Telling the Story Again, Part 3

Posted on August 28, 2024 by ehurst

The first two parts summarize the foundation of how I understand what Jews are doing today, and the wider political currents.

It’s very easy to miss the point that Israel did have a mandate from God as declared in the Old Testament, but surrendered it in favor of a very shallow self-worship. They rejected the deep and mystical truth for worldly advantage. They rejected the God of revelation and defiled themselves, via their worldly desires. Their religion is very worldly, and they are vehement in rejecting the otherworldly viewpoint. Even the Kabbalism they cooked up turns out to be esoteric worldliness.

Individual Jews range over the whole spectrum from the esoteric nonsense all the way down to simple secularism. Some have walked away from their heritage, among them writers like Ron Unz and Israel Shahak. They are the exceptions that prove the rule: Jews as a whole serve Satan, not the God who made them. I saw quite clearly their adoption by Satan long before I ever knew Heiser existed. This adoption should be obvious to anyone, yet American church religion is dominated by various flavors of Zionism. Experientially, I saw the tail end of the process of Zionism hijacking American churches during my youth. It took me a while to realize what I was seeing, but I rejected the Dispensationalist lie long ago.

Basic truth: Satan will offer anything at all to keep us away from the gospel. That includes an awful lot of half-truth, just enough to sound like the Bible, but leaving out the essence of embracing the Covenant of Christ and testifying effectively for God’s claims.

Notice something about the Wilderness Temptations: Satan offered things he could not give. Not that he couldn’t actually provide some semblance of what he promised, but that none of it mattered. He offered economic plenty and physical comfort, but making that your goal is deadly, no matter what flavor you prefer. He offered political stability, but it would have been artificial and wholly outside of God’s revelation. It was a distraction from the real thing. He also offered to feed our heads while letting our hearts die. We would imagine that we could understand reality, but would be kept far away from Eternity.

Jesus rejected this offer, but the Jewish people accepted it. They swore allegiance to a false covenant offered by Satan. They became his special nation, something God had not given him in the allotment at the Tower of Babel. Their flesh belongs to him; that’s all he got. He uses their worldly presence to keep the rest of mankind in the flesh and away from the privileges of the Covenant of Christ.

The fundamental truth of Jewish identity is their commitment to their tribe and the false covenant. The level and kind of commitment they hold determines the worldly benefit they receive, though it’s far more complicated than the mind can imagine. They don’t all share the same political commitments, but the key to their unity is not political or anything else most outsiders would expect. At the core, their unity is purely a matter of ritual and the dark magic on which it is based. The rituals vaguely resemble those commanded via Moses, but have been perverted in the whole so that they now serve Satan.

Did you imagine that the Talmud was purely a matter of intellect? No, it invokes dark powers. It didn’t start out that way, but it developed over the centuries after the New Testament period. The Nephilim spirits (demons) live among them, when Israel once was the nation God raised up to kill the Nephilim. Jewish experts have confessed that what holds them together is the ritual lifestyle, regardless of any intellectual perception of what the rituals mean. Theology is not the point. They worship side by side under any number of varying illusions, but revel in their ritual unity.

Any lingering Jewish loyalty among those who convert to Christian religion is a mark of that dark power still at work. This is part of the reason we teach that humans must renounce their ethnic identity to become part of the Covenant. It’s one thing to be aware of ethnic background intellectually; it’s another to maintain some allegiance or commitment to those who share our fleshly identity. That is the key Satanic influence that keeps us weak in the Covenant.

Keep in mind: The dark magic defiles and fouls your spiritual life. It’s important to keep track of the signature of the dark power of the Nephilim spirits. It’s of somewhat lesser importance to keep track of who maintains a Jewish identity because of the high probability they will serve Satan’s agenda. Jews will get involved in plenty of things that don’t matter in order to hide their real commitments, but as long as they think of themselves as Jews, there is a defiling presence in all they touch. You need to become sensitive to this according to the gifts and talents God has given you.

The whole point of the gospel message is to seek a spiritual identity that transcends flesh.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Telling the Story Again, Part 2

Posted on August 27, 2024 by ehurst

Let’s review what we gain from Heiser’s thesis.

As always, it’s not simply his thesis; he brought together a vast body of scholarly work and presented it to church folks who rarely hear anything about it. The huge gulf in scholarship between biblical studies versus divinity studies has been a very big problem for centuries. Church folks never get to hear much from biblical studies, and so anything that bleeds across that solid wall always causes a ruckus. An awful lot of church leaders condemn the biblical studies folks like Heiser when they dare to share their material publicly.

