Admin: My ISP Hassles

Posted on December 3, 2015 by ehurst

Holding myself always accountable to my regular readers, it seems proper to report that my Internet connection service is stumbling a lot right now. Not the technology so much as my provider has gone bonkers on us.

Cox Cable makes its best profit from the TV service they want you to bundle with the other stuff the do. My regulars know that I hate TV. It’s not as if TPTB aren’t aware of how TV helps to keep us enslaved; they are counting on it and do what they can to restrict our options on official information so that we are denied such info without TV. I am not in a position to ignore it totally despite how much I despise it, so I do have a TV and do watch certain portions of news broadcasts, for example. But I’ll be darned if I let Cox bully me by punitive billing practices just because I won’t play sucker to their hard sell.

Right now their billing department is being downright abusive with us. It’s as if someone in their management is totally schizoid and changing their minds daily about what they are doing to us. We thought we had this thing settled amicably, but the next day it’s like storm troopers and they change things without bothering to tell us. This, on top of a rather shocking new fee schedule, along with periodic technology issues like DNS. They forget that there is competition.

I predict that we will end our relationship with Cox by the end of this month and switch to AT&T DSL services. For less money we can get a faster line (in theory). This means that my Cox email address will go away. Brothers and sisters, let me encourage you to switch to my other email addresses if you haven’t already:

ehurst909@gmail.com
broken@unseen.is
br073n@outlook.com

These three don’t rely on any particular ISP. As it is, I’ll have to go back through all my various online accounts and change the email address I use for those. There are a lot of them because that’s the way the world works.

It’s possible things with Cox won’t even last that long and I’ll be stuck having to use free wifi wherever I can get it for awhile. It’s plentiful here, but nothing very close to home. Thus, my access during such a time would be limited. The issue could be that Cox takes such a big bite out of us that it will take time to come up with the installation fees for DSL.

If any of this matters, or even entertains you, keep your eye out for posts under the “Admin” label. Thank you all for your prayers and support.

Update: I received information that Cox’s website and call center are both out-sourced. Further, within the company it is well known that those services are unreliable and hopelessly incompetent. So without knowing what a disaster it would turn out to be, we had requested moving our services via the website. This is the primary source of our troubles. When we went to a retail outlet staffed by actual employees of Cox, everything got fixed pretty quickly. I still wrote a strong letter to the local company offices via snail mail and may get a further response. But the take away here is that you should never, ever use Cox’s call center or website to do business with them. Always use a retail facility.

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Refreshing Your Core

Posted on December 3, 2015 by ehurst

Stop and re-calibrate; put your intellect back into its place.

There is no command from God to accomplish anything on this earth. Our whole gospel message is characterized as process, not product. We are struggling to explore the vast Land of the Heart, the Kingdom of Endless Repentance, the Moral Universe of God’s Character in Creation. If I were restricted to one doctrine, it would be to awaken the heart-mind as master of the soul, because it simply cannot work unless the heart is bound to Christ. And there is not a thing we can do to change someone else; our whole purpose is wrapped up in raising consciousness of this faith by living it.

The demons of destruction are beginning to harvest the first fruits, as it were, before our eyes. Their crop knows no season, but rather sin inserts its own season by perverting the natural order of things — that order being God’s moral character woven into Creation. But it will only be a season in the sense that this, too, shall pass. Meanwhile, the time of testing is at hand; the Bible refers to it as “tribulation.” It doesn’t require a prophet to see that, but it does require a living and active heart of faith to keep from getting lost.

In all of my blather about computer technology, operating systems and the coming Networked Civilization, what really matters is how I stay on track during the transition. Few living now will ever comprehend what they see happening around them, but if we don’t focus on awakening people to their hearts, it won’t matter what they see. No human reckoning can explain the full range of chaos bursting up from the Abyss right now. Even if we had a whole world of analysts with complete and accurate records of all that has happened, they will not understand the spirit of this time, of what drives people crazy with impossible lusts. The crop of sin has ripened. We can’t know whom God will rescue and redeem, much less could we explain how, but we know that His Word says our minds should seek to understand what He requires of us in the midst of all these things.

