Cycling: South Edmond

Posted on February 1, 2016 by ehurst

This was not the best day for pictures. Much of where I went offered precious little photogenic view. The ride was my typical run north on Midwest Boulevard up to Memorial Road, but this time I turned left. It’s just a short distance to the upper end of Arcadia Lake. This time of year the water level is low.
ArcadiaLkUpperArcadiaLknrMemorialRd

It was largely uneventful riding over the hilly stretch of Memorial Road westward toward what we call the Broadway Extension, a section of old Highway 66 connecting downtown OKC with Edmond. What I hoped to see wasn’t there; the Cain’s Coffee warehouse no longer shows their brand and it looks like their retail front is now office space.

BdwyExtOverMemorialRd But the way they have decorated the overpass where Memorial runs under the highway you would think it was some kind of gateway to a park. Nope, just the gaudy stuff Okies do. So I rode back over hill and dale on the south side of Edmond until I got to Coltrane. You have to understand that this area is the roof of the county; this is out where all the TV stations and some radio stations have their towers. It’s called “The Antenna Farm” for that reason. Sadly, the brutal high crest on Coltrane had trees close to the edge of the pavement and enough traffic that I was reluctant to stop for a photo. So I rolled on down a couple more miles to the backside of Frontier City. This was a big deal forty-five years ago, and was still kind of nice as they expanded over the decades, but now it’s dying.

FrontierCity1FrontierCity2FrontierCity3FrontierCity4

I’ll let WordPress worry about the final placement of these images. If you look on any mapping service where I-35 runs between OKC and Edmond, you can see it right along the Interstate and I simply rolled down along the backside to the south end to Hefner Road. Most of what I saw was the old roller coaster tracks.

DeepForkAtHefnerRdI headed back east on Hefner Road, where I crossed the Deep Fork a couple miles upstream from Arcadia Lake. To my south (facing into the sun) about a mile away was a high spot where a construction crew was working on what looked like a private home, but it was so large the roof was measured in acres. My poor pocket camera just couldn’t pick it up. However, I did stop by what was once called Witcher Baptist Church, something older than most living humans. The old Witcher community had a tiny school that now occupies a quarter-section of land. It’s still under construction and totally ugly. The church has also grown and their new building must not be enough, because it looks like they plan to move east a ways on Hefner to the front side of a very expensive subdivision. I can’t guess how they’ll use the old building.FormerWitcherBC

At Air Depot I turned south for a few quiet hilly miles. It was an odd mixture of palatial homes that gave way to very old horse and cattle ranches that had been whittled down to a few acres each. At NE 63rd I turned back east. This is a very rough asphalt surface. In places you can see three layers down and the topmost is already pretty old. But my reward was seeing the old Sunnyside school again. The new owner has done serious work clearing the lot of underbrush.SunnysideCleaned It was just a short way from Midwest Boulevard where I turned south back toward home.

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War on Western Moral Assumptions

Posted on February 1, 2016 by ehurst

Walk by the Spirit — whatever else that means, it requires that we shift the focus of our awareness to the heart-mind.

The matter of “doing God’s will” is not a long list of rules and principles. The actions and their results are mere manifestations, not the thing itself. His will starts with operating from the heart-mind. His will is, by definition, embracing the image of His revealed character as the moral fabric of the universe. It requires exercising a non-intellectual faculty that the Bible calls “faith,” itself just a word that means commitment to live by our convictions.

The path for Westerners typically requires that you first understand the Spirit speaks to us through our convictions. Something in you is capable of addressing what amounts to divine moral necessity in the context of every choice. It will often contradict everything you’ve been taught to believe so that the demands of conviction defy logic. Doing the will of God is not in the content of the decision, but of how you arrived at that decision. Holiness is not in performance or thought, but in a desire to please your Master.