Heiser points out the Three Rebellions. There’s the one in the Garden where the Devil suckers humans into taking sides with him, and thus pulling them under his authority. There is the second rebellion where some of God’s divine staff came down to get more directly involved in human affairs — on Satan’s behalf — and raised up Nephilim. The Nephilim were nasty creatures, sort of demigods who sought to lead humans deeper into a more purposeful rebellion against God. The third rebellion was at the Tower of Babel. God divided the existing nations among the senior staff, which we call the Elohim Council or Divine Council, while He proposed to raise up a nation uniquely His starting from scratch. The council members wasted no time in leading their nations away from divine revelation and into idolatry of themselves.

God raised up Abraham and the line of his firstborn descendants that we call the Nation of Israel. He took them through various experiences, to include the process of revelation at Mount Sinai and the Covenant. God Himself said they were easily the worst people He could have chosen for this mission, but that in itself was part of His argument against Satan and the rebel members of His staff.

At any rate, they quickly perverted His Covenant into self-centered demands. They presumed upon their status as the Chosen and insisted that God had designated them as the only real humans on the planet; all the other nations were just animals that looked like humans. This is a half-truth blown out of proportion, the same kind of mistake Satan made as God’s Chief Bodyguard.

In other words, as a nation, Israel consistently chose the Devil’s agenda over God’s, and kept taking sides with the rebellion. Satan took advantage of his authority, even in its restrictions, and wholly confined himself faithfully to the those restrictions, yet still managed to seduce Israel away from serving God.

God has always kept a faithful remnant within the Hebrew peoples. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. If God had not intervened, the gospel we have today would have remained invisible. The gospel has always been present in the written record of God’s revelation, but has often been missed because it demands humans transcend their mortality. The gospel requires undoing the Fall, and we cannot do it on our own.

This is why the Bible talks about divine election, that God must initiate the redemption process, because humans are incapable of even wanting it, much less understanding it. What makes election so hard to understand is that it’s a divine moral truth that exceeds the constraints of time and space. It includes factors of human choice, yet rests entirely on God’s initiative and authority. It’s the ultimate paradox. The whole point is our dependence on God; Satan wants us to believe in our independence from God.

God decided that, at some point in the process of Israel being hijacked by the Devil, He should intervene to make the gospel as clear as possible without violating His own nature and while keeping to the original purpose of the Covenant. The Covenant offers only so much — it reverses the Fall. Neither the Fall nor the Covenant can change our eternal nature; they are external to Eternity in a certain sense. Nothing in this world can change Eternity. Eternity shapes this world; it’s one way.

God was determined to have a people who lived by His revelation, people who would worship Him alone, in part to prove His point about glory belonging to Him alone. He was not going to do without a people to testify on His behalf. However, He kept secret from Satan and his allies just how He planned to do that. On the one hand, He clearly revealed through prophesies that His covenant would be opened to all humanity, not just Israel. On the other hand, He kept secret His claim on a large portion of humanity as His Elect before all of this drama got started.

His plan was to insert into all nations a body of people who were Elect, who would defy the rebellion and keep the witness of God’s justice alive on the earth. That body of Elect were within Israel, too. While the rebellion focused on seducing nations, God focused on saving individuals to form an empire that ignored human identities. Thus, when Christ died to end the national covenant of Israel, He opened a spiritual covenant to all the Elect hidden throughout the nations.

Heiser notes that a part of the Wilderness Temptations was Satan trying to get Jesus to reveal this secret. Satan could smell something was up, but was ignorant of how it would work. So, he tried to persuade Jesus to keep the old covenant alive and cater to the worldly desires of the Jews. That failed, but it still wasn’t clear to him what God was planning to do.

This is all noted in the New Testament, but most people miss it. They keep reading their human reasoning back into the Scripture. God sprung His surprise on the whole divine staff; Satan and his allies are left scrambling to keep their claim on humanity as deserving oblivion. Their case rests on some things we cannot comprehend, but part of it is keeping people blind to what God is all about.

Don’t get lost chasing the wrong issues. The question is not our place in Eternity; it’s not about what we can or cannot do to be a part of Eternity. The Doctrine of Election is not about us; it’s about God and His agenda. The question for us is what we can do to stay at peace with God, taking His side in the dispute here and now, which means being at war with Satan and his allies.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Telling the Story Again, Part 2

Telling the Story Again, Part 1

Posted on August 26, 2024 by ehurst

As always, I can only declare what I see. I know for certain there are things I don’t see, but it’s my instinct to make the most of what I do see. The problem is that I can see a lot better than I can explain. Still, I share this vision with others because they keep asking for it. Several people have asked questions privately that indicate I should try to declare things again. I’m trying to take advantage of my training to offer the same basic ideas clothed in different mental approaches so that everyone can get the picture. In particular, the questions concern comments I’ve made about Jews, Israel and the broader context.

