What’s Going On 04

Posted on January 12, 2017 by ehurst

No ride today. It’s not just the cold front and high winds, but I’ve got too much to do. That is, there is a pile of stuff I really want to read, and I’m way behind on updating my commentary on the Gospels. And in order to do it properly, I also need the time to contemplate and pray about everything. My flesh isn’t as fast as my spirit.

I’m not going to use FreeBSD. I took a good look at the current state of things. On the one hand, I dearly love how FreeBSD refuses to commit harikari by moving away from the modular approach. One of the things that makes Windows so vulnerable is the highly complicated and centralized Registry. The whole system depends on it; get one little thing wrong and it refuses to boot. What’s in there carries more authority than you with your administrator password. You cannot overrule it, and it’s hellishly difficult to edit the thing correctly. It’s crazy that there is a permission structure that trumps the owner of the hardware with “system level” permissions.

This is part of the paradox of using antivirus software. It has to have that system level authority, but the software itself then opens doors to hacking in the process. AV software is no less buggy than any other software. Because of how the fundamental system design works with the Registry and that vendor-controlled permission structure taking things out the user’s hands, it simply is not possible to truly secure Windows. At some point this whole thing is going to fall apart, because hiding things from users doesn’t hide them from computer crackers, and the crackers keep getting better at breaking it faster than Microsoft can fix things.

Linux is harder to break because it began without any need for vendor controls; there is no “system level” authority. As the owner, you have full permission, and it’s awfully hard for someone outside the system to hijack that authority. Risky, but it’s all in your hands, and the information you need to exercise that control doesn’t come via expensive courses or a computer science degree. The system is not designed specifically to frustrate your control as Windows is. The information is free and open, widely available on the Internet in thousands of places. But lately the mainstream of Linux development has fallen into the trap of trying to centralize things under something called “systemd” — it’s the Linux version of the Registry. That is, it controls everything and when something in it breaks, there’s not a darned thing you can do to fix it. As development goes forward, more and more of the system functions are pulled into this thing. So, for example, while the kernel and the drivers have gotten better at handling hardware, systemd interferes so that suspend and hibernate now don’t work as well as they did before.

FreeBSD won’t go that route; everything remains modular by doctrine. It adheres to the fundamental Unix philosophy. But then, the FreeBSD community also has precious little interest in desktop use. That is, the number and expertise of people involved in making it useful on the desktop is not sufficient to resolve long-standing issues. For example, any web browser you can get on FreeBSD may not properly connect to the sound system, because FreeBSD sound is such a boondoggle. It’s a boondoggle in the sense that no one else does it that way (and can’t be bothered to help the FreeBSD folks at all). Most of the desktop software available to FreeBSD is written by folks who don’t like the FreeBSD approach. The whole FreeBSD operating system is designed to support server operations, and it does that better than almost anything I’ve seen, but it results in a system that just does not work consistently with the mainstream web browsers. The resources to modify the code and bring those things together just aren’t there. Those resources are heavily invested elsewhere. By the way, in recent years, the Internet presence of FreeBSD desktop systems has fallen dramatically, running somewhat less than 0.02%. No FreeBSD on my tower; it’s Xubuntu for me.

Just a reminder: Yours truly is a clownish fellow. Expect sarcasm and subtle humor; I don’t take myself that seriously. It’s my folksy ways that stuck with me since childhood. I was born and raised in a Southern Baptist family household. Unlike the prissy middle class suburbanites, we were educated peasants (some of us), rural Southern Baptists. When I left behind the Baptist theology — indeed, abandoned the entire Western approach to Christianity — I didn’t leave behind the folksy ways. Most of you, dear Readers, seem familiar with that Southern Baptist “charm” and can read through it to what I’m actually trying to say. You know that I still sound like them, but that they want nothing to do with the path I’ve taken, and vice versa.

