Matthew Jones

This is the mansion that New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino grew up in before her parents were indicted for a massive human trafficking scheme that basically involved forcing Filipino migrants into slavery. Her parents trafficked hundreds of immigrants into the US, then threatened them with deportation if they spoke out against abusive living conditions and extremely predatory loans that basically forced the migrants into a form of indentured servitude or modern day slavery. Her parents ultimately stole almost $2.8 million USD in fraudulent visa fees before being indicted on 40 counts of money laundering, conspiracy to smuggle immigrants, and visa fraud. According to court records, the fraud worked like this: The Tolentino family took school administrators on free trips to luxury beach resorts in the Philippines. In exhange for the luxury holiday, school administrators would then ''interview'' Filipino teachers and agree to hire them to their school district. At first, the school district promised to employ 55 teachers. With this preliminary order, the Tolentino family charged each of the teachers $10,000 for a non-refundable deposit and extracted a promise to pay up to 50% of their US salaries for their first few years of employment. Before even making it to the US, most teachers were therefore placed in debt roughly equivalent to two years of median family income in the Philippines. This debt quickly became crushing because the Tolentino family business Omni Consortium worked with a predatory loan shark company called Blue Pacific to deliver loans at an annual interest rate of 60%. Blue Pacific required that each “recruit” have a co-signer in the Phillipines: co-signers were threatened with jail-time if “recruits” were unable to make monthly payments. The Tolentino family failed to secure employment for many of the teachers once they arrived in the US, so many of them failed to make their monthly payments. If "recruits" failed to make a payment the Tolentinos would charge an additional 10% penalty to the loan payment, plus an additional five-percent 5% interest. At least one victim of the Tolentinos filed for ''T nonimmigrant status'' which is a temporary immigration benefit for victims of human trafficking. While ultimately unsuccessful in their overall ''T nonimmigrant status'' appeal, US Citizenship and Immigration Services DID determine that the victim had been a victim of human trafficking at the hands of the Tolentinos: ''Upon review, the applicant has established that she has been a victim of a severe form of trafficking in persons, and and that her physical presence in the United States is on account of a severe form of human trafficking in persons.'' So a DHS agency determined that the Tolentino family engaged in a severe form of human trafficking that basically involved forcing migrants into a kind of modern slavery. After a lengthy trial, lawyers hired by the Tolentinos secured a ruling of mistrial on a technicality because two of the jurors read some newspaper articles about the case. They ultimately pleaded to conspiracy to defraud the US government and received 3 months' probation each, not prison. According to the El Paso Times reporting on the August 2008 sentencing, the Tolentinos ultimately forfeited: - A $1.75 million house in Houston - $80,000 from five different bank accounts held under the names of parents and grandparents - A 1996 Mercedes Benz - A 1999 BMW - Real estate properties in Houston and McAllen Her mother Angelica Tolentino had her charges dismissed in August 2008 specifically in exchange for agreeing not to contest the forfeiture order. Jia's mother avoided prosecution by letting the assets go, which suggests the family treated the forfeiture as the real cost of the case rather than the criminal sentence (which was just 3 months' probation each for father Noel and grandmother Florita).

We're seeing a concerning snowball effect within the Christian Nationalist movement: 1. Overt racists and anti-Semities identify as CNs. 2. CN influencers stay silent to prevent infighting. 3. CN-sympathetic evangelicals therefore distance themselves from the movement. 1/

There is no way a person can see this image of a cell and deny that God exists.

Why the ancient Romans persecuted the early Christians: "In New Testament times, the Greeks had a term for the underlying principle that unifies the world into an orderly cosmos, as opposed to randomness and chaos. They called it the Logos. The Stoic philosophers conceived it as a pantheistic mind pervading the universe. But the apostle John applied the term to Christ. “In the beginning was the Word”—Logos (John 1:1). Every Greek who heard John’s gospel understood that he was claiming that Christ himself is the source of the order and coherence of the universe. As Paul put it, “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Creation has a rational, intelligible order that reflects God’s creative plan. From the beginning, however, this New Testament concept of truth came under fire. The Roman Empire did not regard religion as the search for truth about reality. That was the province of philosophers, not priests. The Romans defined religion solely in terms of ritual, ceremony, and cult practices. The empire was perfectly willing to accept Christianity if it would take its place as just another set of religious practices. What the empire would not accept, says Catholic theologian Lorenzo Albacete, was Christianity “as a source of truth about this world.” How did the early church respond? It resolutely refused to reduce Christianity to Rome’s relativistic definition of religion. As Albacete writes, Christianity “would not accept a place with the religions of the empire” as merely another set of rituals and practices. It “saw itself as a philosophy, as a path to knowledge about reality, and not primarily as a source of spiritual or ethical inspiration.” The message of Christ’s resurrection—in a physical body, in historical time—did not allow for any dualism that shoved religion off into a separate sphere of life concerned only with spiritual rules and rituals. The early church insisted that biblical truth is a comprehensive unity, encompassing the realms of both priest and philosopher. Truth is a unified whole." (From Saving Leonardo)

This week, the U.S. voted against a call for reparations for descendants of the international slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries. Let’s talk about it. (1/7)

Cuba before the revolution was a horror show. Bankrolled by the Mafia, US intelligence and wealthy US businessmen, dictator Fulgencio Batista's reign of terror knew no bounds. They gouged out political prisoner Abel Santamaría's eyes in front of his family. The bodies of hundreds of political prisoners showed signs of severe torture. Anyone suspected of opposing the government could be rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or even executed in the street. Batista's Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activites, which carried out the torture and extrajudicial killings, was trained by the CIA - at the same time the US government was carrying out a program of political repression against suspected communists in the US in which labor organizers, journalists and members of the Hollywood elite were targeted, leaving their careers and lives in ruin. The American Mafia in Cuba, led by Meyer Lanksy, Lucky Luciano and Santo Trafficante, Jr., paid Batista to kill, torture and intimidate any suspected Cuban dissenters - with the goal of keeping Havana "safe" and quiet so their empire of drug trafficking, human trafficking and gambling could continue unabated. The belief that pre-revolution Cuba was anything but a deadly despotic hellhole run by gangsters is a cute story but nowhere is it based in reality. Make no mistake, when the capitalists say they want to "free" Cuba from the revolutionary government, this is what they have in mind.

I’ve started to wear cargo shorts to the gym and I love it.

Nick Shirley, right now

It’s very telling how pro ‘regime change’ Cuban Americans never address crippling sanctions and embargoes, as if the country’s income from exporting doctors isn’t a result of decades of international isolation and Western imposed mass starvation. Sanctions should be viewed as a form of warfare in itself. Their worldview is almost identical to Iranian monarchists