The broader context is the Unseen Realm, of course, but far more than is covered in Michael Heiser’s books. We cannot make sense of the world from inside our mortal fallen existence. Without divine revelation, I am convinced nothing makes sense at all. God reveals Himself in terms of an eastern potentate big enough to have an empire. That was His choice of imagery, not mine. An eastern emperor would have a massive staff of people who hold specialized knowledge and privileges. Thus, the idea of a whole class of higher beings, of which angels are but one small portion, is simply too obvious to ignore. We humans are truly insignificant on that scale, and the role we play is in some ways no more than a football in a long game.

Humanity is little more than the symbol of a much larger drama. Our eternal destiny is more significant, but our current existence is almost wholly symbolic. Our mortal fates as humans is simply not important. The high moral outlook of the Bible is not about placing a high value on human existence; quite the contrary. What really matters is expressing the character of God to all of Creation, which is considerably larger than humanity. We get lost by making humans the subject when we are simply the object. What’s important to us should never be us.

The real drama consists of all the figures we cannot see with our eyes. It is the whole range of authorities in Heaven that shape our human existence. From our perspective, what really matters is the rebellion of the Devil. Keep in mind that terms like Devil, Satan and even Lucifer are all titles, not personal names. Individual personal identity is a human obsession; in the Spirit Realm, roles and titles are everything. We cannot know the identity of the major figures; all we have is the roles they play.

The role of Satan is more subtle and complex than we will ever understand. He is at the same time a rebel and faithful servant. To understand his role requires grasping how context shifts and what his role demands within the varying context. God has revealed the role Satan plays in our existence, and hints at the wider context of that role. We are told that this figure’s original assignment was roughly equivalent to Chief Bodyguard for God. His role included passing glory to God, and the prophets reveal that he tried to embezzle some of that glory for himself. His fundamental failure was insisting that he was high enough up the chain of existence that he warranted some worship.

This is what the prophecies point out as his characteristic flaw. Apparently he had no trouble convincing some of the staff in Heaven to embrace the same mistake. It was a political movement, but not the kind of thing where God just destroyed them all. He valued something in this situation that called for allowing them to keep on living, but with constraints. And in the process, God conceived a need to explain Himself to some unknown audience — not us. In the process of executing His discipline on His staff, Satan was confined in a prison outside of the Spirit Realm.

That prison was connected to the Garden of Eden, where God had placed a rather insignificant hobby of His — humans as gardeners. We can only guess, but it appears part of Satan’s original complaint was that all of our fealty went to God, and he got none of it. In the midst of this dispute with God, Satan developed a vile hatred for us. We can only speculate, but perhaps it has to do with resentment that God gave us immortality within the purpose of keeping the Garden. Satan doesn’t seem to hate the Garden, only humans.

As part of this dispute, Satan convinced others to embrace his clamor for God to allow himself and others on the divine staff to receive worship. This was the fundamental nature of his temptation of humans, too. It’s as if his whole repertoire rests entirely on this one thing, to tempt others to seek godhood. It’s important to understand that he wants the powers and authority of a god, and the best way to do that is to sucker folks into worshiping him. He’s trying to build his kingdom. That he was banished to a prison means that he’s trying to provoke God to put others in that same prison where he will reign.

But it’s not just suckering us into our demise; he gets his jollies from tormenting. This is another primary signature of his work. Anyone who delights in tormenting others is most assuredly serving the Devil. Side note: The Bible differentiates between a grisly execution (aiming at reputational shame) versus tormenting while alive (debasing).

At any rate, from the Garden, we humans did not so much lose our immortality as suffer having it masked by confinement in a mortal condition. Even saying that much is merely interpretive, a parable. It depends on how you look at it; it’s contextual. The whole thing is revealed to us in parables because the truth transcends clinical language.

Further, it’s not simply a historical decision made by a couple of representative humans; there’s something fundamental to the ineffable context. To be human is to be vulnerable to the temptation Satan offered. We would all have done the same thing had we stood in place of Adam and Eve. It is characteristic of being human. Satan took advantage of our natures and the rules we could not possibly understand.