I teach that God revealed Himself not in a mere document, but in a nation who left us some documentation. He built a nation that knew nothing of Western ways because that was His choice for revealing Himself and what we need to know about Him to live in Creation after the Fall. This puts on us the burden of striving to recover something of what that nation had from His hand (never mind that they threw it all away later). Their intellectual assumptions are the very foundation of revelation, so we have to understand them. You cannot read and understand the Bible in any language unless you have some idea how their language worked — and it shares little with English in how it worked. You cannot bring your English language assumptions to Scripture and get any useful answers; you cannot approach religion and spiritual questions from the Enlightenment epistemology. The Enlightenment is hostile to genuine faith. Southern Baptists remain firmly within the Enlightenment traditions and it really hinders their exercise of faith. I’m not a part of that, but I have found that my best service to the Kingdom of Heaven includes sounding a bit like them.

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Cycling: Katy and 63rd

Posted on January 11, 2017 by ehurst

01dryswampInstead of my normal indoor workout today I wanted a ride while riding is good. Today I chose the Katy Trail and NE 63rd. I think I noted previously that running Reno Avenue westbound I often start off on the sidewalk that runs all the way from Heritage Park Mall to Sooner Road. It’s exceedingly rare I see any pedestrians on it, and I always yield to them anyway, telling them they have the right-of-way. From there it’s just a half-mile to Vickie, my entrance to the NE 4th bicycle route. Just the other side of I-35 the Katy Trail joins from the west, and I turn sharply back below the overpass until the trail heads north. Right at that curve we are on the backside of a small golf course up against Douglas High School. There’s a very old run-off ditch between the trail and the golf course. It’s mostly swampy, but a little dry right now. Repeated hard freezing reduced all the foliage to a dry and yellow mass.

02deepfork-aThe Katy Trail is peaceful and today I had it to myself. With a tailwind it was a pretty quick ride all the way up to the Zoo and Remington Park area. Today I left the Katy Trail and crossed NE 50th so I could swoop through the several acres of blacktop parking for Remington Park. I noticed today their giant outdoor TV screen was on; faces from a commercial were 50 feet tall. My immediate goal was the pond they built off the northern edge of the parking area, catching the drainage from a tributary to the Deep Fork River. The dam is solid and accessible, so I rode out to a clear spot to catch this shot. They matched the dam to the height of the ridgeline along the bank. The pond is on the right edge of the picture.

03deepfork-bOut and around to NE 63rd, it was eastward up and over the ridge to I-35 again. I pulled into the parking lot of Braums corporate headquarters. I wonder what it’s like to work at the Braums Dairy Store on the same lot, with corporate bigwigs looking over your shoulder? Anyway, I found a decent view of the Deep Fork again from the back edge of the parking lot. I then had to pass by several good shots on the north side of NE 63rd because it was just too much traffic. I’ll come back again with my better camera; today it’s just the pocket Coolpix. I stayed on NE 63rd over hill and dale all the way to Midwest Boulevard. The drivers were all friendly about giving me room.

04prayerchapelToday’s prayer chapel was at the bridge over the North Canadian River. I sat on the concrete side barrier and rested my feet on the odd hump of dirt they left right on the edge of the slope above the fence. I stayed long enough to have lunch and let the silence soak into my bones.

05hiddenlakeBesides, I needed the rest. The stiff southerly winds made the last few miles home very slow. Today I took the time to dart into the exceedingly rough driveway just south of where Midwest Boulevard crosses NE 23rd. I knew from satellite surveys there was a lake hidden in there somewhere on that southwest corner, and could only catch glimpses through the trees when winter stripped off the foliage. I’m sure it’s private property, but there’s no gate and no signs. So I stopped near the edge of the water, now quite low from the long dry season, and spooked the Canadian geese. You can see that this place was carved out of the hillside. On the far side is the back edge of a trailer park up there.06oldlakehouse The battered but overgrown driveway leads back to an old vacant house. The glass from the windows is long gone. I stayed where I was and used the telephoto.

With that, I turned and headed back out onto Midwest Boulevard. Just a couple more miles and I was home.

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The Walls Come Tumbling Down

Posted on January 11, 2017 by ehurst

I’m going to summarize this to save you the time chasing all the references. I’ve been saying that the nature of political conflict in the West has changed dramatically in just a few decades. The powers that be cannot pull off another JFK assassination with the same level of impunity. Granted, assassinations continue, but only of little people who aren’t significant public figures. These days the cover story for something big is ripped to shreds by the Internet community before it can even be published. And the powers that be have already seen the potential for violent revolt here in the US when they push too far (like at the Bundy Ranch). The numbers and abilities of vigilante forces are just too big to ignore when the elite can’t control the narrative.

