Small Victories (Updated)

Reaffirming my previous post, I remind you that Debian is better integrated from the start than CentOS. Not bug-free, but fewer problems. Naturally I’m running my preferred desktop environment, XFCE. It lacks some of the bells and whistles, but it’s far more comfortable and less troublesome.

As part of one of my lessons today I was running some system checks on an XTerm (virtual console). At one point I issued the command dmesg — basically the informative stuff about how the OS is wading through discovery of the hardware, followed by standard system alerts in time sequence. Among those alerts is firewall stuff (UFW): I noticed the firewall was blocking some unusual activity. Of course, it made reference to IPV6, which has a totally different IP address format. So I had to look up first what were the reserved network addresses in IPV6, and sure enough the problem was something on my system trying to get out past the firewall every few minutes.

[UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC= SRC=fe80:0000:0000:0000:021e:c9ff:fe29:2927 DST=ff02:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 LEN=64 TC=0 HOPLIMIT=1 FLOWLBL=0 PROTO=UDP SPT=8612 DPT=8612 LEN=2

The “SRC” is the source of the activity and that turns out to be the same thing as 127.0.0.1 in IPV4 (the address for localhost, the machine on which you are working). The “DST” part is the reserved code for a form of open broadcast. In effect, my machine was asking if anybody on the LAN had a certain thing. The ports (SPT and DPT) were 8612, a telltale number used by Canon printers. But this wasn’t some activity coming from the printer spool (AKA “CUPS” in Linux). So I kept searching until I found references to “Pixma” — a product line from Canon. It almost had to do with some kind of Pixma driver somewhere. Eventually I discovered this was activity from the SANE service on my computer, the Linux implementation of scanner drivers; lots of Canon Pixma devices are “all-in-one” printer, fax and scanner. So all this time I was getting a sort of ping signal from the SANE service looking for any Canon Pixma machines on the network.

I have no intention of using such a thing and don’t own a Canon printer. So I killed the SANE service:

systemctl stop saned.service
systemctl disable saned.service

Oh, and just to make sure, I edited /etc/sane.d/dll.conf to turn off the network searching function. The first line after all the explanation at the top of the file is “net” and I just commented it out so: #net. No more firewall pings on that port. Naturally this triggered a scripted complaint that I was violating some LSB standard (Linux Standard Base) — big whoop-de-doo.

One small victory on the way to figuring out this stuff.

Update: That didn’t work. Can’t learn anything if I don’t fail sometimes. It was a good thing to shut down the SANE service because I have no intention of using it, but that didn’t stop the pings. A couple of hours later they came again. More research. I stopped a service called “cups-browse” and that seems to have worked:

systemctl stop cups-browsed.service
systemctl disable cups-browsed.service

Since the firewall activity shows it’s periodic over the day, I’ll have to check again in the morning. I can’t just shut down CUPS itself because I do print to PDF regularly from my browser. It’s the best way to save documents without wasting paper.

Update 2: 24 hours later and not a peep from my firewall. Killing cups-browse (recently deprecated in CUPS development) will stop the LAN noise on port 8612.

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I Tried…

I had no intention of playing games. I was convinced that CentOS 7 was the right choice and I spent a week working it over. There were imperfections, but none of them were fatal until today. Despite this being a server, I still have to write and publish my books. Some of the critical software I have to have for that doesn’t exist for CentOS and nobody seems interested in making it happen. I can’t even get it work properly in a virtual machine.

Okay, so it’s running Debian now. The plans are the same; I’m still going to run server operations on this thing. However, it will be different.

Debian is a much larger project with a far bigger developer community. CentOS remains tweaked toward corporate use; the design and package support caters to the corporate service world. Debian is run by developers and caters to their independent mindset, most of whom are systems administrators. Debian is used in the corporate world, but it’s quite different from CentOS. For one, everything in Debian is better integrated. In CentOS, you either use the impossible GNOME3 desktop or the poorly integrated KDE Plasma interface for workstation use. Other desktop options can be installed only later, and are even more poorly integrated into the system administration tasks than KDE. There were other considerations, and I’ll still need to know how to admin a CentOS/RHEL box because I’ll run into a lot in the corporate world. Not least is that I’ll likely run into it when I finally get a webhost for our new virtual parish.

But for now I’ll switch the focus of my studies to setting things up on Debian. Some of this is scripted and easier, but the considerations will be different and some of the default packages will be different. I’m not upset about all this, just disappointed that I can’t do everything on CentOS. I’ll likely end up running a VM with CentOS eventually just so I can keep track of it. That’s the way it goes; I honestly tried.