The difficulty is that our sense of awareness begins with the arrogance of the intellect in presuming to define what is good and right by whatever capabilities it holds as the highest faculty. Intellect and reason usurps the faculty God gave us for knowing His will — conviction resting in the heart. Instead, we pervert the image of “heart” as some quasi-emotional thing simply because we happen to notice that it often brings on potent emotional responses when it opposes logic. The a priori assertion that reason is the highest faculty of man is the main problem, for this is the very foundation of the Fall. This is eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In Hebrew thinking, that “knowledge” is the assertion of reason as if senses and reason together are all we need to understand reality.

How it is that so very much of Western Christian religion buys into this fundamental precept — that faith cannot defy logic — is a long study in the history of intellectual hijacking of the Apostolic religion.

In the final analysis, what specifically you choose to do in any given context is not the focus of discerning whether it is holy or not. Holiness is in the path you chose to arrive at the decision. That we might between us be driven to different conclusions about what is the best course of action is simply a manifestation of our fallen nature, not some flaw in the process. Further, it serves no divine purpose to debate who is right or wrong; the question is only whether we should in that moment work together or separate far enough to avoid conflict.

Even when I use such language, a large portion of mainstream Western Christians will imagine that they can buy into the teaching. But then you try putting that to work in their real-world projects and see how quickly they decide we don’t belong in their program. Their objections will be slathered in Western moral biases. We can be sure that walking by the heart-mind must of necessity lead you on a collision course with Western assumptions of what is morally right. Even if we use the entire package of Western intellectual traditions of scholarship, we still arrive at the recognition that the very fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality and morality in the West represents a powerful rejection of what Jesus believed as a Hebrew human. It’s the unspeakable arrogance of Western thinking that sees the truth and of this and simply asserts that the Western notions are somehow universal, and that God was patronizing to the Hebrew people because they simply wouldn’t understand the truth of European tribal mythology.

Walking by the heart will inevitably draw you into conflict with that fundamental assumption. Walking by the heart can only draw you closer to the Hebrew moral assumptions that Jesus lived and taught. You would be amazed how people stumbling upon the truth of heart-mind living can study all kinds of stuff that Westerners would never touch, stuff that is also completely outside of biblical revelation, and still find themselves repeating the fundamental truths of Scripture as understood by the Hebrew intellectual traditions. And why do they not then confess Christ? Because so far as they can find, the message of Christ perverted and buried under a rejection of the heart-led existence they discovered. The Church demands they reject the truth of God’s moral justice in order to be a “Christian.”

If you live by the heart-mind, you cannot escape God’s moral character. The only way you can avoid God’s truth is to remain dead to your heart-mind. God designed us to find Him in our hearts, not in our orthodoxies. The only way you can get closer to God is to reject Western Civilization.

If, on some level of your awareness, you are not at war with the fundamental assumptions of Western society in all its manifestations and flavors, then you are not walking in the Spirit.

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Some Minor Technology Notes

Posted on January 31, 2016 by ehurst

Edit: Much of this is now obsolete. The home FTP server is long gone and the static site will be closed as of 2020.

Original post:

This information is dated; it could change significantly in coming days as the context morphs.

It turns out that the router I finally ended up with (Linksys WRT1200AC) is actually more powerful than the more expensive one (WRT1900AC) that first caught my eye. This one has a faster CPU, more RAM and a bigger storage “hard drive.” That’s the good part. The bad part is that, while the developers at DD-WRT are working on it, their only offering for this is a BETA release and buggy enough to generate a steady stream of reports for now. At least they do have one to test on, so that’s a good sign, but it’s not ready for prime time. So I am stuck with using what comes from the factory for awhile.

That means if I try to use some kind redirect DNS (DDNS) that associates this router with a domain name on the Net, I am restricted to what the manufacturer likes, and they have a deal with DnyDNS. Having done the research, the cost of $40/year is the least of problems. DynDNS demands an automatic draft on your bank account and is notorious for billing errors in their favor, plus turning a deaf ear to actual support requests. DD-WRT works with any DDNS service (I like the looks of DuckDNS), so until DD-WRT offers a stable release, we will be stuck using raw IP address links for the FTP service (electronic library) I’m trying to assemble.