If you can dare to explore this alien landscape of the heart, joy awaits you. It’s not being; it’s not doing. It’s living in itself. Nothing could possibly be better for you than to get lost in what God made you for, and made for you.

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Gray Matter Doesn’t Matter

Posted on December 2, 2015 by ehurst

It’s quite likely you’ve run across recent headlines announcing that male and female brains are indistinguishable. Can’t you hear the SJWs and pop-sci fanatics snickering now? Our brains are interchangeable, suggesting gender differences are merely cultural.

Ummm, no. That’s not what the study actually concluded. It’s more like the brain as an organ is designed to respond to contextual influences and is not noticeably different without a gender context. That hardly negates the understanding that hormones and body wiring, along with cultural conditioning, both cause the brain to develop in ways that might tend to reflect a gender bias.

So, if everyone around you is utterly certain guys must grok higher math, and that women must know how to sing, talent or not, you’ll find a gender difference in most of the brains you examine in your particular society. But the notion that sexual differentiation is not burned into human development by nature is perverted nonsense. Each of us is the result of complex patterns of influence and development, but Our Creator says He made the sexes different and we damned sure better acknowledge His Word on the matter or we’ll suffer for it more than is natural to our fallen state. Arguing with God has always been a losing proposition.

Nobody is shocked to discover that the differences don’t arise from the brain, but arise in the brain.

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Can’t Afford Materialism

Posted on December 1, 2015 by ehurst

I can recall serving in the military when it was called “peace time” and all we did was train. In those days, our senior battalion maintenance officer said something to a group of us about what a wonderful thing it was our nation sent so much weaponry to Israel. He said that the IDF would use and abuse the stuff in a real combat environment, compile statistics on what failed and why, and then offer design enhancements.

Maybe the IMF and global banking moguls look at Greece the same way. They are testing all the ways to legally confiscate the last penny from the population. Who would have imagined a Western democracy would do this? Greek taxpayers will be forced to declare all cash “under the mattress” (including inside) or boxes that contain more than 15,000 euros as well as jewelry and precious stones (including gold) worth over 30,000 euros, starting in 2016. The edict and matching forms are just that specific.

This is not a good time to suffer from materialism. The god Mammon is a cruel master.

In retrospect, it seems to me I’ve always had an active heart-mind, but had no help learning how to use it. It’s the only way I can account for having always believed the best use for money was gaining experience and education. Buy things that can’t be taken away from you because they are a part of you — travel, adventure, learning to cope with unexpected situations.

Most of my computer ministry clients, if they store anything on their computers at all, it’s pictures and a few documents. One was writing a book, but still cared more about the pictures she lost when someone else messed with her computer. Those are a sort of memory, and as we age, family pictures become pretty important. My shepherd’s heart breaks when stuff like that gets wiped for no good reason. I can’t help you when government determines to drain your bank accounts and confiscate valuables, nor can I save your computer stuff if something eats your file system. I keep telling folks to back up their files to an external device and keep it somewhere away from the computer.

It really bothers me that, starting with Vista, despite the improved security against common threats, the one thing that has gotten seriously worse is the file system integrity. Updates on XP and before were usually pretty quick and file system rescue tools were plentiful and effective. Those days are gone. Updates take forever, even on fast computers, and they tend to eat both system files and private files. I’ve had several calls where the whole thing was simply file system corruption from an update. Now I’m hearing that Win10 is far worse on this very thing, and I have to wonder just what the heck is Microsoft doing.

Is everyone with money and power out to make us miserable just for their own convenience?

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Bits and Pieces 18

Posted on November 30, 2015 by ehurst

Every time I move, I always get sick at least once. I don’t recall it happening whenever I traveled with the military, but if I stayed very long anywhere, I always got hit with some kind of adjustment that manifested as temporary illness. This time around it was a couple of things, but apparently my body is now adjusted.