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Prayer Request: Service, Please

I’m getting there. As I read through the material on network administration, I’m playing with various settings on our home server, making sure I understand how they work. It’s been years since I played bookworm. And while I find this stuff mostly interesting in the broad sense of helping other folks, I’m not a hacker who enjoys digging into cool computer tools. My brain doesn’t seize upon this stuff with any kind of thrill, so it’s work. But I’m doing it as quickly as I can go. Yesterday’s study in Proverbs is much more my line of work.

At the same time, I’m performing due diligence in researching ways I plan to use this technology. I want to explain what I see. I’ve already noted that the simplest path is also the most expensive and easily least reliable: Switching my ISP service to a commercial account (Cox Business) so I can legitimately offer the services direct from this machine. I wouldn’t hesitate if I could afford it, but we would need some heavy sponsorship. It would be a miracle, indeed, because our national economy is tanking even as we speak.

But farming it out to a local company is looking less likely with each passing day. The few who don’t charge almost as much as Cox Business does seem wholly unsuited. I’ve contacted a couple of them and they appear to have no concept for non-profit site operations. Another flatly ignored a direct query. I have no doubt there is at least one or two operations in this big metropolis who would do it, but they don’t advertise it. Either their advertising ignores it or they simply don’t advertise much at all that search engines can find. I’m not through looking, but it’s time-consuming.

Going farther afield is easy and cheap, some cheap enough for my current budget (less than $100/year). However, I also tend to research reviews from actual webmaster types and cheap hosting typically means poor service or facing oppressive hassles. One promising direction is those who advertise specifically for non-profit hosting, but so far they all want an official charter and tax number from the IRS. Going that route — trying to incorporate and all — surrenders way too much and I’d be exposed to controls that would hinder what we do already. We could do it if some larger tax-exempt outfit offered coverage, but that’s another big kettle of fish. And I understand why those webhosting companies want that 501(C)3 code — it’s the easiest way for them to write it off on their corporate taxes so they can afford to make such an offer. Still, if there were some other way to qualify, some of the better hosting companies offer it cheap or free.

Meanwhile, I will try to offer some experimental “backdoor” connections to this machine that won’t violate Cox’s terms of service. They block some kinds of activity, but the main issue is generating enough traffic for them to notice. Bandwidth coming in is no big deal, but going out is where it costs. If you connect to this machine and request much more than a small file that loads in your browser or email client, that’s outgoing traffic they might notice if there’s too much of it. Yes, there are other providers in my area, but none at this price and all of them are an even bigger hassle. But I’ll do it some because it’s part of the learning experience for me and any of you who want to play along.

And with so much going on in the background with economics, government policies, etc., who can say what challenges tomorrow will bring?

Pray with me that I can see clearly the path God wants me to take when the time comes. At this point, I tend to think the ideal situation is not so much money but that someone out there steps in and offers the service on terms that blesses them, too. I cannot imagine being ready to use it before the end of this month and that would be quick, so we aren’t in a hurry.

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The Tracking Economy

I offer no advice at all, just my impression of things I’ve seen.

We have the Tech Big Five: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. They all have one thing in common — tracking. They are all trying to monetize tracking and assessing human behavior with technology, particularly networking behavior.

Microsoft gives away their newest OS in exchange for tracking. They expect to make a profit on that. Google tracks more ways than even the NSA could, and they do make a profit on that. Amazon is more careful about it than Google, but uses a more pervasive technology, in that a huge portion of the stuff served over the Net comes from their massive collection of servers rented out to others. Amazon tracking is more abstract. Apple relentlessly tracks their own users, which is a bigger portion of humanity than you might think. Facebook feeds on tracking like no other service, and is by far the most intrusive, sneaky and personal about it.

Even big cyber crime is now all about “stealing” data sets, and not just credit card numbers.

There are other, smaller players, but you should get the picture: This is the new product line on the Internet. Insofar as they are concerned, it’s “you” they own and are selling to some third party. And while for now it seems the whole purpose is selling you to their business partners for data that shapes ever more intrusive and manipulative advertising, that’s no longer the main point. There is something in the tracking and profiling itself that exposes you in other ways.

Granted, we who live heart-led are nearly impossible for them to track in any useful fashion; it’s the tracking of all those who are not heart-led that poses some kind of threat. Even if we stand out as some notable anomaly, they can quantify that for their own purposes. The difficult thing right now is that, not only am I unable to give a full report of their purposes, but even they could not. For the time being, getting us used to the tracking is the most important issue, because they can always implement new forms of it later. They know how it’s useful right now, but they know this thing has far more potential only starting to unfold.