The primary means of tyranny was always information control, and that’s just about gone. So the primary field of political battle is largely reduced to mere propaganda wars and deception is failing fast. Any political agenda that requires deception to succeed, won’t succeed easily. It’s still possible to keep secrets from the public eye, but it’s a lot harder than it used to be — it has to be woven into the very fabric of common assumptions. People who fail to adapt this new reality will go down in flames.

So perhaps you’re aware of the goofy ploy to tar Trump as a Russian agent. This was cooked up by the alliance of globalists and imperialists, so it’s not a left-right thing. Now, I’ve already said Trump is bad news, but his enemies are worse. And his enemies are far less competent. They built a campaign to discredit Trump on badly eroded credibility with the public, and it collapsed under them. Their story about Russian influence was transparent nonsense. Instead of attacking a genuine weakness in Trump’s agenda, they created a huge hole in their own agenda.

They were so desperately scrambling for anything at all of substance that they took the bait and latched onto something so ridiculous you wonder how adults could believe it. Some fans of Trump, who share their sleuthing on a forum called 4chan, cooked up a wild story about Trump inviting folks to urinate on a bed Obama had slept in. It was your basic fan-fiction nonsense, but rather well written. One of the authors of this spoof sent it to a lefty mouthpiece. That person believed it, and in turn passed it to the CIA. Somehow this story was embellished with some narrative about Trump being under Russian cultivation for at least the past five years, although some versions that leaked out included the wild tale that Trump’s family was planted in the US a century ago by the freshly formed Soviet government. At any rate, this silly spoof was inserted into the existing anti-Trump narrative and gravely offered as an explosive revelation, to the tune of a 35-page report.

And the trap was sprung as the creators of this silly tale published the evidence of how they cooked it up in the first place. Suddenly the credibility of the whole “Russian influence” thing is reduced to hilarious mocking laughter. If you really have the urge to read the details, this story has links enough to keep you busy for an hour or so. CNN bought the story; the CIA bought into it. What does that tell you of their competence?

I’m not sure when the globalists and imperialists will stop digging and realize they are standing in a grave, but this is the nature of politics here in the US right now. Most of the serious battles will take place on the Internet as a propaganda war. Sadly, all of this hides the real danger.

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River Trails and West Wind

Posted on January 10, 2017 by ehurst

01notsodryOur unseasonable warm weather has returned in force today. When I left it was almost 60°F (15C) with a stiff westerly wind. I felt it was a good time to emphasize working the right leg near capacity on power, so it didn’t need to be a long ride. I headed out through the back streets paralleling Reno Avenue. This took me into Del City and through Trent Park, zigzagging around until I came out on Reno just a quarter mile from Eagle Lake. Through the lake and onto the Eagle Lake Trail, I paused as usual on the bridge over Crooked Oak Creek. It was flowing decently today from melting runoff. The North Canadian itself has a decent flow. Our first image was shot from under the I-40 crossing.

02okcskylineThis takes me past the Indian Heritage Center, where giant dump trucks are dropping huge piles of ordinary red fill dirt all along that gravel road next to the river bank that allows access to the timing stations on the rowing course. Once I connected to the start of the OK River Trail (south bank) I spotted this interesting alignment of the water-slide and cable-slide towers against the downtown skyline. There were very few riders out on the trails, and even fewer pedestrians. The idea was to head into the wind with as high of a gear as possible on the relatively flat course.

03prayerchapelBy the time I reached Pennsylvanian Avenue bridge, I was through. This bridge isn’t that bad in terms of hiking up the slope to get up onto the deck. There’s a decent walled-off sidewalk and I rode that across, but the drop down to the north bank trail was very steep and the dirt/grass surface slipped a little under the pressure of my feet. Once down on the trail, it was so much easier whipping along with a stiff wind at my back. I decided to stop at the closer crop of pine trees west of the Walker Avenue bridge. I took a shot of my prayer chapel for the day. I sat on the pine needles and stayed awhile. Nothing heavy this time, just a few things to sort over in my head.