So today I felt well enough to engage in my wake-up work out as soon as I got the coffee started making. The main workout today was cleaning the apartment. You know, moving stuff, sweeping and mopping. I finally unpacked the last of the books I actually tend to use.

Across the breezeway some folks were moving out just as we were moving in. They apparently didn’t obey the lease requirements, because there were a parade of notices attached to the door, followed by a notice from the sheriff’s department. Then today a deputy watched while the maintenance guys broke the lock and opened up to a stinking, trashed-out mess. You have to wonder if rent would come down a bit if there was less of that. It can’t be cheap to clean that up and get it ready for another renter. And then there’s the similarly abandoned apartment just next door to us…

Right before the move, I used some of my PayPal donations to get a netbook. It was very handy during the transition, and it was still useful the other day after the ice storm knocked out our electricity. It’s easy to carry that thing to some place with free wifi and get caught up. But I’ve got to replace it with something that will run CentOS 7. I got a donation to cover that, but the transaction wasn’t what I expected. You see, on Ebay right now, a tower with moderate specs for Vista era hardware — just the tower alone — costs more than a good laptop with the same specs. So now I’ve got another laptop coming and I wonder what I’ll do with the netbook. I’m not a collector of devices like some folks.

Apparently our street address is quite an issue with various services. I don’t pretend to know what is, or ought to be, the absolute correct answer, but the local post office says one thing, the USPS website says another, and different utilities are wholly inconsistent. The street name doesn’t change when it comes around a corner, turning from east-west to north-south orientation but the addresses change radically to reflect the different orientation. So it goes from “West Glenhaven” with three-digit numbers to “North Glenhaven” and four-digit numbers (bearing no relation to the E-W numbers) just before it comes up past our building. So naturally some of our mail has already gotten misplaced.

None of this is a cry for help, by the way. It’s just giving you a peek at my life and what I now find normal. We are really happy with this place, and I’m very comfortable here. Our living expenses have gone down quite a bit and everything we need is within walking distance for me. I’m still not sure whether I like the change in cycling terrain. Gone are the long quiet hilly rides along backroads in the country. There’s very little rural area anywhere near now and virtually no brutal hills within striking distance. Instead, there are vast stretches of purpose-built bike routes, but they go places I’m not sure I want to see all the time. I see way more traffic than in the past. But for now, it’s not a really big deal because the weather hinders riding much in the first place. It’s mostly strapping on a knee brace and taking a walk. Lots of quiet neighborhood streets that are easier to walk than ride around here.

I really miss the woodlands and the hiking trails. The highly limited foliage around here is awfully quiet compared to the noisy voices of the woods.

Prayer requests: We hope that the tax refund covers a new kitchen stove. They gave us the oldest piece of junk available, featuring those old hinged electric burners and no oven light. I had to buy my own reflector pans because the ones they used were completely wrong and poorly modified to just barely fit in the holes. We’d like to see our missing mail and get our ISP to correct major billing errors; we have service but the billing is really messed up. My son and his wife are still dealing with the insane manager at the trailer park we just left. We can’t transfer the title for the trailer to them until we pay the taxes for this year, and that’s a fair chunk of change.

Finally, I still have my eyes on the mission to teach the message. I still have the calling to do computer tech support as a cover for that mission and I still sense things are about to go crazy on that front.

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Taste of Fellowship

Posted on November 29, 2015 by ehurst

The fundamental issue is who you are.

On this blog, I strive to set the example. Not that you should follow me, but I want you to emulate how I follow Christ. The whole business of manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven has nothing to do with you changing your world. Indeed, that notion is a blasphemous rejection of God’s sovereign authority. The whole of the gospel message is you engaging divine power to change yourself. It’s internal, not external. That’s more than any of us can do in the first place. It’s not a goal; you can never get there in this life. It’s a place to explore for as long as you live, knowing you’ll never discover the whole thing.

Knowing yourself truly is the same as knowing all you can about God’s revelation.