That’s because the biggest use of tracking will come with more advanced AI. The massive data set of human tracking is part of what will shape the AI they hatch. Whatever threat AI holds, I submit that the biggest problem is that their work in AI will hatch something utterly lacking in any moral sense at all. AI won’t suffer from the hard-wired inhibitions and blind-spots that hinder humans. So while the people involved in this tracking and AI development can’t guess in full what they’ll get, they have no doubt they’ll find a way to profit, likely in terms that don’t have any meaning yet. I’m willing to bet they are right about that, though I suspect there will be some other surprises, too.

The tracking has already gotten to the point where the data quantifies those who never touch the Net, as well. That in itself becomes a tracking factor, and the presence of those offline is betrayed secondhand. Refusing to use Facebook won’t keep you out of Zuckerberg’s clutches. So there’s not a lot we can do about that part any more. Even a very intelligent and purposeful paranoia is pointless. We have all been compromised already. Despite having a radically different approach in terms of moral purpose, and that we are learning to react from the heart first, most of us still engage the system in ways that permit a certain amount of tracking.

Even hiding behind the shield-wall of Linux pegs me somewhere in their system. I suspect it marks me as something they need to ignore for most uses so that my actions don’t taint their data set. In a few cases, I suppose it tags me with a certain level of suspicion, though it’s not the kind of thing anyone could act on just now. You’ll notice that I am ignoring the boundary between corporation and state — that’s because I think it’s fading into meaninglessness. I consider the corporations a bigger threat, insofar as there is a threat.

You take it from here.

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Proverbs 27

Only a fool takes himself too seriously. Your personal sense of identity and integrity should not rest on total control of outcomes. Self-cynicism is not the same as self-doubt; you can still forge ahead in your calling while keeping a firm grip on penitence. God’s grant of dominion in this life does not mean that the only people who care about you are those who submit to your fantasies. Your best friends will have their own sense of dominion. In many ways, the substance of the Fall was elevating our own individual reasoning power, our sense of order and what ought to be, to the place in our souls God made for Himself. A critical part of redemption is making room for God to speak through external sources, including other people, and learning to accept a context we don’t control.

Western minds struggle to grasp how an Eastern ruler would trust his nobles to handle things without a lot of detailed instructions. Nobles were considered adept at knowing the heart of the ruler, and talented at producing results that boosted his reputation, in part because they did not struggle with selfish ambition, but were held by a sense of calling to the welfare of the whole community. What follows are not direct quotes, but restatements of the ancient Eastern noble morals.

1. Do not boast yourself of tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth. This is the quintessential statement of trusting in God, who alone can see the future. You can assert only what you intend to do for now, and would look quite the fool if you insist on a course of action that does not match an unexpected change in context.

2. Let another man praise you, and not your mouth; a stranger, and not your lips. This is actually the other half of the previous verse. The Hebrew word for “praise” is the same as “boast.” What you think about yourself may not mean much to others. Wielding power is inherently political, meaning that you should never pretend to control the narrative finally told. Don’t worry about your reputation among humans; worry about your faithfulness to God’s call.

3-4. A stone is heavy, and sand is heavy; but a fool’s wrath is heavier than them both. Wrath is cruel, and anger is overwhelming; but who is able to stand before envy? Exercising authority is actually work. Sometimes you deal with people dumb as rocks, wholly unable to think for themselves. Even harder to deal with is someone who gets insulted at the smallest thing. But as bad as that may be, the worst is someone who cannot comprehend why you reward people as individuals. They will nag you to death and waste more time and resources than all the rest of your domain.

5-6. Open rebuke is better than secret love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. The image here translates poorly into English. We all want to be loved and appreciated. The image of someone hiding their affection equates to staying out of your way. Contrast that with a friend who stops you when you are about to make a fool of yourself. At what cost do they protect us from some greater harm? False adulation is not really love, so avoid giving any place to a yes-man.

7. The full soul despises a honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet. Another gem tarnished in translation, this is more than a warning against surrendering to your appetites and trying to take your fill of things. This has nothing to do with the Western image of iron discipline and fake self-denial, nor some kind of golden moderation. Rather, you should work from the assumption that you cannot trust yourself to estimate how much is enough of anything, and expect that some part of you will always want more than you get. Don’t ignore the needs of the body, but try to cultivate a desire for moral truth, where even the harshest realities can still seem a blessing.