Times like this I wish with all my heart I had a close communion here in my area that understood my peculiar brand of faith.

It was a quiet ride through Bricktown and back home on NE 4th, the wind pushing me all the way.

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What’s Going On 03

Posted on January 10, 2017 by ehurst

It turns out the symptoms exhibited by my tower system point to a simple hard drive failure, after all. I’m waiting until I can afford to replace it and try again. I’ll probably try to run FreeBSD on it; I’ve used that for general desktop operations in the past, and it’s quick to run it as a server, as well. It’s a little more work to set things up manually, but it should work well enough. So if you feel the urge to donate a little money or a hard drive (500GB to 1TB, preferably 7200RPM SATA drive), now is a good time.

There’s a person using the name “Steven” who likes to comment on the Kiln blog from time to time. He posted recently and I can’t do anything about it. Not only is the blog admin function still broken, but I can’t fix the blog software directly. Steven also posts from random IP addresses and leaves no valid email address, so I can’t even tell him what’s up. He’s notorious for not getting the full context by actually reading here at all, it seems. His comments betray a cerebral fixation and he doesn’t seem to get the symbolism of parables or the mysticism angle at all.

Truth be told, I sometimes wonder if he actually has some kind of unspoken agenda. Maybe not in the sense of trolling for the sheer fun of destroying, but specifically targeting this mission itself. The effect of his comments seeks to tear down just about everything I’ve been doing here. I’m not bothered by it. One thing about people asking questions that fall into the gaps in my teaching is that it prompts me to toss it against my heart-mind; I get answers my brain didn’t previously know. That’s the true advantage of drawing your awareness up into your heart and away from the brain: The logic is already there, fully formed by faith. It’s not a question of building an intellectual logical system, but seeking the logic of God’s moral character.

Steven seems unable to grasp that I’m not making this up from my own intellectual resources. If that were the case, I’d be one of the most bizarre keyboard commandos chasing every conspiracy theory out there. I’d buy lots of guns and ammo and mortgage my soul for all the latest in prepper gear. I’d be living in some travel trailer or motor home and constantly moving. That’s what my brain would come up with on its own. Instead, I live by the heart-mind. Or if you prefer, I walk by the voices I hear from somewhere in the back of my head. I tend to believe it’s One Voice coming from my heart-mind, and it reflects the heart of my God.

Either way, I cannot be mainstream because I simply cannot trust the system any more. Long before I started this blog, the system threw me under the bus while I was still a very loyal servant. Once I was chewed up and spat out on the ground, I knew I had to find another way to live or crawl off and die. I was torn between several contradictory tendencies for quite some time. Those days are long gone, but you can catch a hint of it from the early years on this blog. The eight-plus years of archived posts here together illustrate someone coming to terms with the heart as a superior faculty to the mind.

I may well qualify as bonkers by most peoples’ definition, but that started when I knew the system was my enemy. Madness or not, I stand in the full commitment to that One Voice in my soul and subject my intellect to whatever that Voice says.

And that voice says I need to take another ride today. It’s already warm enough to wear shorts and a t-shirt outside, but I have to take care of the laundry first. You know how it is with us old retired guys: A house-husband’s work is never done. I’ll get my ride later; I need to commune with some of my tree friends, part of the “standing people” as the Native Americans call them. That’s what I miss the most when I can’t get outside for whatever reason.

Update: Turns out Steven is not so difficult as I had first thought. I want to note that I regret the harshness of my description above, but I leave it so that this all makes sense.

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Don’t Surrender

Posted on January 9, 2017 by ehurst

Don’t become entangled; keep your dependence on Christ alone.

Let me testify that living heart-led will change your fortunes. It’s the promise of God. While the whole of Creation could fall apart, He never fails on His loyalty to His own. Creation remains intact by His conscious attention, and we are critical to His plans for everything. A heart-led life is part of what makes us His own. I am not specially favored; I am available and strive to obedience. It works. Don’t become entangled in this world. Work in it according to God’s moral character, but don’t invest your hopes in the system devised by humans who ignore God, because that system does not respond to a sincere heart of faith. God does.