I’m about to embark on assembling as much of my Bible studies books and related materials as I can find already in or close to HTML format. That’s a lot of stuff, and I felt led to give all that material its own landing page on the server. I’m taking all the old individual chapter pages and combining them into single webpages where possible. The Bible History series will be collected into single pages for each major period. The point is that you could download any of those pages rather easily and it would contain all the formatting instructions inside the file (it’s called CSS). Maybe you’ll get the idea that I encourage you to copy and distribute at will. The other file formats will be available at Smashwords and on my FTP library service (PDF, Word DOC and Libre Office ODF).

Our host for the new blog (Universal Networks run by Timothy R. Butler) noticed that we have some trouble using our email service with some ISPs because they are blocking the IP address but refuse to tell him why. He mentioned he would like to get a new IP number assigned to the server, but until we get a “clean IP address” I cannot recommend you asking for an email address on soulkiln.org.

For the techies, I would like to note that Linux Mint has released their latest version 17.3 “Rosa” with the XFCE desktop a couple of weeks ago. I’m testing it on my netbook and you probably wouldn’t notice any big differences, but it seems to work a little better, maybe a smidgen faster on my wimpy hardware. That and all the other desktops they offer are available here.

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Mind Slaves

Posted on January 31, 2016 by ehurst

If you change someone’s mind on something, you haven’t accomplished much. Sure, it probably comes with a package including the person’s actions and words, but that’s just physics.

It’s hard to overstate the perversion of Western mythology. Let’s remind ourselves of the proper biblical approach to thinking about our existence. On the one hand, Creation is a marvelous expression of God’s character. What He has done naturally reflects His Person, and the link between Creator and Creation is a living thing in itself. The very moral fiber of His divine nature keeps Creation intact. As soon as He loses interest, it all goes away. Creation is a direct and wholly dependent fabrication of His imagination. Try Colossians 1:16-17.

Do you notice how language breaks down trying to express it? How do you pull all that higher truth down inside of Creation when Creation is just a figment in His mind?

So we acknowledge that Creation is unspeakably grand and beautiful because He is also unspeakably grand and beautiful. Why do we have so much sorrow then? The Bible doesn’t explain all the details, but God gave us a certain amount of free choice in this thing and we chose wrong. Your consciousness isn’t the issue; it’s His thoughts on the matter. So all we really know is that we somehow enter into this life flawed, and trying to pin the blame somewhere else is pointless. Whatever it was or could have been or should have been is not down that path. The only path out of this mess is accepting the Creator’s assessment of things.

Indeed, it’s so simple and easy we are rightly shocked more people don’t take it. All we have to do is embrace His assessment. He’s the one who made it and keeps it working, so why argue with Him about it? Suddenly the world becomes that unspeakably beautiful place He made it, instead of sorrowful place we made of it. Creation is not fallen; you and I are fallen. Unfortunately, we are the pinnacle of Creation, so our fallen state afflicts all of Creation in certain ways we are hard put to describe. In Romans 8, Paul doesn’t try to explain it but offers a dramatic image of how Creation moans and groans to God about being confined under or fallen nature. Creation itself is looking forward to our redemption.

In various ways, Paul and the other Apostles teach us that some measure of that redemption takes place here and now, but that the full realization is still down the road somewhere ahead of us. In that same chapter of Romans he notes how beautiful life is under that redemption right now, but how it just doesn’t compare well with what comes later. Celebrate your redemption now as a foretaste of what is to come.

Sadly, Western minds have turned that redemption into a mere cerebral exercise. That in itself is a form of blasphemy. Western Christian religion is all about proper ideas and thinking and actions, but this whole business of genuine personal connection back to God is shoved off into “Woo Land” that, not only can we not describe it, we can’t even really believe it. We can assert spiritual birth as orthodoxy, but Western thinking excludes the actual boundary layer between this fallen existence and the Spirit Realm. It’s an orthodoxy connected to nothing. Western thinking just barely accepts the notion that there is an entire brain and nervous system in your chest, but cannot possibly admit that there is any faculty above the human intellect. So whatever Western minds make of the heart-mind, it cannot be superior to the brain in our heads. It is permitted only to offer a little advice now and then.