8. As a bird that wanders from her nest, so is a man who wanders from his place. The image of the bird is hopping and flitting aimlessly with no particular purpose, by degrees wandering too far from responsibilities. This compares favorably with a man who doesn’t keep his attention on his mission from God. His “place” is the domain God granted him through circumstances the man does not control.

9-10. Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart; so does the sweetness of one’s friend by advice from the heart. Your own friend, and your father’s friend, do not forsake them; nor go to your brother’s house in the day of your trouble; better is a neighbor that is near than a brother far off. There’s nothing wrong with trusting the loyalty of your blood kin. The context here assumes typical arrangements among nobles who disperse their sons to reduce natural rivalries. The truest counsel comes from someone with no ambition to rule, but is driven to support those who do, and is already deeply involved in the local situation.

11. My son, be wise, and make my heart glad, so that I may answer him who shames me. The Hebrew word translated “shame” here is the image of stripping away vestments and armor to show the naked and vulnerable human under it all. This isn’t merely a periodic reminder inserted in the text a father writes for his sons, begging that they not make a fool of him. Rather, it reflects fundamental morality itself. It’s not a question of pampering the rulers, but independently seeking their best interest within your calling from God. Cover the human failures of your rulers with your own pursuit of holiness.

12-13. A sensible one foresees the evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished. Take his robe that is surety for a stranger, and take a pledge from him for a strange woman. This is a general reminder that choices are usually packaged with consequences. Therefore, as someone who exercises authority, it’s proper moral justice to let others suffer for folly. In Hebrew society, the ultimate expression of folly is binding your fortunes to people you don’t even know, aside from their seductive sales pitch.

14. He who blesses his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him. The cultural image of rising early in the morning expresses eagerness, excessive in this case. It feels like a curse to deal with airheads whose affection arises from having no identity of their own.

15-16. A never-ending dropping in a very rainy day and a quarrelsome woman are alike. Whoever hides her hides the wind, and his right hand encounters slippery oil. We will see a lot about good women later in this study, but we should be surprised how little Solomon says of bad ones. The quintessence of feminine moral failure is a woman who forgets that she is on the same team as her man. Thus, she disputes with him almost every decision he makes. How can a man provide moral covering to a woman whose presence is like the worst storms? It’s like trying to pick up oil with your hands: Not only is failure guaranteed, but you can’t hang on to anything else afterward.

17. Iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the face of his friend. Rubbing two pieces of iron together does no real damage, but gives both a useful edge. Your best friends are those who remain firm in their convictions regardless of the sparks it might cause.

18. Whoever keeps the fig tree shall eat its fruit; so he who waits on his master shall be honored. Another of those Eastern feudal concepts is allowing a servant to share in the blessings of his hard work. It motivates him to do a better job. So if the job is boosting your reputation, the proper fruit is honoring them publicly.

19. As in water face answers to face, so the heart of man answers to man. This translation is a little archaic. You can see a good reflection of your face in a pool of water. Just so, you can discern the morals of someone in how they express their commitments.

20. Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied. Death is never satisfied and our fallen nature is always willing to see the next bit of visual stimulation. Our fallen nature offers no good filter for things we might see, even if it gives us nightmares or destroys our morals.

21. As the refining pot for silver and the furnace for gold, so is a man to his praise. To see how much actual precious metal there is in ore, we heat it to separate out the dross. The true test of a man’s moral character is how he reacts to praise. If it changes how he acts, there’s room for improvement.

22. Though you should pound a fool in a bowl with a bar in the midst of wheat, his foolishness will not depart from him. The image is more of a large mortar and pestle, a primitive means of grinding grain still used for small amounts in Solomon’s time. Flour is still wheat, but it’s easier to work with, unlike fools for whom no amount of effort makes any difference.

23-27. Know well the face of your flocks; set your heart on your herds. For riches are not forever; nor the crown from generation to generation? When the hay is removed, and the tender grass is seen, and mountain-plants are gathered, the lambs are for your clothing, and the goats are the price of the field. And you shall have goats’ milk enough for your food, for the food of your household, and a living for your young women. A marvelous paradox, this is a parable that warns against forgetting whence the symbols of parabolic language. If a king is shepherd to his subjects, let him not forget how to actually herd domestic animals, lest he fail to understand God’s calling on him. A real shepherd comes to genuine compassion for his flock. Do you understand that when hay is cut down, the roots sprout a fresh crop? Are you aware that life can be sustained without all the trappings of royal regalia? Don’t be a captive slave to the your position; distinguish yourself by moral discernment about the genuine redemptive needs of humanity.

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It’s Coming Home

Could you have predicted it?