There are real world examples, though you may need to do a bit of factual reading to discern them. For example, I can tell you that Russia is struggling against a rigged game and is winning about as much as it is possible to win. I heartily recommend this analysis of the game afoot. It will also explain how the globalists and imperialists have allied together for some time now. With the looming collapse of the globalist dreams, those who have served that agenda will either have to change sides of get out of the way (i.e., take the money and run). Their time has passed.

I cannot pretend to know whether anyone involved in the US government is half so sharp as Putin, but I believe the US will weather the coming global debt crisis. I suspect it’s as much business instinct as visionary wisdom that will see our economy limp along instead of grind to a halt. But it will happen because somehow we will claw back some measure of dependence on the global banking system. A big part of that will be making friends with Russia and breaking ties with globalist financiers. Any other course of action promises to destroy us. My prophetic sense leads me to believe that we will see some serious breakage in the globalist banking system, partially at the hands of US government policy.

If what I’ve written so far rings a bell of recognition in your heart, then you should understand two things. One: God has shifted reality dramatically from the previous course of things. Instead of an apocalypse of destruction here in the US, we are now headed for something else. Instead of economic disaster and system collapse, there will be a shift in how the system works and our economy will run on a different track. However, this track comes with a whole new set of serious problems that are exceedingly difficult to estimate. I can tell you only what I see so far — those who are fooled by the apparent wise economic choices and stay wired into the system will fail to see the other disaster coming our way. In exchange for keeping our toys and full bellies, we will come under a new form of slavery.

Two: The best way forward in pragmatic terms is to stand clear of the debt system as much as possible, as the primary means of enslaving us to the worldly way. Be aware of that dependency factor; whatever it is you borrow money to buy may be little more than a temporary tool. Don’t invest emotional attachments to anything that requires debt. You will have to follow your own heart’s guidance on the specifics, but recognize the inherent risk of debt=slavery. Bend your mind to organizing a daily existence that does not rely on debt. While that’s obvious even to the most worldly minded folks, it’s a very real implication for the practice of Christian Mysticism. It’s what Sister Christine calls the “woo” factor — it requires an awareness of things not visible to the five senses.

It requires that your awareness shift to the heart. It’s the eyes of faith that can see a system designed to chain you to the materialist worship of Mammon. Don’t surrender your will and loyalty to idols. If you can stay free of that trap, you will do well enough. You need not fear having to crawl down into your belly and act on mere fleshly survival instinct. Don’t descend into the flesh, but pull the flesh up into your faith. Draw your whole being into your higher moral awareness of reality as God actually made it. Discover the confidence that comes from relying on the God who made all things, because your heart already knows His promises.

Things were similar for believers in the First Century churches. John saw the apocalypse coming and wrote: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21). That’s how you ride out tribulation.

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Watching and Working

Posted on January 8, 2017 by ehurst

Moral discernment (quantum reasoning) works on multiple levels, seeing that a specific event may well bring two kinds of good and three kinds of bad.

On the one hand, it should be pretty entertaining. But that’s all it will be. I hope by now you have adopted enough holy cynicism to know that nothing really important is going to happen in politics here in the US. That is, even if we do see the globalists shut down decisively, all it means is that there’s more room for the imperialists to operate. So we trade one kind of problem for another. In that sense, you’ll know what to expect. But for the immediate future, we should expect a lot of noise, much it meant only as a distraction. There will be some actual changes taking place, but that will be mostly in the background, in that you’ll learn of it only from independent news trackers.

Indeed, if American politics amuses you, I suggest there will be a much more interesting constitutional battle with the State of California and certain large metropolitan governments versus the new ruling regime. This is what could prove truly interesting. The noise about giving sanctuary to undocumented immigrants is hardly the whole issue; this is truly a polarized country. It’s not just globalism, but a whole range of other agendas that represent an uncrossable chasm of cultural difference. This is a very real issue, in that where you reside can determine what sort of hassles you face in your mission and calling. This is far more than mere politics, but a very real problem that could result in significant changes on the ground in terms of every day life.