Since God says in His word that He doesn’t speak directly to the mind, but only to the receptors in the heart, that means those who count themselves redeemed are wholly unlikely to know how to talk to God. They can stir up lots of emotion and imagine that somehow it’s not mere emotion, that this particular brand of excitement is holy and what you see at football games is secular. The problem is, however much religion and faith gets stirred up in those football rally worship experiences is as ephemeral as your team jersey. And all the orthodoxy of the teaching and endless classes in the mere words of the Bible, for all the artistry they may indulge, is still just an exercise in the brain. The heart is not reliably affected because nobody admits the heart can be engaged consciously as a superior faculty.

All that’s left is orthodoxy and activism, with some varying measure of emotion thrown in. There is no heart. Nobody accepts the true power of Romans 1:20.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — His eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (NIV)

It’s all reduced to a mere figure of speech. Westerners can’t imagine a literal sensory heart that “sees” the truth in Creation. Well, Creation doesn’t witness of orthodoxy; Creation witnesses the living moral character of God. There is no such thing as “objective truth” because there is no objective reality. It’s just whatever God says it is, and since we are fallen, His truth is expressed in terms of Law Covenant. But it’s not Western law; it’s Ancient Near Eastern feudal law — you must become family or you will be a slave in the personal dominion of God. And family will remain personally devoted and loyal to the Person. That’s “Law” in the biblical sense.

If all you change is someone’s mind, then they are still a slave at best.

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Psalm 86

Posted on January 30, 2016 by ehurst

Don’t go looking for the precise spot David occupied when he composed this sweet hymn. We have no idea what human historical context goes with this impassioned plea, and precious few humans can even begin to share the moral place he stood. That’s what makes all the difference in the world, because it’s not enough to translate the words if we can’t transport our souls over into that moral sphere of the heart where Heaven calls us to rise from our natural fallen state.

Nor could we guess why the Temple music director pulled this psalm of David into the midst of their collection of songs, but we do understand how this fits into a penitent call that robes every soul sincerely seeking God’s favor. Without the moral tenor carried in these words, it won’t matter where you stand in the entire universe, you won’t stand in God’s Presence.

David begins by depicting a young child begging his father to bend down and hear his tiny voice. The Hebrew figure of speech often translated “poor and needy” is not merely an economic condition, but a sense of total dependence. While most English translations have David referring to himself as “holy” it might better be rendered as “godly” in the sense of morally consistent with God’s character. It’s the image of someone who manages to gaze upon this messy reality from an eternal viewpoint and then acting accordingly. The context is a claim to feudal loyalty. And it’s not so much that David cries all day long like a whiner, but that he cannot imagine going anywhere else with concerns that are far bigger than he.

A mighty lord in David’s time would surely rescue even his own domestic herds if they fell into a tight spot, so there’s nothing wrong with a human servant asking for a rescue from trouble. “Give me another reason to shout to the world what a mighty and good God you are!” So David refreshes his request for an honest hearing of his plea. This day and any day when things are difficult, David will call on no one else.

He goes on to contrast how Jehovah is not like any other deity. Whose gods could claim dividing the waters and making the seabed dry? Whose idols could speak with fire, smoke and earthquakes? Which of the gods dropped food from the sky daily for years on end? Which of the deities drove out entire nations of giants and massive armies with better technology? No god had such a record, and so David notes he can’t imagine thinking of any of them as actual gods. David paints the image of a mighty warrior king leading a vast army that includes all of Creation itself.

Verse 11 rings across the ages and appears in many modern worship songs. Reshape me, David says, and make me like You. Ancient Near Eastern law was conceived not as mere writ, but as the character of the ruler Himself, and David asks for insight into what God intends in His realm. “What would I do if it were You at work here?” In giving fresh life to a ruler’s moral character, David hopes to warm himself in the glow of divine truth as a living force in Creation. “I wanna make You look good, Lord!” After all God has done by bringing David into His empire, how could David not bring God fame? It was as if God had breathed life into David’s dead corpse.