We are watching the West implode. The cultural milieu has run its course and we are watching something new forming from the ashes. Even Western self-awareness of cultural birth and development is biased, but if what we can eke from past records means anything at all, we learn that catastrophe is rare. Disaster movies are just fiction. That is, people seem to keep on living in the midst of dramatic cultural shift. You would rightly get the impression that everything makes perfectly good sense to folks within the context of events. In a world where the heart-mind is considered dangerous mythology, it’s not hard for those with a vivid heart-led awareness to see what comes next.

But you do need some distance between yourself and the thing you evaluate. If you live by the heart, you would at first despise, then feel deep sadness and cynicism about the obvious flawed assumptions that steer social behavior at large. On the one hand, the average human does buy into the basic notion of conspiracies because it’s just too obvious that there is so much money and power possible via mass manipulation. And the masses are so easily manipulated, despite the broad individual awareness of it among the masses. That’s because Western culture induces a kind of schizophrenia, that we can’t break certain rules and customs or we lose everything in our resistance to those who pretend to herd us. We don’t want to destroy all the good things of our way of life, just get rid of those who take more than their fair share. That sort of self-deception is part of the mythology. It’s meant to make us feel isolated and vulnerable.

Without chasing the particulars too far, the folks who seem to take more than their share of power and wealth do suffer some confusion arising from the false assumption that their advantages are inherent in themselves and permanent. Exceedingly rare is the plutocrat who doesn’t take himself/herself too seriously. For them, it’s obvious they got there by some natural superiority. So it goes to their heads, but the real issue is not superior talent; it’s merely their ambition for something that offers such a small advantage. And it requires you back away from the materialism of the whole mess to realize that a huge number of those dominated could easily replace the plutocrats so that the entire scene could be reenacted with different faces doing exactly the same things. It is neither wholly random nor by inherent superiority, but who rules in a materialistic Western society is decided above the human level.

Things are decided in the Spirit Realm. But so very much of the factoring is generously revealed from Heaven. All it takes is turning from your intellect to your heart as the root of conscious awareness. Once you grasp the moral fabric of reality, it’s too easy to predict results based on what’s given. I’m not smarter than you. I might be farther down the path on a few issues, but don’t swallow my narrative. Write your own. Take advantage of your own divine gift of perception from the heart and filter out what won’t fit your divine call. Be aware that some of what you sensed years ago was probably your heart trying to break through your heedless intellect and prepare you for God’s coming actions. We are called to see with moral clarity and act on it.

Some years ago, despite the obvious drift of society toward the “progressive” social and political deception, some part of me knew there would be a reactionary shift at some point. Try to step back from the false debate of left versus right here, even as you realize that some individual ideas from each might appear to reflect moral truth. What you see is fake; it is built on ignoring fundamental moral imperatives. It dissects moral law and reassembles the bits into a monster. The whole thing stands on a collection of false assumptions about reality itself, so even when they get some particular issue right, they are still fundamentally wrong on both sides. The pendulum swing of common political perception is natural in our society as people get a taste of the fruit from each of the partisan teams. Society bounces off two false walls that serve only to keep them inside the shooting gallery. Right now we see the herd colliding into the useful limits of Western liberalism. They recover at varying rates, and as latecomers still collide behind them, the mass momentum is starting to turn back to the right.

As you might expect, some few plutocrats are fully aware of how this stuff works. Again, they aren’t superior, just not blind to obvious even as they seek to blind others. They are in a position to see all of this and strive to hide it from the herds because they are counting on taking profit from the action. My part is not to take profit, but exploit it for the glory of Our Creator. If I can see it, so can you.

The half-truth of Keynesian economics drove the West to the peak of prosperity some years ago, and now it’s unraveling. Not because the Austrian School was right all along — that’s another bag of half-truth. Rather, it’s because materialism itself is cyclical, with cycles inside of even grander cycles between whole civilizations. These cycles are not wholly obvious to social sciences (tied as they are to Western Civilization in the first place) but we use some of the limited grasp of Western social sciences to inform and provide a language for our moral perception. We know that social stability (the summum bonum in God’s Laws) rests on a balance between moral integrity (such as it is) and material prosperity. A shift in one affects the other. We’ve seen how oppressive moral strictures bind economic advancement. We also know that too much material stuff means moral decay. This is a shadow of the higher moral truth that when folks get fat, they get sassy with God. Through ancient moral wisdom, we can see that some things never change.

