A witless comedian has complained about God. The only reasonable answer to fools like that is: God didn’t make the world like this. The world He made was wonderful; it was Eden. The problems with this world are our making. You find it nasty, Mr. Fry, because you participate in making it so. You can’t demand that God bend to meet your personal requirements; you have to meet His.
Do you remember those tiny lead-paged books found a few years ago? They are called the Jordan Lead Codices. Among other things, scholars suggest that the books indicate Jesus was trying to resurrect a more ancient form of Hebrew religion from the time of David. Sound familiar? We might debate some of the particulars of that ancient religion, but it’s obvious to just about everyone that it was not the same as Judaism. Naturally, the mainstream resists the idea that Christ didn’t come to start a new religion — their religion. As regular readers know, we always seek to tie faith in Christ with the ancient faith of Abraham and David, not just as a rhetorical device, but we take seriously the implications of knowing what kind of religion Abraham and David held. We assert that this is what it means to follow Christ.
The activists that elected Trump are now divided between those who simply support the man versus those who supported his promises. It’s never that simple with most individuals; the latter group is still trying to find themselves after the shock of Trump’s betrayal. They aren’t silent, but you won’t hear about them from mainstream sources. As regular readers know, I don’t support activism, but my advice to these folks feeling betrayed is to recognize that you cannot fix the system no matter who you send to the Whitehouse. Ignore Trump. There is still some momentum out there for changing things, but you’ll have to be ready to take this far more seriously than just electioneering. You’ll have to target specific individuals in positions of power who stand in the way of the changes you seek, and you’ll have to be ready to fight fire with fire. Start where you are in the lower levels of local government, and don’t shrink from removing judges, sheriffs, or school board members.
One of the things I watch for as I test different browsers includes a CPU meter. Mine shows all four cores separately. When I visit some sites, it’s almost abusive how much activity is going on just to keep the page open. I’m already blocking ads and animations, and some pages still manage to hammer away on my CPU the whole time the page is open. There is simply no excuse for this crap, from neither the website nor the cooperating browser makers that play along with this. This is one of the main reasons I no longer recommend anything based on Google’s Blink engine for daily browser use: Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi and Slimjet, just to name a few. This is a major flaw in the philosophy behind the Blink engine, in that it invites websites to abuse your system for their manipulative purposes, and to avoid having to do the work and craft a really nice website. They just throw in a menu list of pre-made abusive scripts. It’s okay for some specific uses, but not general browsing. For example, I use Opera for sites where I login. I firewall that from general surfing.
Mozilla Firefox is also moving toward cooperating with websites against users in this way. Thus, I typically recommend Seamonkey for most standard browser use. And if you don’t really need a full service browser, use something like Links2 from Twibright Labs (already included in repositories of most Linux distributions). It takes getting used to and you’ll probably need guidance in setting it up, but it simply ignores the scripting that causes most of this senseless background noise. Browser/website scripting is actually a security vulnerability, so don’t cooperate if you don’t have to. I’m not saying every webmaster is plotting evil against us, but that there are folks out there who just don’t give a damn about you and I, and they are setting the standards. They began sucking up to big-money lobbying long ago. They are trying to make the Internet like TV where the consumer has zero control or input.