And what did it bring him? David faced relentless opposition from those who were hostile to God’s revelation, those who rejected His call. David simply could not fathom how people might walk away from God’s mercy. In the final lines, he admits he’s just a nobody, wholly undeserving of any good thing. But he does make himself fully available, so if for no other reason, let God reshape David into an ensign of divine authority just to shake folks up. Show them You are Boss, O Lord!

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You Figure It Out

Posted on January 30, 2016 by ehurst

Our dear Sister has a marvelous sweet rant I wish everyone could read. I want you to notice she never suggests other folks are morally wrong for bathing in this electromagnetic sewage, but that we do so at a high price. I can only agree with it.

My natural inclination is to hide away in the woods and harvest nature’s bounty from the trees. My natural inclination is to insist you join me in that environment so we can talk and worship together. My natural inclination is to leave behind everything that my mission requires of me here in the virtual parish, except for that real sense of communion. Did you ever wonder why I love riding my bike so much?

But I find myself in a place where there are several computers and multiple strong sources of electromagnetic emissions. I will tell you that the new router has such a potent wifi signal that I had to turn it off and network in an older and less potent wifi router just for that purpose. I still have to use the wifi, but that massive beast kept me awake last night. I could feel the darn thing in my bedroom. So sometime around 1AM I finally rose and did all the switching around to make it more tolerable. And now I have to carry my cellphone more places and more often because the landline is gone. I choose the weakest “stupid phones” I can get from our provider.

I also have to go among the sinners of the world in order to call them to my Savior. I have to be ready to infiltrate some of the nastiest places where moral perversion piles up to levels of physical pain just being there. That shit hurts physically more than an over-powered wifi router. And “shit” is the nicest word that fits. Imagine driving a taxi in the worst crime areas you know; I’ve done something like that and I couldn’t take it very long. But the same awful sense of pervasive perversion nearly drowned me in the public school system, too. After a few years of substitute teaching it drove me to wacky behavior I still can’t explain.

I’m not that tough with some things. We have to assess our strengths and gifts from the Creator. Somehow I manage to shake off the affects of that electromagnetic pollution, but I assure you it’s not easy. Unfortunately, I can’t find the words to describe how I do it or I’d write them. But somehow I manage to keep my sense of His divine Presence despite spending several hours daily in this computer office. Somehow I generally manage to keep my heart-sensing working when I’m in town and among the crowds of folks. And sometimes I get to go way out in the country and just relax and absorb the sweetness of creation in a more natural state. So I miss the woods out in Choctaw, but I don’t miss at all the smothering sense of curse that weighs like a stone blanket over that trailer park.

If you’ve never gone out into a wild place and just stood or sat still and absorbed the elements as Creation speaks to you of the Creator, there’s nothing I can do to help you understand. But every time I ride past some high point of land and feel that wind — any wind from any direction — hitting my face, I have to stop so I can hear the voice of my Father. I can’t live without that; I might exist but I’ll be dead in heart.

Find His path for you. Know that it will require some kind of compromise just to touch those who most need it. Know that when He returns that last time, all this shit will be over and done with. Can you say, “Maranatha”?

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Virtual Catacombs

Posted on January 30, 2016 by ehurst

Step inside my madness for a moment; I’ll leave the door unlocked so you can escape when it gets too much for you.

Review: The Cult is not so much a physical presence, but an avatar, a mental image of a perverse moral presence. We know them not by their physical presence but by the fruits of their labor. My description of The Cult is an abstract of consistent behavior, of how they have operated so far in human history. In broad terms, their aim is to prevent souls escaping the domain and servitude of Satan. Try not to oversimplify how they go about this. By the same token, don’t buy the wild speculations offered to confuse everyone about things.

I’ve mentioned in other places how the scandalous document — The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion — is at least partly true if we read it as a description of the plans of The Cult back around the time that booklet was published. There is plenty of exaggeration and broad satire in the document, but a kernel of truth peeks out at us from behind the curtains. However, the plans and expectations were not carved in stone. Some of the ideas didn’t pan out. Still, the general tenor of the basic plan from so long ago is our current reality today.

