We don’t embrace the imperative of winning. Even scaled out to national survival, the Christian Mystic’s approach is that God is running the show, and His whims are inscrutable regarding such things. Instead, we focus on righteousness in the process. It’s the one thing that’s in our hands. Not that we can control ourselves in any strict sense of performance, but that we can learn to feed our own desires for holiness. God measures holiness in terms of desire, not in outcomes. It’s this outcomes-based obsession that is destroying the West. The Western consciousness scrambles hardest for outcomes, and it is the one thing no one can control.
Perhaps you heard about the way the FBI managed to seize control of a child porn website (“Playpen”) hidden away on the “dark web.” You might have heard that they held control of it for some time, using it as a honey trap to plant malware on computers of those who visited this members-only website. They have been condemned publicly for serving up child porn in the process. Both the porn serving and the malware have been condemned. Their defense is varied around themes of tactics that produced measurable results with hundreds of arrests once the users were all tracked down via that malware. But the real problem is that they already know the names of thousands of US government figures, both elected and appointed, who are directly engaged in both child porn and child molestation, but they refuse to investigate and prosecute. It would destroy the government.
Did you know that there is at least one genuine Open Source project aimed at producing a free version of Windows? It’s called ReactOS. It’s struggling due to lack of sponsorship, but the developers are giving it serious effort in their spare time. As you might expect, it’s a massive undertaking and they are way behind the curve. It’s not even close to ready for actual use and the target keeps moving. At one time I really believed this was a great idea. Not any more. I’m convinced that the Windows approach to things is already dead. It has nothing to do with any emotional commitment to any alternative, but a genuine conviction in my soul that the time-space window has closed on Windows. It has nothing to do with technical merits either way; it’s the inherent failure of centralized control. Its end is here. The longer people hang onto Windows, the more painful will be the shift when it is forced on us.
And if you think that’s an ugly picture, wait until it starts biting into the mobile device market. The current trend toward conglomeration among cell phone providers has not yet run its course, but somewhere not too far down the road, this trend will become impossible to maintain. Only the necessity of infrastructure and current technology keeps it alive. Once alternatives arise, the industry will become chaotic.