Still, I remain convinced that God is watching out for us. Unless your heart warns you otherwise, I think we can expect to avoid any real threat to our shalom. We might not get a bigger share of it, but I doubt we’ll see less of it. We have His promise that our heart-led obedience to His revelation brings down powerful promises that our minds won’t believe. Don’t fret; things are going to change but we won’t get hurt unless we get distracted.

Watch from a sidelines with your eyes, but keep your heart and hands on the task.

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Psalm 119: Ayin 121-128

Posted on January 7, 2017 by ehurst

This is the Way of Wrath. We work from the image of a sheik come to inspect an outpost of his domain. There is a high probability that he will find something unpleasing and will correct the deficiencies. Those of who are truly loyal will be glad to have even harsh corrections from him, while those who have been serving their own interests will resent his wrath. Our psalmist places himself among the loyal looking forward to having his Lord come and restore things to good order, because he has long endured the minority position of putting his Master’s interests first.

Thus, he trembles with delight at the thought of his Lord arriving. All this time he has sincerely obeyed the Lord with a clear conscience. As far as he is concerned, the Master’s will is the definition of good and right. He prays that this visit will not see him subjected again to the command of those who don’t have a clue about moral justice. Having bound his fate to the expressed will of God, he has every reason to expect that God will bail him out of this bad situation. He humbly waits the crushing of those who arrogantly ignore divine revelation.

How long has he gazed at the horizon, waiting the ensign that signifies his Lord’s approach? While others rightly dread His arrival, the psalmist can’t wait for a fresh expression and explanation of what the Lord desires. He has reason to expect God’s mercy because that’s the promise. He’s ready to learn what he could do better to please the Lord.

Indeed, the first words from his mouth will be a humble request to be corrected. He begs for discernment to understand the message implicit in the record of God’s decisions. Again, he celebrates in anticipation that the promised Day of Wrath will fall on those who have flouted His Law.

It is God’s faithfulness that makes the psalmist treasure the Word of God; it’s better than the best of refined gold. “Keep your money,” he tells the corrupt, for he has a treasure in his heart and will not be bribed. He struggles to find words for the fire of anticipation for having everything put right, and he wonders how he endured the deceptions of the wicked for this long.

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Keeping it Real

Posted on January 7, 2017 by ehurst

I’m hoping I can draw a rather complete image for you in terms of moral implications. It’s too easy to be drawn off course by propaganda.

Let me recall to your mind The Cult. Let’s remind ourselves that it’s a matter of moral influences, not people; that’s how the Devil and his demons work. God’s moral character is all about persons, and everything is personal, but the Kingdom of Darkness is all about dehumanizing and depersonalizing everything. Thus, we understand demonic activity as impersonal moral influences. The attack on you and me should not be seen as personal in nature, lest we get caught up on a pity-party. It’s just the way things are.

The Cult works through human governments, and the various actors have widely ranging levels of awareness about what really matters here. Even the Cult is deceived, but knows far more about the truth than most of the folks used by the Cult. The damnedest lie is the one closest to the truth. None of this is a matter of absolute truth. This is not a question of orthodoxy, but a parabolic approach that will work for most of those influenced by Western culture. We raise up symbols that our minds can use to frame a response that glorifies our Creator.

You should already understand how the entire Western approach to government and social policy is founded squarely on materialism. Simply observing what officials claim is important will tell you that. For government, every citizen is merely an economic unit. While the system recognizes that we peasants are motivated by personal loyalties, the system itself ignores them internally when making decisions. For example, the whole purpose of the Child Welfare system is aimed at terrorizing parents. The business of “child welfare” as a concept is merely a matter of economic investment in a future worker. The notion that a child’s welfare is truly a matter of emotional wellbeing is confined to the most superficial considerations that deny anyone is actually human. We are mere animals with vulnerabilities to be exploited for the purpose of coercion.