And as the false prosperity unravels, people are looking for a moral scapegoat. Who shall we blame for taking what is rightfully ours? It really doesn’t matter what or whom they choose for that role, there simply must be a scapegoat. Worldly wise plutocrats are both hastening the collapse and providing the scapegoats in the form of refugees. First, the plutocrats provoke conflicts in relatively stable and prosperous countries because those countries don’t kiss the imperial ring of Western superiority. Worse, those stable countries aren’t vulnerable to Western financial rape. So with a thin veneer of “democratic values” the West provokes the ever-present malcontents and claims to support the “justified” complaints in order to destroy the system. Chaotic and corrupt government over a territory makes it ripe for Western exploitation. When simple internal strife isn’t big enough, the West creates a false exteranal threat through some proxy. When things get tough at home, some portion of the population is always ready to leave. And the West uses the same paid provocateurs to drive the folks into Western countries.

Given that the Western plutocrats have already plundered their own people to the limits of the existing system, it’s time to bring that instability and discord home to open up more opportunities for plunder. Whether the herds see and understand what’s going on doesn’t matter; there is always a resident segment of the population that will play to the script and this is what gets reported. The herds feel individually isolated, feeling powerless to take what limited action they think might solve the problem. They do eventually find each other, but the plutocrats are already seeding the response with hired henchmen who will play the extremist cards.

Do you really think the mass drunken groping in Cologne was a surprise to the plutocrats? They already knew that the young single men driven from places like Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq would seem to Westerners as raping goons with no conscience:

What happened in Cologne happens regularly in my homeland, Pakistan. The men are never ashamed, never feel guilty, never show remorse about the way they treat women in that part of the world. The men who sexually harassed girls in Cologne were not demented; they knew what they were doing. And I am sure they did it with absolute contempt for the European culture, its norms and its people.

And will anyone be surprised when a moralist reaction rises among the Germans? Do you not already understand that the plutocrats have been funding fascist thug organizations all along? Here in the US, you cannot find any local Klan chapter that isn’t infiltrated and even led by federal agents. In some cases, the entire organization is federal plants, though sometimes from different agencies, in a kind of comical Keystone Kops show of watching each other with deep suspicion. Of course, spies from various federally approved “civil rights” organizations are there, too. It’s no different from various animal rights and other “eco” organizations, riddled with federal spies. You shouldn’t imagine that the various European governments are any different, keeping their agents inside both left and right “terrorist” organizations. Dare I mention the spies working in religious groups, too?

With the plutocrats, it’s a simple matter that there must be a moral weakness in every flavor of human. It’s never a question of whether humans can be bought, only a matter of the price. Provide enough variety in distractions and there won’t be much genuine resistance left.

But they aren’t the only ones seeing this and seeking to exploit it. The difference is that you and I as heart-led believers aren’t interested in worldly outcomes. Quite the opposite; we are interested in otherworldly outcomes, but we want them visible here insofar as it’s possible. That’s the whole point. So if you can see all this noise and fury for what it is, you are ready to follow your divine call into whatever part of the big picture is God’s mission for you in His glory. Glory to His name is the plunder God seeks.

There will be a right-wing backlash, and more left-wing backlash to the backlash, but a significant portion of the herds will now drift right with substantial momentum. Don’t be surprised when that momentum destroys the thin chalk-powder imagery so carefully laid in the streets by left-wing propagandists. If chaos and violence were not already bad enough, it’s about to get much worse, much more widespread. And please: Don’t forget that this all mixes in with the virtual world, as well. The wars are coming home; don’t be caught off guard. We can infiltrate better than any earthly agency because we stand on the moral fabric of Creation itself, and are supported by Heaven.

Most of all, be ready to exploit the folly of the plutocrats, too.

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Right There

Redemption is right there within reach.

As always, your cultural climate can make a huge difference. If you grow up in world fully expecting that nature itself is obliged to take you seriously on your terms, you’ll struggle with redemption. It will be painful and emotional. Western Civilization builds in us the expectation that we all can and should assert the rights of nobility, as it were. On at least a subconscious level, we are repulsed at the idea that someone should hold privileges we don’t get. “It’s not fair!” How often have you heard that?

Thus, we should hardly be surprised that someone should refer to conversion as the “dark night of the soul” and we see converts weeping, etc. Even a mere psychological conversion can be traumatic in that sense. There is a whole branch of psychology dealing with breaking people down, of pushing them off their perch so that they become malleable to some external influence. A Western mindset sets you up for this kind of thing, and it’s the only cultural milieu in history to have this flaw.

