Inventory

Today’s a good day to consider what is before us.

As noted yesterday here, martial law is now officially the law of the land. I still believe it will take awhile for things to gear up. However, crushing dissent has already begun in earnest against various mandated government orthodoxies, as noted in the other post yesterday.

At various times I have stated some basic principles of operation here.

1. I can’t shut up. In order to be me, there is a fundamental requirement to write and publish. This and other places on the Net fulfill that necessity for me.

2. I’m a pacifist. I refuse to get involved in fighting and actively resisting the police state. Indeed, I refuse even to protest publicly.

3. That’s because I am utterly certain God has ordained this nastiness as punishment for our gross national sins. (It has nothing to do with grace, Jesus on the Cross, or any of that other stuff; it’s strictly a matter of His Laws.) So any form of active resistance is a sin.

4. Flight is not a sin. If you can get out of Dodge, get out. If you can only flee to some isolated area about which no one else cares much, that may be sufficient. Part of what I am doing in terms of physical fitness is keeping an eye on the necessity of playing cat-n-mouse. I openly encourage and profess my own plans for avoiding arrest under this new system.

5. There is some room to maneuver. Because I’m not a significant threat, and there are only so many badge-bearing thugs against a really huge number of folks who are easily more offensive to the system, they’ll probably not come after me, or people like me, anytime soon. I don’t see any evidence of gearing up right away for a mass movement to crush dissent just yet. Stuff like that inevitably leaks out. Our only real problem is false leaks which promote senseless behavior.

To my advantage is the complete lack of need to hide or keep private any of my grouching and mutterings. There are no secrets here. I may use plenty of sarcasm and humor, but the only thing I can’t let hang out there in plain sight is the Truth itself, since by its nature it must be presented in parabolic and symbolic terms. Even then, I often struggle mightily to make it as obvious as my talents allow.

But I suppose at some point it will become pretty inconvenient to keep mouthing off here on this blog. Simultaneous with the imposition of martial law and the police state in meat space, we have at least two serious proposals for crimping things here in virtual space. All in the name of protecting copyright, you understand. It’s altogether possible WordPress and other free blog space providers will be forced to take action to shut down certain types of dissent. I’m expecting the rise of popularity for more “bullet proof” services in the near future. If that fails, I’ll have to move my publication to something more obscure.

Given what amuses me, it also raises again the question of operating systems and computer software. I have noted in the past the only real advantage of using Linux or other Open Source is how much control the user has. That control is limited if the user doesn’t write code, but you don’t have to worry about secret back doors and commercial exploitation. Windows has those doors wide open, but has certainly improved on resisting outright criminal exploitation and basic system stability. So I may end up having to consider and discuss, and act on, such things in detail sometime soon.

This, in the context of considering my audience. When I write about computer stuff, I get tons of traffic from people who seldom bother to interact. They matter to me, in the sense I get the chance to help someone do something they couldn’t otherwise. For those who come here because they actually like my writing in general, these few folks are of a sort who are already fairly savvy about life in general. At least, they have been asking the right questions long before they happened upon this blog. If I have to “go underground” with those things about which I simply cannot shut up, you’ll probably know where to find me, provided you have leisure to spare much effort on such things. If I stop posting here, you already know how to get hold of me to find out what’s up. If you don’t, simply email me at the address on my resume (gone now) and I’ll provide a half-dozen email addresses, etc.

But we’ve got some time. Frankly, I expect the evil doers will run out of resources before they get to me. That doesn’t mean I won’t take some heat, but I believe I’m prepared for that. Meanwhile, I still believe in the God who made and rules the universe, and I’m sure He has plans incomprehensible to us all. I am aware of that, even as I profess no particular ideas what that would mean for me specifically for this discussion.

We can still get some popcorn and put up our feet.