When I write about “social stability” as summing up the purpose of God’s Law Covenants, it is not at all the same thing as what Western governments mean by “social stability.” We are aiming at a moral influence that creates the optimal context for human life as the goal itself — the Law is its own reward. Governments are aimed at economic stability, and simply rename it “social stability.” Government activity works to smooth the economic chart line of human activity. Their aim is reduction of anything that hinders measurable material production and consumption. Don’t forget that consumption is a part of the formula; that’s why welfare clients are so important to the system. Without them, the mechanism of profit at the top of the system wouldn’t work properly. It’s all about the velocity of money flowing through the system. Those who actually pull the levers of power know this, despite all the rhetoric of economic efficiency. Ignore the debate rhetoric. They aren’t going to actually cut welfare payments, but redefine who receives them so that the profit shifts to another part of the competing teams of plutocrat society we cannot see directly.

A biblical definition of “social stability” allows for a lot more economic disruption than Western plutocrats can tolerate. That’s because God’s Laws don’t allow for the existence of those plutocrats. Obey biblical law and the plutocrats will starve. Our approach results in a form of social stability too messy for their tastes. To be honest, there is no ideal in biblical moral law. God fully expects a reality that is messy, with a majority of folks never quite rising above their fleshly concerns and living by the heart-mind. Yes, the Law presumes that there will never be more than a slender minority walking by the heart. It presumes a preponderance of materialism in any given population. But it promises that the heart-led could rule if we obey, to include all that visionary stuff of what we might do when we are in charge. But it also assumes that such a situation will not hold long or often. So in broad general terms, we aren’t supposed to run the show, but siphon off a few here and there who begin pulling out of the worldly system. We can influence political results, but we are forbidden thinking we can own them.

With that in mind, I offer this link: The Fourth Generation War. This explains how the net result of government is keeping wars going by feeding both sides. Yes, we have government agents throughout the Middle East training and funding both ISIS and al-Qaeda, while the same governments send troops to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda. Yes, there are specific events where our own CIA planted booby traps to bomb our troops. Yes, assassins and suicide bombers are typically sent into action by the CIA and other allied clandestine agencies against our own people. And yes, they know and applaud the resulting terrorizing of Western civilian populations, wherein radicalized nuts do crazy things with bombs, guns and trucks. The guy who drove that big rig through the Christmas market in Berlin was transported by German intelligence to the place where he could hijack the truck. It wasn’t about the actual level of death and destruction, but a chance to provoke hysteria.

The West’s enemies are created and driven by western governments. That’s how the plutocrats profit; they need no other motive. When you understand this, it allows you to let go of a lot anxiety. Then you can get down to the business of staying focused on your divine calling; you can devote more energy to the moral calculus of what’s actually likely to happen.

And by the way, as a side note: We could easily develop an economic system that doesn’t depend so much on petroleum, but it’s kept in check by the petroleum plutocrats. I have been personally very close to situations when technology was literally confiscated by “men in black” and the inventor threatened or jailed to silence him. A more celebrated example is Tesla’s lab notes confiscated by agents (both government and private) of his competitor. A lot of folks die without much public notice simply because their God-given talents threaten some plutocrat prerogative.

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Down Time Today

Posted on January 6, 2017 by ehurst

Okies don’t do snow. That is, just a little bit of snow can bring everything to a halt because there is precious little infrastructure designed with snow in mind, not a lot of resources for dealing with snow once it falls, and not many drivers who take the time to develop skills and habits that match snow. We got a couple of inches overnight and schools are closed today. Besides, it’s 14°F (-10C) outside. That means frozen pipes in a lot of abodes where the residents didn’t take appropriate measures, particularly our high number of mobile homes. In other words, this is a bit much for folks around here.

Despite growing up and learning to drive in Alaska, I’m also not too eager to run outside for frivolous reasons. I am well equipped for it, and I would jump to help someone in need, but even my daily habit of picking up trash is pointless right now. Yesterday was snowless but almost as cold, so I did laundry and moved some furniture into a more pleasing configuration for our activities. Today I’ll be spending time on something I pursue periodically: the underbelly of independent information on the Net.

There is a point to this. Buried in the morass of noise and schlock is the occasional gem of information not available elsewhere. For example, you won’t find too much information about the Franklin Scandal or Dutroux Affair on mainstream websites. What you do find on such sites is too thin to really portray the depth of depravity, and they certainly won’t name names. For example, the Bush clan was neck deep in Franklin, and a lot of other big name Republicans could be pulled down if they hadn’t murdered the only folks fearless enough to dig into it. Let me assure you of this: every Republican politician with national experience knows all about this and will not talk about it. All of that information is marginalized and pushed into the Internet underbelly. It’s posted there because the folks who run those sites are willing to host just about anything that might draw eyeballs.