Do you not recall how the Apostle Paul responded on the road to Damascus (Acts 9)? In the psychology of his culture, even a man with great authority understood the nature of such things. He might have pushed it aside to become a ranking rabbi himself, but it was never that far from him. Why was it such a big deal that the Roman Centurion who asked Jesus to heal a servant would treat an itinerant rabbi with such respect? Jesus said such faith was rare only because the rabbinical leadership of His day had been Hellenized and conditioned into that Western arrogance, while Romans had not yet bought into that nonsense. In both cases, the man in question held radically different expectations than do folks around us today.

This is why condemnation is such a powerful chain on our souls. We are forced into compartmentalization. On the one hand, our conscious mind demands things that could never be, and the only reason we get away with it is because it’s the ubiquitous cultural mythology. On the other hand, we know instinctively that this is inherently rebellion against Our Creator, and we dare not admit it to ourselves consciously. Western Civilization is inherently schizophrenic in that sense.

Further, other cultures tend to have at least a semi-conscious acceptance of living by the dominance of the heart over the head. Westerners make redemption a conversion experience, and Western Christians cannot comprehend how certain Asians, for example, have no trouble claiming Christ while retaining their pagan religious commitments. Their hearts remain in the pagan realm while conversion to Christ is merely an external and intellectual formality.

Western Christian missionary work is more about Western culture than anything else.

For us at Kiln of the Soul parish, the biggest problem we have is awakening Westerners to the heart-led awareness as the core of faith. There is no conversion; you don’t buy into anything. You are simply finding yourself. If that new self-awareness includes drawing near to us in our work, sure, there are some basic structural concepts that we share. But there’s nothing in the shift of awareness itself that binds you to us. We have learned to like it that way. The most important thing you can do is not join us in our teaching, but in our awareness from the heart. You submit to the Creator, not to any of us, and you make that submission on a level of commitment far above mere intellect.

He has been there since at least the moment of your birth, waiting for you to reach within and find Him.

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Back to School for Me

The fresh education has begun. Not that I’ve ever stopped learning in the first place, but this is something I never felt the need to know. I approach it like every other academic endeavor because I need to make sure I can do what it takes to press ahead in the mission calling. So I’ve got this marvelous computer and CentOS 7 is installed and I’ve already learned how to set up and run the service that replaces the APC “Powerchute” software you get with the battery backups for Windows. It’s not exactly simple, but very effective; the system is now fully aware of the battery. But this is just the beginning.

Aside from different logos and not having to pay for use and software updates, the official Red Hat manuals apply to everything involving CentOS. For years CentOS chugged along as the a free clone of RHEL. A couple of years ago, Red Hat adopted CentOS as one of their officially sponsored projects. So if you visit the RHEL documentation page, and click on the small gear-button at the right side across from any of the manuals, you can choose to download different formats or simply read it online. The System Administrator’s Guide is mostly review for me, but I’ve already run across a few tricks I hadn’t known before.

At the same time I’m reading this excellent guide to Linux networking. My knowledge of networking in general is very spotty, so this is more work. I’m taking the time to memorize bits of it here and there, whatever strikes me as critical. And it turns out that there is a lot more to those little home routers you buy so cheaply; a lot of them run Linux already and can be tuned to carry out some pretty sophisticated networking tasks.

The business of webmaster is more complicated because the technology is a faster-moving target. Any book will be little more than an introduction to each of the topics common to the field, and it becomes more important to master specific tools you use. Do I really need to know all about SQL and the details of database management? Must I become a master of PHP and Apache webserver operations, too? Probably not right away. Those are specialties within a broad array of possible applicable topics. I have zero interest in web design, and I’m much more likely to engage only the stuff I have to know to do what I’m doing. Most of those things yield nicely to mere familiarity because some of the best tools are already prepackaged for you.

Meanwhile, you notice that I continue my biblical studies by churning out the weekly lessons in Psalms and I’ll be working on some more of Proverbs this week. If it turns out that starting a new “career” at almost 60 was even half the reason God drove me to retain a high level of physical fitness, it makes all the sense in the world to me.

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Psalm 84

This is a Pilgrim Psalm, a celebration of marching to Zion for any number of annual feasts and festivals. The imagery is rich with symbolism.

The psalmist begins with a common figure of speech heard among pilgrims meeting to share the journey. They refer to the House of Jehovah as if it were a long lost dear relative. Just the sight of it in the distance makes the heart sing! Never mind the tired body as the long journey is near the end; the soul itself grows weary and faint being away too long from the symbolic imperial courts of the Sovereign Ruler. Oh, to be in His vicinity again! The hearts are aflame with anticipation.