Do you get tired of hearing from me how bad Western Civilization is? Then stop reading this blog. The message of departing from Western conceptions of reality is fundamental to who I am; it’s a function of God’s work in my life. In order to draw closer to my Savior, I had to identify my native Western culture is completely and hopelessly perverted. It can’t be repaired because the foundation is sand. I write things like that because that’s what brings me peace with God. Find your own peace with God, but realize that as long as you discern Western Civilization differently, fellowship between us will be very difficult.

It’s never a question of who is right and wrong; that’s part of Western lie. It’s a total delusion to imagine that we can appeal to some objective truth. If it were always a matter of who scores the most points, professional sports would financially collapse tomorrow. Team loyalty is what keeps that entertainment industry alive. People are not loyal based on always winning. They celebrate when their team wins, and even more when their team takes the trophy for that season. But they are loyal for reasons of affinity. Each individual might offer a different version for the why of that affinity, but it boils down to what they see as their identity as a human.

So if I tell you that I supported OSU in the Bedlam Game last night against OU, it hardly matters that OSU lost. It’s just a freaking game. My loyalty is highly limited in the first place, but if you ask me why I choose one over the other, it’s mostly a matter of a lifetime of personal encounters with folks connected to each university. In the balance of things, my experience with OU has been less pleasant than my experience with OSU. I don’t need any other reason.

So it is with our associations within the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s not a question of who is right or wrong, good or bad, or any of the crap most Western Christians cite. The real issue is mutual tolerance. Indeed, it’s much the same with any human institution, including marriage. The fundamental question is whether you can live with each other in the best and worst that life has to offer. Up to the point when I met my wife, it wasn’t a question of whether my previous romances were less qualified. Those romances failed because there wasn’t sufficient convergence of individual natures to build something permanent. Veloyce is the “best” in the sense that she’s the best fit to handle my collection of failures. The longer she puts up with me, the more I love her; I can trust her in everything. It’s only a difference in degree with how we choose our friends and fellowships in Christ.

This is why I teach that your sense of humor is a critical element. If you have to restrain yourself in certain company, then you don’t really belong there. There may be a host of reasons why you can’t simply walk away — that’s the way it is with human society. But if you can’t openly share what makes you laugh, you need different friends. You need time with people who can appreciate your sense of humor or it will eventually kill you (in one sense or another). At a minimum, it makes for serious neuroses. Granted, a problem in this area may require a fresh introspection for something like why you have an impulse to hurt people who love you, but that’s another matter. In the balance of things, you need to keep company more with those who can appreciate your real self. Humor reflects who you are and where you are at this point in your life.

This should deflate the pompous popular notion that you must conform to the values of your society. You most certainly must not do that. Nobody but Christ has a claim on you at that level, no human can stand between you and your God. If you feel out of place, you probably are. Spend some time in prayer alone with God to begin sorting out who you are, but always walk in the best understanding that you have right now. You cannot move forward and develop a better grasp on any demand of the gospel until you taste how it touches your soul. Indeed, how you go about changing is itself a matter of individual character, but you can scarcely use God’s power to renovate your false understanding until you have tasted some measure of things that will harm you, however it is you taste them.

People who can’t tolerate your real self, and who make too many demands that you conform to their tastes are not your friends.

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Psalm 77

Posted on November 28, 2015 by ehurst

We remind ourselves that, for all their piety and scholarship, translators remain captive to their own biases. We should never pretend that we have none, but be conscious of them and strive to make them serve our individual callings. It is wholly unfair to build a doctrine or theology from any English translation without at least being aware of the mystical character of Hebrew poetry. As much as any other Hebrew text, this one seeks to bring us vividly into that moment whence this psalm was inspired, to discover that precious moment when we come face to face with God in the midst of inner turmoil.

It matters not whether the sorrow as personal or national, or anything in between. Sorrow is a pervasive human experience. The only proper starting point is offered immediately, in that the psalmist cries out to his Creator. Surely He hears, as the writer notes. He goes on to paint the full image of calling on God because everything else was as good as dust in his life.