Had I not seen some of the crazy stuff like that with my own eyes during my time in military uniform, I would never have taken of this seriously. Let me try to establish something in your minds: A significant portion of folks involved in government secrecy are moral perverts. Either they come into that way with damaged morals ready to serve the government’s foul purposes, or they get that way because it’s a necessary element of the job.

So if you hang out with, say, military intelligence folks, you’ll find some of the most bizarre deviance you could imagine. It’s not just sex, but it’s the whole range of fleshly sin, pushing into the darkest corners of everything you’ve heard of, and much you could not imagine. Even people who volunteered in the NATO Chapel with me, supporting my teaching ministry, I later learned, were involved in some of the most bizarre stuff. There was the woman who tried to seduce me, the man who died during an unspeakable ritual sex act, along with a thousand little things that pile up to serious immorality.

So the business of “fact checking” on the Net is loaded with just that kind of people. For example, I would never recommend that you cruise the site run by Jeff Rense. He’s a big liar about his own past, and claims credentials that are utterly false. His site is plastered with advertising for some of the biggest fake garbage ever sold, and he hosts articles that I know for a fact are false. But he also hosts stuff by people who can’t get an audience anywhere else when they want to share an earnest exploration of something not widely know. Do you really want to know the true story behind the Snopes fact checking site? Not everything in that article is pertinent, but it does point out that the founder started his career with — you guessed it — military intelligence, and bears the same bizarre deviant tastes he’s trying to help others hide. Oh, and Snopes was notorious for serving up malware.

There aren’t any normal people involved in the CIA, NSA, DEA, etc. Maybe they don’t all have the same kind of perversion, but they all have something deeply broken inside. Normal people can’t bear the atmosphere. And it permeates the Net because, in the early days, intel folks were a major element in building the technology. Google was born with CIA funding; PayPal was founded by spooks. Virtually every part of the Israeli technology industry is run by Mossad. These are not regular folks. And you know for a fact that virtually every independent information site is infiltrated by government spooks, and may even be run by them. Some of my subscribers are government agents; that’s taken for granted.

There are other sites like the one Rense runs. For example, on this blog some years ago I denounced a site known as SOTT because they promote some truly wild nonsense about aliens and a blatant denial of biblical truth. At the same time, they also hosted a series of articles that reveal the birth of the modern rock music industry. It started with a handful of former intelligence agents, and children of even more government spies, with all the drugs and bizarre sex, etc. Did you know that Frank Zappa was a gun-toting authoritarian? His entire public career was a cynical cover for destroying what he believed were mainstream American values. Not that I’m any fan of those values, but it’s that his whole public persona was a cover for a fully documented effort to bring the US toward some of the insanity we face now. He wasn’t anti-government, but was against the existing ruling regime and in favor of a different group of elite tyrants. The main actors of the early rock genre were protected from prosecution for the murders they committed. Charles Manson was a part of that scene; he got into trouble for believing his own lies. The series begins here with links to successive parts; I have a copy of that series of articles in PDF format, by the way.

Sometimes you need to take a glimpse behind he curtain so you can get a better sense of what is typical, what is behind what so many people call “normal” or “real.” Without that awareness of what hides in the dark corners, too much of what we see in the light makes no sense at all. I’m not inviting you to see for yourself, and I’m not promoting myself as all-knowing about such things. Rather, I’m describing a portion of my calling from God. The full spectrum of what our parish does together exposes sin as sin and glorifies holiness. If some fool tries to steer me away from something as a questionable source, I take that as cue to see what they are trying to hide. I’ve done that since I can remember. Sometimes I did get some bumps and bruises, but it’s exceedingly rare when the mainstream tells the whole story, much less the honest facts. These days I’ve learned to let my heart guide me because it’s far better at recognizing moral significance than my brain ever could be.

How do you spend your down time?

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