The Cult favors no identifiable human element outside the boundaries of itself. I’ve noted The Cult has has a vast army of servants, and some quite highly placed in the scheme of things. But most of those names and faces that we would recognize as powerful public and not-so-public figures are not actually part of The Cult. They are guided and used; sometimes they retire well and sometimes they are tossed aside as a reminder to others that none of them are indispensable. I’ve warned that some major projects hold the same status. I sense that the modern State of Israel is one such dispensable project; it’s value is merely contextual. The Cult will eventually let it go because it is neither the objective nor a necessity for the objective. It’s been a very effective tool in deceiving humanity regarding their objectives.

I get the sense that a major turnover is at hand, that we are about to see a great many other projects and people thrown under the bus very soon. Some of the old team will go down with the scuttled ships they crewed. A new crop of servants will replace them and herd us on board other vessels. Some of the old goals and plans are obsolete, as well. But the broad moral deception and control are still there. The only reason the new rising figures survive and are not marginalized or smothered is because The Cult sponsors them as the means to keeping the deception going and the power in their hands.

The biggest challenge for the cult remains the Internet. They are learning to use it, but they cannot change its nature. On the one hand, it is no longer possible to rule without it. On the other hand, it is absolutely essential that they insert a layer of abstraction between common folk and the Internet itself. Since there is no way to actually assert any useful controls at this point on the Net, there must be a way to control the people via their access to it. Currently the primary focus is through massive changes in the operating systems of commodity devices. Not so long ago began a very intensive effort to steer people’s browsing behavior into acceptable channels. Making a certain class of services socially essential was part of this plan, even as the services were incrementally modified to insinuate various forms of control. Look for these same services to become required for certain government services and each other. Look for the services to become interlocking in new ways.

Most of this is easily defeated if you posses some measure of technical expertise. The Cult has also been trying to squeeze the computer technology middle ground, like an obnoxious child who insists on squeezing the toothpaste in the middle. The underlying trend is making the technology more demanding so that users either give up trying or invest a far greater share of available resources just to stay even. The price of expertise is rising while the price of devices and access is dropping. This takes place against a background of general decline in the quality of education so that real life-long learning becomes decreasingly likely. The Internet services and information sources are being dumbed-down to enforce this trend.

As I consider the calling on my life, I find I cannot avoid the task of embracing the greater expertise. If just a few of us who are driven by moral purpose and heart-led awareness can seize some cyber hideout, we can offer refuge, an antidote to some of this moral poison. This vision keeps morphing as I walk farther along the path. There are other areas of expertise than what calls my name. I need brothers and sisters who will find themselves in those other fields of glory to stand with me, at least in the sense of using this virtual parish as the place to offer your particular antidotes to the moral poison of The Cult. This is behind my hopes for a virtual library. I’m hoping to create a catalog that we can share so that visitors need only click on a link to call the file from this FTP server; there are technical reasons that I can’t put a webpage on the FTP server itself. So if you contribute to the library, I need from you some kind of explanation of the item’s value. It’s not the idea that I would examine every item in detail (though I will probably scan for malware and viruses) but that we would work together to build a free information community.

Naturally I’ll have to put passwords on this thing for now. It’s not about secrecy but keeping control. That means you would need to build an element of trust with me in order to gain access. I’m still working through where to draw the boundaries so we can stay below the radar. We have to weigh the risks and sense where God says He’ll cover it with His mercy. We have to discern the boundaries of His covering.

I’m working as fast as I can on this stuff, so pray with me.

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Network Upgrade

Posted on January 29, 2016 by ehurst

This stuff is happening too fast.

The Lord has been gracious and we got our state income tax refund. So today we stopped by a Cox store and discussed the free modem upgrade. They want everyone using the new DOCSIS 3.0 cable standard and that means a new modem. I was curious about owning the modem instead of simply using or leasing theirs. As long as we had their phone service, the modem was free to use. The new modems mostly have no phone jack. We seldom call out on it and all that comes in is sales calls. So I asked and there was no penalty for dropping the phone service, and the bill goes down as well, plus it would mean a cheaper modem. They even sell them in the store, and the price wasn’t that bad. Even better was that they could activate it in the store and make it work before we got it home.