Don’t get hung up on the word “spirit” here as a doctrinal label. In Hebrew literature it takes a more organic meaning, an expression for the human sense of awareness. Nothing more than human, yet this is far more than mere animal, aspiring to things far beyond our sorrowful existence. Thus, the psalmist’s spirit was overwhelmed — the literal image is something shrouded or covered up and unable to find a way out.

But what words can indicate the depth of sorrow here? The inner conflict keeps him awake, bewildered and unable to reconcile things. He is fortunate to find some anchor, some solid awareness of God’s record of protection. He even sings of it, recalling old songs of God’s mighty acts. Where could the solution be to this imponderable inner conflict?

Against that deep and heavy history of God’s power and mercy is the apparent situation that finds the psalmist outside the boundaries of that protection. It’s a figure of speech that blames the sinner for being locked out of God’s Presence. In English translations it could be mistaken for whining that God is capricious; it was acknowledging that the one excluded simply could not comprehend because it was ineffable in the first place. So instead of blasphemy in accusing God, the psalmist recites the typical subjective human response. It was a common form of expression from ancient times.

Suddenly he confirms this by confessing that this is merely his human anguish speaking out of turn. Contrast that with the unquestionable history of God’s dealings with His people. It’s rather like that popular song, “Count Your Blessings.” When you hurt the worst, it’s not a mere distraction to recite the blessings of God from times past. Rather, it provides a far more substantial context for thinking about things the mere shallowness of current discomfort.

If nothing else, who could forget the Exodus and the sea crossing? We are talking about the God who made water stand aside for His nation to escape slavery, then drowned the slavers behind them. These were the people who just moments before whined about the Egyptian army and wondered aloud if there weren’t enough grave sites back in the Nile Delta that they had to be moved here to die. You can stand with Moses and Aaron, or you can walk wait to be herded through blessings you’ll never understand. God’s purpose never fails, despite whether you can grasp what He’s doing.

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Desktop CompSec Update (End of 2015)

Posted on November 27, 2015 by ehurst

You have to understand that computer security (CompSec) is a moving target. Every day something new appears to threaten our control over our systems and our sanity.

As always, we need to keep in mind that the primary issue is control of your system. This implies some measure of control over your data, but all the privacy absolutists are chasing a lie. Remember: Once digitized, forever public. Even more important than data privacy is data integrity, particularly in transmission. We want to make sure that no one has an easy time spoofing our identity and saying for us things we’d never say. In similar fashion, we want to make sure when we pull stuff down from the Net that we are getting what’s advertised.

Realistically, CompSec is properly system control and transmission integrity. One of the major elements of morality in technology is honesty. Reputation is a fundamental element of your online presence. It’s reciprocal; you rightly demand it from others. When you detect deception, you rightly become guarded with the source. Consistent deception justifies cutting them off as much as possible. Cynicism is a necessity online.

Given recent revelations that paint Google as not a whit better than Microsoft or any bureaucratic government, I’ve been moving away from using their products. Every big company compromises user wishes in favor of profits (particularly from advertising) to some degree, so it’s a matter of how much trust. Google has really gone way over the line, so when there’s a choice, you should look at other options.

I’ll use GMail because it’s just above the line of tolerance for me. Android? No freaking way. Chromebooks? Nope. Chrome browser? Absolutely not. Other browsers derived from their Blink browser engine (forked from WebKit)? Not if I can avoid it. I’ll keep Chromium around for sites where Firefox simply will not work. But we keep finding sneaky crap Google has done to compromise user control, particularly in snooping. Then they lie about it.

It’s not that Mozilla Project is wholly trustworthy, but they do offer the user somewhat better control. They tend to report honestly what they are doing and how you can control it. And lately their browsers are working better with a wider range of websites. Not just Firefox, but I can actually use Seamonkey on Outlook.com without any problems. It also appears to work well enough on the MS Office Online applications. And Seamonkey is the volunteer project that has no profit motive, so in keeping alive the original Mozilla Suite (which derived from the old Netscape Communicator) they offer an honest measure of user control.