The pilgrim envies the very birds that reside in the Temple precincts. Stop and consider the context a moment: Asaph and his descendants mostly lived in or near Jerusalem. It was their duty as Temple singers to be there year round. It’s not as if they were unaware of the paradox that those who live closest to the Holy Place are often cynical, whose ritual observances are empty habit. This is a hidden joke here. Speaking through the pilgrim, the lyrical priest senses in his heart that surely the very birds are taking full advantage of the blessings of flocking to a structure that would offer lots of nesting opportunities well out of reach of anything without feathers. But the birds are not fallen and know their Creator instinctively, needing no such tangible reminder of Him as temples and rituals. The psalmist wants to capture the joy and wonder of someone who counts it a privilege to worship. Thus, he is among those blessed to hang around and worship formally on a daily basis. It’s a big deal to him.

Then he explains why it matters so much: He lives here, but his heart is always on pilgrimage. We can’t be sure, but if the Valley of Baca were a literal geographic location, it would have been dominated by a weeping shrub, most likely the Arabian balsam, which is drought tolerant. Obviously the psalmist uses this as a symbol of a rather long and difficult passage in life. People whose heart remains hungry for more of the Lord’s Presence and power can turn the desert valleys into places filled with springs of living water, whose lives are filled with the downpour of blessings. Never mind the bad times, they just keep getting stronger in faith.

So standing before the Lord, he first observes the ritual of calling on God simply because He is God. Then observing the second protocol, he prays for his king, gesturing to the palace that stood next to the Temple.

Then he launches into a final celebration of the high privilege of standing a place long recognized as holy ground, even before Abraham wandered the area. If he died here, it would be more than he deserved. When on duty, a doorkeeper slept in the vestibule behind the door and lived a very Spartan existence. In more lyrical terms, it was his duty to open the door for the Master of the place, able to recognize Him in whatever guise He traveled, ready at any hour. That would be better than a solid and comfortable residence with any number of folks whose hearts were effectively dead to moral truth. Think of the immense privileges of serving God! He is the very sun in the sky, the armor of His warriors. Whatever it is we can imagine as “good” is in His hands offered to us daily. Just walk in His character.

In the final verse, the word for “trust” in Hebrew refers to committing oneself to a feudal lord, without any reservation and expectation, for whatever service He decides.

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The Server, Part 2 (Updated)

The monitor and tower are here together. Unfortunately, the latter did not come with keyboard and mouse, so I am unable to confirm much else about it. Looking inside tells me only that it is designed to last with fancy convenience features for accessing various parts of it. For example, the slide-out hard drive bays lie in the bottom of the case and face out toward the side panel opening, there is a huge cooling block and fan setup, and so forth. I can use the Dell product key to tell you what it had when sold, but the vendor on eBay insists it now has a lots more.

Now, Office Depot apologized and it appears I’ll get the battery backup later this afternoon. I also ordered a keyboard and mouse kit from Walmart because it was easy to arrange in-store pickup today. I’ll post image(s) and stuff later, so check back this evening for updates on this post.

On a related note, I am thinking I’ll just leave this blog here as it currently exists, and keep a copy of it at home. I read up on how to download the database that includes the entire content. However, once I get a separate facility running closer to my geographical location, I will probably start from where this one leaves off, and link back the posts from the new blog here. I’m pretty sure I want to run something simpler than WordPress, so I’m looking at things like Blosxom and other fast-loading stuff. I ran WordPress on an account I had several years ago, and then tested something a friend of mine developed. WordPress is big, complicated and a lot of work to maintain.

Check back later.

ComputerOffice

Update: It’s nothing glorious, just a fast quad-core from the Vista Era of hardware. I use headphones instead of speakers. It’s hard to get a wired mouse and keyboard so I’ve got a wireless set that will do for now. Since I type so much, I decided to put the mouse on the table next to me. I’ll spend a week or two just getting stuff set up for normal use while I’m reading up on network protocols and Linux systems administration in general. This will take awhile, but we are on the road and I am determined to make this thing talk to you folks who want to hear from it.

By the way, this big monitor was cheaper than a lot of smaller ones.

Oh, and we got the battery backup this afternoon. The system is complete almost complete, church; you now own a nice “facility” for our meetings. Next I’ll save up for a second Gigabyte ethernet card and a second hard drive for backup. Those can wait awhile and I’m not going to do any more fund requests. I’d rather you gave some donations to my dear Sister and ministry associate, Wildcucumber. She lives in Canada where food prices are soaring right now, so you can guess what the cost of living in general is like.

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