In the midst of this setting, several events figure large in the Bible narrative as a way of filtering out all the other stuff that happened in the human realm. The whole point was not to record human history, but rather a narrative of the interaction between the Unseen Realm and the mortal realm in which we live. The way in which God makes His case before that unknown audience includes all the things recorded in the Bible, at least from our human perspective.

And as part of that process of revelation, we have the nation of Israel and the story of how God’s Chosen became Satan’s primary weapon against humanity.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

NT Doctrine — Hebrews 3

Posted on August 24, 2024 by ehurst

I’ll share here my previous commentary on this chapter.

The Exodus was the very foundation, the defining event of Israel. If the Exodus was a myth, so was Israel as a nation. While they pointed with some smugness to their specialness before the Lord some fourteen centuries later, they paid only lip service to the duty of expressing contrition for the nation flinging challenge after challenge into God’s face. The story of the Exodus is the sad tale of whining and bickering slaves who preferred their slavery to the freedom and identity as God’s Own People. The entire Exodus generation remained unfit for the Promised Land, conditioned as they were to bondage.

Our writer calls this to mind, charging that his readers are the same sort of people. When Christ came to fulfill the promises of Exodus, how very many of God’s Own People rejected Him! The Roman Jews were among those called into the Kingdom of Heaven, a far higher calling than the Kingdom of Israel. Christ, God Himself, called them. If Moses can be held up as the model of faithfulness, who was but a servant in the household of God, how much more Christ the Son? Christ formed a household as His inheritance; Christ built it.

And it was Christ who faithfully discharged all the duties of His Sonship. If He owned it all, He was the very definition of faithfulness. The first household was just an earthly temple. When its purpose was fulfilled in His death on the Cross, it was torn down. From the rubble were found a few stones still of use to God. He chose from among the Jews, but also from the rest of humanity, stones suitable for His house. He built up His household by His teaching and power, the means of trying the stones. These Roman Jews were a part of those passing the test. How then could they return to a house that no longer stands, except in the fallen imagination of mere men? Hold fast the confession of your faith in Christ! It is the only thing that is real.

The writer quotes Psalm 95:7-11. There David recalls testing of the Lord by Israel at Meribah (Rebellion) and Massah (Trial) in Exodus 17:2-7. This was rather early in the journey up from slavery, during the first shock of introduction to desert nomad living. Had they but called out to God in faith, the whole scene would have been remembered as a triumph. Instead, they gave Moses much grief and God took it personally. For the next forty years, Jehovah faithfully stood by them, led them and took care of their every need. Every step of the way, they whined and attacked God’s chosen servant. For the Roman Jews, Jesus was the new Servant, the actual Son of God. This Roman persecution was just the spiritual nomad boot camp. Bitterly wishing they had not come on this spiritual journey was to wish for slavery, granting Satan the victory. It was treason to side with the enemy.

As the Lord swore in His just wrath that the Exodus generation would die in the wilderness, so the Roman Jewish Christians risked losing all hope of finding the true Promised Land of Heaven. Those without Heaven in their souls cannot enter Heaven when they die. Allowing doubts to rise about whether serving Christ was worth it was silly. The word “today” is but the moment of testing and is quickly past. Today we should all face testing with joy and confidence. Were these readers among those who would die in the spiritual wilderness today? Or were they among those who clung to the revelation of Christ and would pass into the Promised Land to see God’s face?

No one can do it for you. God will carry you through, but you must accept His power to commit yourself to His plans. They won’t be like your plans, no more than the Exodus brought Israel to a place like Egypt. Their souls were at home in the swampy river bottom of slavery, not out in the rocky heights of freedom in Christ. All you have to do is hang onto Him.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , | Comments Off on NT Doctrine — Hebrews 3

Mission for the Apocalypse

Posted on August 23, 2024 by ehurst

Human conflict will increasingly consume everything in sight. The nightmare has just begun.

Let’s review the knowns: Netanyahu is determined to provoke an apocalypse. It is plainly obvious from his actions and words that he desires deeply a global war centered on his country. He is desperately trying to drag the US into his petty conflict in hopes that our involvement will force the rest of the world to line up on one side or the other. It really doesn’t matter why he is so committed to this nightmare; what matters is that this is what he is consciously trying to do.

Zelensky holds a similar commitment for his country. He doesn’t give a damn about the people of Ukraine; it’s all about him and his war. For the time being, nobody is talking about whether Zelensky and Netanyahu are in direct competition or pretending to ignore each other. However, they do share a fundamental commitment to destroying the West. Their actions and their planning makes a lot more sense when you understand their hatred first and foremost for European people and all their derived countries.