You can also find the ESR version of Firefox (extended service release) which doesn’t pump in all the extra latest-n-greatest features that you may not like. The ESR channel caters to government-corporate environment, where sudden changes are unwelcome. This, by the way, is the basis for Debian’s Iceweasel rebrand of Firefox.

There are other browsers built on the same Mozilla framework. One that is growing in popularity is Pale Moon. It’s a little clunky running on your Linux desktop because the updates have to be installed manually. Their nifty installer script doesn’t work on every distro, and may not put things where you want them. Unless you know how to rewrite it to suit you, it’s easier just grabbing the zipped tarball and installing manually into your home directory. Firefox, Thunderbird (email) and Seamonkey all update in place on Linux if you install it in your home directory where your user account owns the file system. Just periodically check through the menu system: Help > About. If there’s an update, it’ll happen while you watch, then it directs you to restart the application.

Regular readers may recall I’ve often advised compartmentalizing between your various online activities. For example, I use Iceweasel for general surfing and research, Seamonkey for sites that require secure login and for email, and regular Firefox for blogging only. Because of how Mozilla stuff works, Firefox and Iceweasel would tend to grab the same user profile on my system, so I keep them compartmentalized by having multiple profiles. Then I create all my launchers with the proper commandline incantations to make each one use a different profile. It looks something like this:

/home/ed/firefox/firefox -P default --new-instance %u

Parsing: The executable binary is in a firefox folder in my home folder, and it’s name is “firefox” of course. The -P warns Firefox that I want to use a particular named profile; in this case, it’s named “default.” The --new-instance ensures that Firefox won’t recycle the currently running process if I have Iceweasel open at the same time. The Mozilla folks are trying to save your RAM, but it’s safer to create an entirely new process.

Unfortunately there’s no direct route to creating a new profile without using the commandline. You launch it this way on Debian, for example:

iceweasel --ProfileManager

This opens a tool that you can use to create as many profiles as you like, so long as you give each one a different name. Then you can create your launchers (“shortcuts”) as noted above for each profile. Similar language is used for Windows shortcuts, but I don’t have room to explain here how to do that. You can look it up easily enough…

Check out the addons (Tools > Add-ons). I always add the ublock advertising blocker. While Seamonkey has their own wiping tool (Tools > Clear Private Data), the one for Firefox doesn’t work quite the same. You can get a Click & Clean that does a better job for Firefox variants. I have no need for other extensions, and some of them may not be totally honest about what they do, but the two I named have never been caught in a lie yet.

Finally, I note that if you are running CentOS 7 (or some other Red Hat clone), you can always run the Mozilla stuff because either CentOS handles the update or the generic downloaded versions (select 64-bit only) are compiled on CentOS in the first place (last time I checked). Keep in mind that the primary reason for selecting any of the Red Hat clones is longevity; your OS will be supported — bug fixes and security updates — several years from now. Google is scornful about such goals and builds all their stuff on the latest-n-greatest, refusing to even advise Red Hat developers on how to make it build on their long-lived systems. If you just have to have that Blink engine on your Red Hat clone, maybe Opera will eventually offer something for you. Or, you can always try Slimjet if you get the generic 64-bit zipped package. You can install it the same as the generic Mozilla stuff in your home directory, but it’s a little clunky because every time you install or update (reinstall), you have to use the commandline and setup the sandbox (a required security feature) using root permissions.

At any rate, Mozilla stuff is the way to go right now if you need a full service browser, regardless of your OS.

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Politics of Obsession

Posted on November 26, 2015 by ehurst

In Scripture, the term “Lust of the Eye” (see The Nature of Sin and Temptation) refers to a particular weakness in human nature. In this modern age, it manifests most often as entertainment-seeking. At a fundamental level, it’s an appetite for sensory stimulation. Think broadly on this, because it’s what fuels drug and alcohol abuse, porn, gaming obsessions, TV and movies, all the adrenaline inducing rides, etc. It manifests in a whole range of human behavior that may not in itself be harmful, but becomes the human excuse to defy God’s moral character.