We decided this was the time to get the new router, too. On a whim, we stopped by the Best Buy and I was quite surprised. That fancy router I wanted has a cheaper cousin: WRT1200AC. Everything is the same except it has only two wifi antennas and a much lower price. All the beef without the excess fluff. Strange how my online searching never revealed this other model. For now we are running the factory software because — well, I’m not ready to mess with the DD-WRT router firmware. This is too soon.

I do have an external hard drive on order and this thing will offer a built-in FTP service. Once I get that drive and load it up with as much electronic library as I have now, I can turn it on. At first you’ll access it using a raw IP address instead of a domain name (URL) the way you do most things. And that IP address is subject to change, but I’ll try to keep you up to date if you want to use it much. Later I’ll see about getting a Dynamic DNS service. The router as is supports only a DynDNS which costs about $40/year. If I can get up to speed on the DD-WRT firmware, I can choose any service I like. However, being that I’m so busy and God keeps providing, I may just pay the fee and go with that for a year or so.

Thank you so much for your effective fervent prayers on our behalf. We are using the new equipment right now. And I’ve managed to get the password wrong and had to reset the thing once already, so I’m now an expert at running the setup. If I don’t screw something up, it’s because I wasn’t doing anything.

Wow. This is getting to be like work.

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Construction and Renovation Continues

Posted on January 29, 2016 by ehurst

(This post was imported from a separate blog that no longer exists.)

I found a much better theme; it was also much simpler to adjust some of the details. The picture at the top will change from time to time; I will eventually get enough of them to turn on automatic rotation. The fonts it calls up are in this order: Georgia, Palatino, Times, serif.

The static site is where I really invest a lot of time. As promised, I’ve begun reformatting some of my books into plain HTML webpage. I’ve updated the links and formatting of A Course in Biblical Mysticism, added The Mind of Christ and a couple of articles referenced by those books. In part, I’m hoping to emphasize the academic character of the ministry on the static site. Thus, I won’t include the computer or fiction works, just the religion and Bible stuff.

Thanks for stopping by!

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NSA and Your Security

Posted on January 29, 2016 by ehurst

If you genuinely need privacy, use the one-time pad.

Recently the NSA came clean on a few issues at one of the many tech conferences taking place annually. Obviously they aren’t going to tell the whole story, but there’s no harm in making use of what they will tell us.

First off: PGP and GnuPG for encrypting your email generates an awful lot of useful “noise” that allows the NSA to collate all your connections. That noise is called “meta-data” — the wide open system chatter that allows computers to transmit information back and forth. Such things as length of message, frequency, timing within various contexts, etc., tells them who is actually worth investigating.

Second: If they decide you are interesting, they will get into your system or network. They will persist and rely on the weakest link — humans. They admit that the best way to slow them down is know your equipment and how it actually works. In other words, keep your IT technical expertise in-house and pay the price for real expertise. Get your IT people trained in security procedures and detecting intrusions. There is a powerful hint that using Open Source software where possible is one of the best ways to keep your security in-house. The NSA admits they have friends in the commercial software industry.

The best way to hide your private messages is in the most humdrum routine traffic. You’d be surprised how effective a private code language is when used as a matter of routine communications. And if something really must be kept secret, use a one-time pad because it reduces the likelihood it will be noticed in the massive traffic vacuuming the NSA does. And when they do notice such encryption, there is no way at all they can decrypt it without actual assistance from one of the participants. It takes time to get it right: More on the subject here and here and sample generators here and here.

The better policy is to remove as far as possible any need for such encryption. With a different moral frame of reference, the whole question dies. Heart-led living is the single biggest game changer. The real issue with computer security is keeping as much control over your stuff as possible, and that starts with having full control over your system. The more it matters, the more you have to make sure you gain some expertise.

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