These two men are Jews; both participate in this fundamental assumption that their kind are the only real humans on the planet, and all other races are cockroaches. Their people are divine, worthy of worship and honor. Because we fail to give that honor, they will seek to destroy us from within. They hate us so deeply that we cannot begin to comprehend it. They get all riled up when we dare to mention any of this. We are unworthy of even the knowledge, much less sharing it.

No, not all Jews are this way. Only the leadership is like this — the master planners among neocons, Zionists, and in the background of every globalist agency. They are playing both sides against each other; every current political agenda and authority in the West is their creature. For the time being, they have managed to squelch the broad social response to any other political opinion. Anyone who dares refer to them remains far out on the fringes of public notice.

If you understand the grip they hold on all things here in the West, then you are in a better position to decide what God wants you to do about the problems we all face. We’ve said it often enough: Political/military action will accomplish nothing that matters. That is their home field; God has given this into their hands for His own inscrutable reasons. We can suss out some portions of the big picture, but it’s fundamentally out of our reach. Instead, we are granted parables and models that we can understand in order to motivate and guide our choices.

Jesus and His Apostles have all said that Jews as Jews are inherently evil. Jesus’ cousin John, both born as Jews themselves, called the Jewish leadership the Synagogue of Satan (Revelation 2:9 and 3:9). They are the children of Satan. Here’s the odd thing: The best way to understand God’s will for humanity is to embrace what Jews had abandoned, the Hebraic truth to which Jesus kept calling them back. The adamance of their refusal was symbolized in the crucifixion. Individually, any of them will be welcomed back into the Covenant, and they will even have certain advantages over Gentile believers, but as long as they remain under their own false covenant, they are damned.

The only warfare that works against Jews is flaunting in their faces the divine heritage they have abandoned. This is the biblical strategy for handling them. Their ascendancy in human terms is meaningless; it is what God is allowing for now. They can attack the flesh all they like, but what really matters is how things register in Heaven. This world is Satan’s home and he uses them as his chief servants. If you were to kill them all, he would simply grab someone else and they would believe and act the same way. As long as there are mortals in this world, someone is going to play that role. Hating them is exactly what the Devil wants us to do. Don’t play into his hands.

The only passion we need in all of this is a zeal for God’s truth to be clearly shown. Don’t lose track of this vision. This is our reality. None of it will make sense on a human level; don’t expect to lay a foundation that is reasonable and logical. The only use for reason and logic is to serve the divine truth and implement ways to manifest it.

For me, that is currently a mission of words. The keyboard is my sword. There will come a day when that door will close; I’ll know what to do when we get closer to that. For now, my mission is to write the truth as best I can understand it. Everything I have and do is organized for that message. I’m committed to sharing it. What is your mission for the apocalypse?

Posted in tribulation | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

How Will You?

Posted on August 22, 2024 by ehurst

We are not in the First Century Roman Empire, nor are any of us Mediterranean subjects of Rome. This is a different world, different culture, different times, etc.

Like many of you, I feel a deep sorrow over the evil men do. And it certainly seems to be getting worse by the day. It’s not as if God doesn’t notice, but He isn’t bound by our logic. His actions aren’t always obvious, and His frame of reference on time is far longer than ours. The whole point is that we obey regardless of the visible consequences, that we obey because it’s who we are. The outcomes will never be in our hands.

We believe that there’s no worldly purpose in engaging human political ambitions. No good thing can come from activism, if your intention is to make things better. That still leaves an awful lot of room for doing things that simply make a clear statement condemning sin. In other words, we will denounce the political system in words for sure, but maybe in the actions we take that might serve to disrupt the evil, and maybe even engage in open resistance.

We aren’t so much trying to stop it as to make it painfully obvious to all that our government is hopelessly and relentlessly evil, wicked, mean and nasty. Our government hates us and is at war with us. Oh, and to some degree, the same goes with every other human government on this planet. Not a one has embraced the Covenant of Noah as God requires, so all of them are invalid. The only issue is whether they make trouble for people in the Covenant of Christ. In the West, the rulers are determined to stamp out the gospel when they can’t pervert it to their own benefit.

I’ve already admitted that it’s conceivable I would use physical violence against agents of a US federal government that clearly hates us and is intent of destroying us. Millions of Americans have said it openly, so I’m in good company. However, it’s not as if I’m plotting any kind of armed revolt. I tend to de-emphasize that possibility in favor of my preferred form of combat: information warfare. It’s not a question of changing government, nor its actions, but of making lots of noise about what is good and evil as God has declared it. For now, that means mostly using the Internet as the way to conduct that warfare.