Awakening your heart-mind doesn’t solve the problem, but it does empower the means God placed in each of us to overcome, to reorder our internal processes so that we can focus on the drive to serve and glorify God. For this were we created and nothing else can take its place.

What most people fail to realize is how quickly the Lust of the Eyes can become the main problem with absorbing what passes for news reporting. The Three Lusts typically work together. For example, reading so-called insider reports appeals to your “Pride of Life” in making you imagine that you hold some advantage over the poor benighted souls around you. It teaches you to take yourself too seriously. This is what sells these days, particularly on the Internet. This is where we get the vast horde of Keyboard Commandos, trading in all their so-called “alternative news” reports that cater to all flavors of political persuasion.

You shouldn’t imagine that this is entirely the domain of right-wingers. The lefties (“progressives”) do it, too, with their own unique flavoring. Each side whines about how the opposition owns the system and engages in unjustified persecution and censorship. They refuse to admit how the various outlets are all owned by the same small group of folks. While the Internet itself has escaped direct ownership and control of the sort we have seen with print, radio and TV, you won’t have to search hard to discover a heavy layer of filtration between data and people. It’s a filtration that consists of software and even hardware specifications that serve to keep us from discovering things the media moguls want to hide from us.

Thus, you should understand that when someone like Rush Limbaugh stays on air, it’s because there is a market for his particular form of entertainment. He’s not interested in actual truth, but making a buck. He, at least, has admitted it quietly. The media moguls allow it because it’s harmless misdirection, herding a dangerous element into “safe” obsessions, while allowing the moguls to take their cut of the advertising proceeds. The same goes with every popular info-huckster all over the political spectrum. So long as everyone believes in working through the system, battling for political leverage, the people who are actually in power face no real threat.

There are plenty of info-consumers who shift around on the spectrum. So long as everything rests on the Three Lusts, it hardly matters what you claim as logical and reality-based. As previously noted, the existence of reason as a mythological “objective standard” becomes an excuse for ignoring how we are driven so easily by non-intellectual forces. The elevation of human reason is pure mythology, idolatry of a false god. Nobody seems to notice that every theoretical construct has logical holes that others can identify while standing within an opposing theoretical construct. In the end, the only reason you can give for choosing one over another is that it answers some non-intellectual call in your fallen nature. So long as you insist that intellectual reason and logic are the final arbiter of all things, you will never escape; you will never come up with a solidly satisfying moral system.

Instead, the cravings continue and you find no peace. Peace is not possible on that level. Not because there is no peace, but because it’s simply not available there. Peace of that sort is actually a cry for meaning, for moral significance. Morality can never rest on mere logic, and certainly not mere sentiment. So long as you cannot break out of that logical construct, you are doomed.

The only possible escape is to awaken your heart-mind awareness. It’s then you realize that the only change possible is in yourself. People cannot truly change on any other basis. All your hopes of convincing or forcing people to do whatever you imagine is good, right and moral can never work for more than a few minutes in this world anyway. That’s the nature of our fallen human existence. Any system you could devise to disable or inhibit what you consider immoral (whether in thought or deed) will be perverted and hijacked before you even get it in place. There will always be contextual psychopaths, people who cannot be made to care about what’s good, right and moral. And there will always be someone among those moral black holes smarter than you, because the nature of psychopathy makes them more creative. For all intents and purposes, psychopaths have no heart that can be awakened. The link between mind and heart that God made in us might as well not exist in them.

