, I'll put a link to the song that I just made. I feel good about it. And also look up some Pasifarians and subscribe to some Pasifarians on YouTube. There's a great community and two, way more than you would anticipate. So find them and realize around the world. They're all around the world and and the more attention we can give to them, the better because the news may not do you a favor in that regard. Larry, anything you would recommend? Well, my content can be found at digitalfreethought.com. Excuse me. Be sure to click the blog button for our radio show archives, Atheist songs and many articles on the subject of atheism. My YouTube channel Handle is at Doubter 5 and you can find my book on atheism called Atheism What's It All About on Amazon. So it's there. Thank you, Dredd, for showing it. Remember, everybody is going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it, enjoy your life, and we'll see you next Wednesday night at 7 o'clock on WOZO Radio. Say bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.