There was a time when Linux was just a hobby for me. I invested countless hours in learning a lot about it. Linux has become both less and far more than that. It has become one of the best weapons I have in the infowar. You probably don’t need Linux; that’s fine. But if you do, I’ll be glad to help you get it and use it without having to dig any deeper than you did into Windows. Indeed, given my recent experience with Windows 11, I’d say Kubuntu is far less complicated for the average user and offers a lot more choices.

And best of all, using something like Kubuntu makes it a whole lot harder for government or its lackeys in Big Tech to mess with your private life. If you choose to learn a bit about Linux, it becomes a weapon they cannot easily target for suppression. If you own a system running Linux, it really is totally yours; there are no secret codes held by super users at Microsoft or anyone to whom they choose to sell keys to your system. It’s fully your computer.

One more thing: All of those Win10 systems that cannot run Win11? Most of them will have no trouble running Kubuntu, or something similar, for many years to come. Indeed, some of your Win7 machines will probably work just fine.

Nor is this some campaign for free speech or any other human rights. I assert the divine mandate to speak His truth any time, any place, any way I can. I will not be silent. That said, you must decide for yourself what role you play in this apocalypse. How will you manifest His glory?

Posted in tribulation | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on How Will You?

Kubuntu 24.04 on Dell Latitude 3540

Posted on August 21, 2024 by ehurst

Everything works out of the box, though it does require some effort to configure a couple of things. The biggest item: I got my laptop to hibernate on Kubuntu 24.04. A few years ago I wrote a long blog post about making it work on earlier versions of the Ubuntu/Mint family of distros, but it has gotten more complicated. It’s not the distro’s fault; it’s because of changes in things like SystemD and other upstream modifications.

First, let me point you to my primary source on the more recent procedure: How to Enable Hibernate Function in Ubuntu 24.04 & 22.04 LTS by Ji M. This is the best, most complete single reference I’ve seen.

Note: You must go into the BIOS and turn off secure boot. It’s a notorious old lie calling it “secure boot”. The only thing it secures is Microsofts’s control over your system. In actual practice, it makes the system less secure, because it’s an attack vector for some malware. Turn it off; you’ll never miss it. UEFI itself is not a problem. And on some laptops (like Dells) you’ll also need to switch the harddrive from RAID mode to ACPI in order to install Linux. Most other BIOS settings should be okay.

Ji does mention making sure you have swap working, but misses something I ran into: Having too small of a swap space. By default, Kubuntu and friends will choose a swap file instead of a swap partition. Unfortunately, it also makes one too small for hibernation. So, I’ll say your first step is to get that fixed, and I recommend this guide, which offers plenty of hand-holding to get you through it. No reboot required.

On my laptop, Kubuntu gave me a 512MB (half-GB) which is woefully inadequate for hibernation. I bumped it up to 8GB simply because my system has 16GB of RAM. While Linux loves to spread itself all across most of that, when compacting down for hibernation, it has so far fit well inside my new larger swap file.

After you get that fixed, then proceed with the detailed fix Ji lays out at the handbook site. I note that, instead of using UUID to identify the resume instructions in the GRUB line, he recommends using the “/dev/nvme????????” tag. I set mine up that way.

One more note: Kubuntu tends to act a little odd unless you properly identify your laptop keyboard. Under settings, look for “Input Devices” and under keyboard, don’t accept the generic 104 key setting. Check to see if there’s something more accurate. In my case, there was a setting for Dell Latitude laptops, which works fine. Without that, some keyboard and mouse functions for me were not yielding the expected behavior.

Posted in computers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Kubuntu 24.04 on Dell Latitude 3540

Interesting Times

Posted on August 20, 2024 by ehurst

I have come to believe that the elections, now just over 2 months away, simply aren’t that important. Yes, they will certainly affect us. Whichever bunch wins will have a lot to do with the flavor of our apocalypse, but it will be an apocalypse either way. As such, any comments about the election are speculative and are of small consequence.

Did Trump actually die after all? Did the bullet that clipped his ear manage to somehow take his soul, leaving the shell of the man? If you have been watching Trump lately, you might get the impression he was already dead. It’s not just the MSM propaganda; right, alt-right and independent sources have suggested that he is not himself. Trump always knew how to manipulate the press, so if he wants to be in the news, he knows how to do that.