The system on this level cannot be fixed. The one system God revealed is anathema to virtually the whole world, so we are unlikely to ever see it again, except on some moral level alone in the hearts of just a few folks in any given context. But if there is any hope in sharing your heart-led existence with anyone, you’ll have to break a wealth of bad habits. Do you ever get the feeling you’d sometimes be better off simply not knowing about events outside your own community? So long as you rest on the power of your mind, that’s generally true. Once you rest your awareness in your heart, it’s pretty easy to decide a lot of global news doesn’t matter much. It’s not that God’s Word promotes blind ignorance, or that it forbids such topics as “foreign policy.” Rather, divine revelation has such a radically different approach to human relations as a whole that you cannot trust anything that tends to fall under the label of “foreign policy,” any more than you could trust anything cooked up as “domestic policy.”

Recognize that most of it is mere entertainment, a means to capture your attention by obsessions to things that you could never change. The system is herding us, and it’s an illusion that we can influence it beyond more than the most superficial features. For example, voting has been perverted, stood on its head to make you imagine you have a choice. No one gets on the ballot without being owned by the system. It was a lie almost from the first election. You don’t have any real choice; all you can do is be herded into giving consent to whatever the system allows.

Escape the addiction so you can see what indescribable peace God has for you.

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Encryption Back Doors Already There

Posted on November 25, 2015 by ehurst

Perhaps you are aware of this ongoing stupidity from the government. There’s no real debate, of course, just government figures ignoring the obvious. The motives may vary among themselves, but not a single one of them honestly serves your interest.

At any rate, the US government for one has been pushing for backdoors to encryption systems and software so that they can snoop at will. What they aren’t telling you is that it’s not just about snooping, but the authority to plant malware at their whim. Techies might tell you there is a difference between breaking encryption and breaking other kinds of security, but I assure you it’s all one package. The government admits to wanting a secret key that allows them to break encryption. They don’t admit to demanding the authority to plant malware, but they do it frequently enough for folks to notice and report on it. Keep your eye on encryption but never forget that the government is using this merely as a starting point for having complete access to monitor all computer activity.

But while this stupid government kvetching carries on, getting particularly loud when anything “bad” happens anywhere in the world (like the mass murders Paris), you have to know that the major private industries are complying without telling you. That is, they are going along with the government demands in secret. All this noise about resisting and trying to come up with systems to protect their customers is just noise — they are lying through their teeth. Not all of them in quite the same way at exactly the same time, but you can bet they want to keep their foot in the door on big government contracts, so they will find ways to give the government what it wants.

There is a network protocol most users don’t know about that has to do with issuing certificate numbers to certain players on the Internet. Those certificates are collected and cataloged and placed in computer operating systems and in browser packages so that when you visit a certain website, it can offer a certificate that your browser or operating system can recognize as valid. Then you can negotiate for a temporarily encrypted connected that excludes eavesdropping. That way you can do your banking, log into various other kinds of services, and feel comfortable that it will be safe and secure.

Awhile back, Lenovo caught hell from technicians because they were selling laptops with a certificate that went into the operating system itself, and it was issued by Lenovo on behalf of third party advertisers so that they could slip their ads into your browser even when it was supposed to be an encrypted connection. That’s because the ad certificate overrode the safeguards. This was darned near a criminal act.

Just recently, Dell was caught doing something equally stupid. No, it was even stupider. It took advantage of a weakness Google intentionally built into the ultimate standard of certificate security, and Google adamantly refuses to fix it. And while Dell is fixing their part of this stupid mistake, it comes with a second similar certificate blunder that Dell refuses to even talk about.

Granted, this Dell crap only works if you are running Windows, but the huge freaking doorway Google put into the certificate process itself touches everybody online. In effect, Google has created a permanent weakness so that anyone with the ability to plant a certificate on your computer can gain access to all your connected, encrypted or otherwise.

That includes every connection you might use to download stuff, like maybe even computer updates. Granted, most Open Source operating systems use a different system for protecting their updating process that doesn’t require using encryption certificates. And most Linux distributions are always discussing ways to make it even more secure, but I have zero confidence in the way Windows gets its updates. That’s where the government malware comes in. And if a frequently bumbling incompetent government agency can do it, what’s to keep other agencies from using that system?

It just keeps getting crazier.

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