Mr. T raises a good point in a comment on yesterday’s post. He notes that DNA is a factor in high-trust societies, and that neither nature nor nurture can explain how high-trust arises, or when it doesn’t. Of course, my point was that high social trust is not a defining trait of Christian faith. It’s common in societies that arose from northern Germanic tribes, but it’s also a feature of Native American societies. Indeed, Christian faith presumes a moderate lack of trust, to include distrust of the self.
I’m amused by the efforts of lefties to suddenly embrace private gun ownership. Something tells me this is all just a big a put-on.
As the article says: Australia has emerged as a world leader in bad information policy. I was once acquainted with a serious Linux developer who lived near Perth; he told me he is just waiting for the day when his government tries to order him to stop running Linux on his laptop because they can’t plant snooping malware on it. Honestly, I have no feel for how things are going Down Under, but the fuzzy image I do get is disturbing.
Speaking of spying malware, where does one draw the line between criminal governments and just plain old criminals? And at what point would we expect something like Google to become a de facto virtual government that protects its “citizens” from such malware? You have to understand that the entire global Open Source community is being pushed into its own category of competing “government” by refusing to play along with demands by territorial governments to cooperate in spying on users. There are incidents where the old kind of governments are already bumping up against that boundary. The problem with such a crackdown is that too many governments are running Linux servers themselves.
I’ve been reading a lot of almost feverish efforts to make Windows more resilient. For example, Shield File System tries to detect malware activity and provide a means to rollback changes in the files. The major antivirus players are working hard to come up with their own kind of advanced protections. I noted that Kaspersky is now offering a free version for the first time ever. I’ve also noticed that Avast bought out AVG; other big names are considering consolidation and buyouts. At the same time, their free versions have become more annoying and intrusive to use.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has been making it harder and harder for those third party AV products to work at all. Given the attitude of MS, I usually recommend folks just run MS Security Essentials and a good malware remover like Malwarebytes. Make sure you have a regular file and system backup handy, because you can never tell when something is going to eat your Windows.
Addenda: I know that some subscribers will never see this but it doesn’t warrant a separate post. By request: Let’s assume for a moment the government of Israel seizes the Temple Mount and proceeds to build another Temple. It would enrage most of the world, but it won’t bring us any closer to a final Armageddon. More importantly, the Shekhina glory will not return to the Temple; the Covenant was closed at the Cross. The Temple veil was torn in two at His death — end of story.