Someone got to him, and it looks like he’s throwing the match. Not in the sense of bought off, but I believe he’s been boxed in by the Deep State and Zionists. He’s just a figurehead now and he hates it. What we are seeing is due to instability and in-fighting among those who actually rule America in the first place. The Zionists are not united, and the neocons are following their own agenda. Their conflicts result in the situation you see.

I’ve already said that I’m not getting any word from God on these things. All I can do is try to sense the moral currents of this world. Right now it feels like things have shifted since last month. Trump may miss the window; he has failed to seize the opportunity so far. It is slipping through his fingers. It seems to me that God offered him a chance to play the role but Trump doesn’t like what comes with it.

Given the current trends, he will not make it into office. He must turn this around very soon or it will be too late. Then again, it could be that we are about to experience something so shocking that the whole question will fade into insignificance. Still, it seems for now that we face the obvious threat of a Harris presidency (if we have an election). That will be nightmare enough. At this point, we should prepare for the globalist flavor.

We live in interesting times.

Addenda: If you have the time, this article outlines the conflict behind the scenes between Zionists and neocons.

Posted in tribulation | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Kubuntu: Still the Shortest Path to Linux

Posted on August 19, 2024 by ehurst

Some years ago, I published an ebook: The Shortest Path to Linux featuring Kubuntu Linux. The contents are long out of date, as is typical of the fast moving field of computer technology. Still, regardless of what you may think of Canonical (the company behind it), their flagship Ubuntu and all of its branches and clones, Kubuntu remains the easiest way for a Windows user to get acquainted with Linux, in particular because it features the KDE desktop. KDE is modeled somewhat on the layout and integrated functions of Windows.

Recently, I tried several distributions I had used in the past on various hardware collections, but this time on a laptop (Dell Latitude 3540) that originally shipped with Windows 11: Mint, PCLinuxOS, OpenSUSE and Kubuntu. No, I didn’t try any of the RedHat derivatives because the kernel is too old and KDE is very hard to get for it. I tried to work with Win11, but I quickly came to hate it. There were too many restrictions and frustrations. After testing how well each of those Linux distributions worked on my system, I found Kubuntu the only one that worked consistently. PCLinuxOS KDE is broken; it comes with very bad defaults and they are extremely difficult to change. Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu, so to get KDE, you have to install it from Kubuntu. It isn’t very well integrated with the underlying system, so I wasn’t happy with the results. I tested OpenSUSE, but it doesn’t recognize all of my hardware.

Keep in mind: SUSE is very good at server and uniform corporate desktop stuff, but not so much for the home user. If you use it on a server, it is very easy to configure, since it comes with a GUI tool called YaST that automates most common configuration tasks. However, because the corporate world is their focus, the quality control for common consumer stuff is a little weak. I ran into broken packages and it kept me from performing some tasks. Kubuntu provides a fully integrated experience for the average consumer.

While I don’t believe I’m going to rewrite and republish another edition of my book on it, I am going to post about dealing with Kubuntu in the interest of helping others deal with the inevitable challenges every OS throws at us. All software sucks, but some is more manageable than others. I want to give back to the community of users, and frankly advocate for people to move away from Windows.

Posted in computers | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Adjusting Myself

Posted on August 18, 2024 by ehurst

Moral choices I’ve made over the years have consequences.

In my twenties, I was offered a job in business management. It would have kept me from going to church, and at the time, that was more important to me, so I turned that job down. Granted, that company eventually folded, but I would have been quickly hired somewhere else for a job that ignored Christian religion in the same way. I’ve turned down plenty of offers like that over the decades of my life. It meant a loss of economic opportunity for me, but I don’t regret it.

A few blocks from where I live now, the building that once housed Dick’s sporting goods stands empty because the rent surged dramatically when the owner refinanced the property. It happened all over town and lots of Dick’s stores closed at the same time. The former On the Border restaurant also stands empty. Steak-n-Shake is gone, and Panera took over their building because it was bigger than their former location. Where Panera used to be, The Big Biscuit restaurant moved in. For each of these, something changed in their situation to either prosper them or shut them down.

All of it affected me personally and I had no say in the matter. A bicycle I had bought at Dick’s was orphaned from its warranty, unless I was ready to take it twenty miles across town to their warehouse. On the Border shut down because the quality of the food declined dramatically over a couple of months, and people stopped eating there — my wife and I were part of that. Panera gained a bigger clientele when they moved, but they also changed their menu and we stopped eating there. Steak-n-Shake is sorely missed. The biscuit house is way too expensive.

And then I had to go on a low-sodium diet, and can’t eat out much at all. Yes, I could have ignored it and let my high blood pressure kill me slowly — or maybe not. Lots of people live with it. Still, I chose to fight back by dropping my salt intake far below what restaurants are willing to offer. We don’t eat out nearly as much as we used to. It’s not really the money, but we were already discouraged by the inflation and shifts in menu or food quality.

At the same time, the COVID debacle killed a bunch of restaurants. Many never reopened when the mandates ended. That was a limited economic collapse, and quite intentional on the part of our rulers. Locally, some retail stores closed and never came back. Some simply changed hands. I know that I’ve been forced to buy online far more than I really like. Some businesses benefit, while others start to die because of a hundred different pressures on human behavior. I’m just one of millions blown by the winds of fortune.

And yet, I insist that the Creator of the Universe is paying attention to the details of my existence. More, I claim that He communicates with me daily, hourly, even by the minute, on choices I make. Sometimes my choices blend right in with the rest of the world, because my convictions don’t require taking a different path. Even some of my moral choices appear to be part of a much bigger trend. But there are plenty of choices that require me to pull away completely from the masses.

On my bike rides, which include a lot of routes popular with cyclists, I have not seen more than three other folding bikes. None of them were even the same brand (Zizzo), much less the same model (Forte) or even the same color (green). Very few individual users have a dot-matrix printer; it’s almost entirely a commercial printer. If you count by aggregate server logs on the Net, very few individuals run Linux on laptops compared to the vast number that run Windows, and far fewer than Mac laptops. Yes, Android and Chrome OS are Linux, but tightly controlled by a central authority, not endlessly configurable like “real” Linux users.

Each of those choices were taken because of convictions about one thing or another. I avoid sodium, and thus most restaurants, because of convictions. I bought a new laptop because of convictions, and now run Linux (Kubuntu) on it by conviction. I bought a dot-matrix printer because of convictions. I bought a folding bike for the same, and declined high-paying jobs. I dropped out of the military when they begged me to stay. I kept applying to pastor churches when they uniformly turned me away. The end result is not the point.

I keep a stock of canned goods and a pile of paper and pencils when few people do either. No, I don’t see an imminent collapse of the Internet tomorrow. I bought when I did to obey my convictions, which included the certainty that I did not know when I would need them, but I could see them priced low to clear shelves at times. It’s a habit of mind. I’m not disappointed when no emergency comes to justify the habit. I keep doing that kind of thing because my convictions say so. I am obeying the single best source of awareness of God’s will for me. Sometimes it does pan out; sometimes I’ve needed that stuff and had no money to buy. It’s not magical and consistent across the board, but I’m seeking to be consistent internally regardless of the external circumstances.

I see a moral collapse that usually brings about some measure of economic, social and political shift. I see chaos rising, and I’m convinced it is here already. I see more chaos coming, but I’m pretty sure a lot of folks around me won’t see it as a major problem. At least, their actions portray a certain acceptance and adaptation that I can’t copy. I can’t keep making the moral compromises they make. Is it the end of the world? Hardly. That may come later when Earth’s magnetic poles shift dramatically and our planet’s magnetic field drops to the point that we see auroras almost every day in the tropics, while migratory animals get totally lost all over the world.

But the moral collapse is what holds my attention. That other stuff will come eventually, but the moral crisis is already here. It’s hard for me to imagine that God’s covenant people are going to ignore that moral crisis; they keep talking about it even now. I might disagree with them on what I need to do about it, but we all see it. Most of the world doesn’t see it, or at least, they don’t see it as the crisis we do.

Having a bicycle means I am ready to travel a bit without being tracked. Using BMX tires on that bicycle means I can go more places than with conventional road tires. Running Linux on my laptop does the same thing on my Internet surfing (less tracking and more opportunities). Running Linux also means not handing over my computer to an outside agency to control. A dot-matrix printer doesn’t leave microscopic ID tags on the printed product. Being ready to live without a cellphone prepares me for less tracking. Eating out less means there’s less tracking. Stocking up on stuff now means less tracking later when Central Digital Banking blossoms fully. And less tracking means less control, less meddling by humans in my moral choices. There’s a pattern to my behavior that I suspect most people do not see.

Or, more likely, they will misread it. But my God sees my heart and knows me better than I know myself. He’s the one with whom I must keep peace. And He’s the one who makes all of this work out for His glory, and to my benefit. His control is good, right and just. Everyone else’s control is harmful, wrong and evil. He decides what matters, and I do all I can to adjust myself to His wishes.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment