Over the past month my ISP (Cox Cable) has been struggling with something in their email system and it has become somewhat unreliable. On top of this, my wife and I are moving the next couple of days and I’ll be using public wifi to connect much more than in the past. I’d like to ask that you dear readers please use one of my other addresses:
ehurst909@gmail.com
br073n@outlook.com
broken@unseen.is
God bless you all.
If your conscious focus is not in the heart-mind, none of this will make any sense at all.
In the previous post, I left you with the understanding that Zionism does its work in darkness. If Zionists act in full daylight, the world instinctively reacts with revulsion and denunciation. It’s not so much that the world is right, but that Zionism is so wrong. This reflects how Zionism is a tool of The Cult.
You and I are free to discuss our agenda and tactics in full public view. To most people we sound like nuts. But to the degree anyone begins to understand, they realize there is nothing humans can do to stop us. That’s because our entire focus is above this realm of existence. We eschew the choice made in the Fall; the decisions of our lives are made far above this world. Whatever makes sense on this fallen level is for us mere context, a collection of reference points against which we react with divine justice. Miracles are not a departure from reality, but a restoration of reality that has been twisted and perverted by fallen human reason and lusts. The greatest miracle of all is God breathing His Spirit into your dead spirit, and the second greatest miracle is the awakening of your heart consciousness.
Insofar as magic (as opposed to miracle) changes anything, it perverts and twists — it deceives, steals and destroys on some level. On the one hand, we realize that true mystical Christian believers are rather few in this world, particularly with the dominance of Western culture. On the other hand, those clinging to the dark mysticism are even fewer. They are wolves and we are shepherds. We can overpower them with great ease, but they are convinced they are winning because of their confusion. Their hearts are active, but perverted and dark. They believe that they are the only ones who understand the higher realm of heart-mind operations, though they are unlikely to use that kind of language.
The Cult participates in the Dark Mysticism. My reference to The Cult is simply a way of organizing what we can know about Satan’s work among humans. To the degree there is a religion that follows the Devil, The Cult is it. Granted, a great many people claim to be “Satanists” but virtually none of them step outside the Western frame of reference. Then again, we could say the same about the vast majority of Christians, too. Whether or not The Cult is a literal human organization doesn’t matter; it gives focus to how Satan has infiltrated everything throughout human history. Our Enemy’s work is fairly consistent and predictable, as is our defense against it.
When we walk in divine justice from the heart-mind, Satan is not permitted to do much to us. There are exceptions for reasons beyond us (see the Book of Job), but we generally evade the worst of human suffering one way or another. We start by not caring much about this fallen existence. In Revelation 12:11 we should discern that our deliverance was purchased at a cost we could hardly meet (the Blood of the Lamb), implemented through obedience to the Word of the Lamb, and which results in a focus on the realm of the heart, not of the flesh. The heart-realm or Moral Realm is a perceptual buffer zone or boundary layer, the level at which the Spirit Realm touches the Fallen Realm. The Realm of the Spirit touches us in the heart-mind, not in the flesh-mind.
So our focus is not in this world; this is just where we manifest truth from a higher plane. Satan is confined largely to operating in this realm of existence. The critical point here is that everything we value is out of Satan’s reach, and by extension, outside the reach of The Cult. Our tactics are primarily keeping ourselves on that higher focus, gradually bringing more and more of our conscious awareness and existence into harmony with God’s moral character.
If you organize it, The Cult will infiltrate it. They might use any number of proxy layers to do it, but I can assure you that if you give anything a name and a physical shape, The Cult is pulling strings there. The Cult managed to hijack Judaism, then Christianity, and eventually Islam, as well. It’s not hard to examine the activities of people who claim those religions and see evil at work. You will still see decent human beings, but to the degree that they subject themselves to their organization, they are morally compromised.
Were we to organize in the flesh, the strongest and safest path to follow is that of the covenant family — an expression of Ancient Near Eastern feudalism. While it’s not impervious, it is what God commanded and what He protects. It is the single most consistent way to organize human flesh in accordance with the way God made us and all Creation. To the degree we keep it close to God’s moral character, it will resist The Cult. But as a virtual parish online, we offer even less of a target than that. We aren’t organized at all; we are simply affiliated by some limited affinity. We don’t have to rely on any human to coordinate our activities. The members are supposed to avoid conforming to anything at all that a human mind could recognize. What holds us together is in the heart’s moral realm, invisible to the intellect. So, for example your membership in this virtual parish is not based on any defining factors at all, aside from your say so at any given moment: “I am a member.”
The true nature of spiritual and moral conflict in this world is not some kind of Manichaeism where the Dark Side is equal in power. The Dark Side holds some twisted weak grasp on real power and keeps trying to use it to change things that any human could understand of this realm of existence. They keep trying to sneak back into Eden without having to deal with the Flaming Sword. They aren’t confined to intellect, but their hearts are dark and confused; they don’t have a grasp on ultimate reality. If you reject revelation, that’s about as powerful as you can get. God permits Satan some pitiful authority to make stuff happen that most humans don’t comprehend, but it cannot do us any real harm (Exodus 7:10-13).
We cannot change anyone’s mind; God alone does that. Rather, we seek to bring our own minds into subjection of the heart-mind set on Christ.
(Note: Let’s do ourselves a favor and try to understand that Scripture doesn’t condemn everything that falls under the label of “pagan.” Westerners read a legalistic absolutism back into the fuzzy Hebrew reasoning about such things and completely miss the point. Paganism is simply misguided, and some pagan mythology does approach the truth. How you should react to it depends on the context and whether or how much it interferes with your divine mission. Need I state the obvious? Western Civilization is pagan, built on Greco-Roman pagan philosophy and Germanic pagan mythology. That means a great deal of Western Christianity is more pagan than Christian.)
So far I’ve managed to avoid painting a target on myself, in that I’ve not noticed any pressure from Zionists. If you’ve read much here at all, you know that I am no fan of the modern State of Israel, nor the political movement called Zionism. But it arises more from my opposition to the roots of Christian Zionism: Dispensational Theology.
I teach that Zionism arises from rejecting the actual Covenant of Moses and perverting it into something with only a superficial resemblance. There is ample historical evidence that Judaism is a blatant departure from Hebrew intellectual traditions, but arises from exposure to Hellenistic philosophy. Anyone with just a little education in such things can discern the radical departure from everything God gave them. I teach that God didn’t simply choose the Hebrew intellectual heritage, but designed and developed it Himself as the one valid frame of reference for understanding His Creation. We can easily trace the development of Hebrew thought, and just as easily trace how Jews abandoned it after Alexander the Great swept through, conquering and preaching Hellenism. It’s all on record. Judaism, and the resulting Zionist politics, are a blasphemous rejection of God’s revelation. Until the modern State of Israel goes back to the original Hebraic understanding of the Law of Moses, and embraces specifically how Jesus taught it, they are fighting God. That’s all we really have to understand about this, because only a fool would join their folly.
I don’t have to delve into the Holocaust or wild mythologies of how Jews run things. Have you seen some of the outrageous, cartoonish nonsense people splatter in forums and in comments to articles and blogs? I do contend we should act as if there is a shadowy group controlling things, but one that it is not specifically Jewish in nature. And I have taken the time to explore some of the ugly stuff hidden away in obscure teachings of the Talmud (a massive reading project) to make sure I understand the differences between Judaism and what The Cult does. I firmly believe you can’t criticize things you haven’t actually examined.
Most of all, I avoid any advocacy for activism. For example, I really discourage joining the BDS. Good moral action must first arise from your individual calling and mission in serving Christ. No other human on earth has any claim to deciding for you what that means. They can show you their own choices and make suggestions, but their authority ends with deciding whether or not to include you in their own mission. So while you might sympathize with the underlying idea of BDS, the people who press this idea are not God and cannot speak for Him about your choices.
Walking in Christ’s calling doesn’t necessarily defy human logic, but ignores it. Sure, we recognize how sensible some ideas may seem on lower layers of reasoning, but the moral logic of the heart cannot be formulated intellectually. The only thing your reason is really good for is organizing and implementing something from far above. We can’t even explain how to shift the focus of your consciousness above the intellectual level, only assert that it can and should be done. We call it “walking by faith, not by sight,” despite those words having been hijacked for something that isn’t really faith, but some kind of man-made religion.
Faith is that ineffable call from Heaven, the tug of the Spirit; religion is merely the human response to that indescribable longing. If you can write it in words, it can reflect faith, but it is only religion. If you can organize it in human activity, it’s only religion. But all the traditional forms of religious organization are distinctly contrary to Scripture.
Still, I have managed to attract little direct ire from Zionists or mainstream Christians. But I suppose I’m about as ready as can be when it does come. I’m not feeling threatened, so you can’t call it paranoia. Watching the trends, anyone can discern the growth pattern of the propaganda war. It seems to track closely the increasing militancy and unconscionable behavior of the State of Israel through her citizens and officials. All you have to do is read some of the earlier statements of Zionist hopes to realize they never intended to honor any of their promises to Gentiles. You can read that in the Talmud, in their obscure political palaver, and in their actions. The only time they back off at all is when waiting for a chance to try again when opposition has been restrained by some means. So we reasonably expect they will eventually try to silence every critic. Absolutism is a fundamental feature of this beast.
And it will fail, because God is not in it. That’s been my point all along. Everything about this flouts the clear Word of God. The only way any Christian can claim to see Scripture behind current political reality is to buy into the teaching of the Pharisees, and Judaism as it now exists is essentially some flavor of Pharisaism. So this is nothing more than one more human political empire-building exercise, working through a deeply flawed Western Civilization, and the whole thing is on the verge of collapse even now. Blaming all this evil on God is blasphemous, and He won’t let it stand much longer.
So I take the position of someone watching from a distance. At some point there won’t be room to back off very much and I’ll get splattered by the orgy of violence, maybe even killed by it. I feel like a sports reporter on the sidelines, hoping I can keep the broadcast entertaining without finding the action crashing down on me. Meanwhile, Israel tries to rewrite the rules of play to favor themselves. It doesn’t require any particular brilliance to realize that Israel will keep raising the ante until they get what they want or the whole world decides it can’t tolerate their insufferable chutzpah any longer. Who wants to bet the Zionists will win this game?
With all the crazy stuff going on in our world today, I know that my own divine calling requires I keep an eye on Israel. They keep testing the limits, but typically try to run a distraction operation so folks won’t notice until it’s too late to stop them. I can’t guess the tipping point, any more than I can guess who will take the lead and what portion of humanity it takes to do the job, but it’s human nature that there are boundaries that no one can cross. It’s highly contextual. We can probably suggest obvious examples of things they can’t get away with, but no single human can predict accurately the direction or degree they’ll go next. It’s that chaotic.
However, we can probably confine our reckoning to things we do know. I suspect it will be several things at once, but given the nature of my calling, I’m predicting something in the area of censorship and the Internet. My heart tells me to expect some new outrage that will evoke a propaganda backlash on the Net. Israel will try through her proxies to silence this virtual yelling and screaming and again go too far because the leadership will have reached the point of no return, so completely surrendered to the madness of the demons driving them. Delusion snowballs that way.
Whether and how it affects my virtual ministry really isn’t important. Instead of worrying about me, I hope you will extrapolate some of this into your own calling and mission. Someone very wisely noted that, had social networking existed in 1948, Israel would not. That is, Zionists would have failed in the glaring light of public notice of the evil they’ve done. They obviously want to push things back to the place where they can keep their actions hidden until it no longer matters. The frenzy will overtake them well before any possible success; that’s human nature. There’s nothing godly about their works.
Ref: Genesis 3:24; 2 Timothy 2:15 and Hebrews 4:12
Self-regard is one edge of the sword. I don’t take myself seriously in part because I don’t take fallen humanity seriously. Cynicism is a sword that works best when it cuts both ways, and even better when the sword is forge in the fires of God’s revelation. Then it becomes Holy Cynicism.
Jesus talked and thought in terms of compassion for the sheep; He spoke in terms of being their Shepherd. As any shepherd could tell you, the majority of the flocks seldom take an active interest in anything beyond the narrow range of things sheep do: eat and make more sheep. But in every flock there were always just a few sheep that acted like pets, cleaving to the shepherd with some affection. Such are humans. Most are herded here and there according to the Shepherd’s intended outcomes. So we have learned not to take seriously human politics in the sense that we are wholly cynical about the claimed intentions. Those few who really understand know better than to get lost in herd identity, because despite the limits of the parable, He promised some of us could become shepherds alongside Him.
The parabolic image of Shepherd and sheep only stretches just so far, but the resulting Holy Cynicism offers a very broad scope. Indeed, you see it everywhere you look. Our Sister Wildcucumber rightly noted in the comments to yesterday’s post about education being equivalent to torture that it was a dark teaching. It reflects the justified cynicism toward Western Civilization and all the resulting abuse such a culture heaps on humans. In some ways, we could suggest that micro-management is the trademark of the West. I was attempting to trace the biblical logic how people came to micro-management.
Just because we have some grasp of how things work doesn’t mean we have any justification for trying to exploit that knowledge. All the more so when our knowledge is based on utterly false assumptions about what makes things important. The Tree of Knowledge is a symbol for being one’s own god, deciding what is good and right in this world while cutting off all reference to the One who made this world. Frankly, the only reason I delve so deeply into such exercises of biblical logic is to expose deception and give you a chance to evaluate how you might change the path your mind takes in organizing and implementing your obedience to Our Creator. We can’t fix the insanity that characterizes our dark world of lies, but we can begin turning our steps toward the light.
Let me give a concrete example: I have written quite a few articles that were published in other places regarding the moral necessity of meeting the user’s needs in computer technology. You and I as computer users are caught between those who want to exploit our human frailty for profit and those who simply want to build their own egos. That is, commercial software is largely an attempt to capture the user for exploitation. So we say that if you use Windows, you are the product being sold to Microsoft’s business partners. Mass marketed software actually shapes the broad expectations of the consumer market by creating an environment where a wider range of human activity is simply ignored.
If you use Open Source, you are choosing to feed the egos of little godling geeks accountable to no one. Open Source is developer-centric. The developers explore all sorts of directions that nobody else can imagine wanting. Only rarely do Open Source ideas scratch a real itch that draws the consumer market by offering something people didn’t realize they really wanted. Instead, we have a chaotic mix of developers each insisting that their unique vision of computing nirvana is the only thing you should want. They want to micro-manage your computer use by forcing you to accept their divine output. How could you possibly want anything else? “I left that feature out because only idiots want to do that.”
Nobody is user-centric.
Of course, it’s not hard to explain this dilemma through Holy Cynicism: Merchants are all about human materialistic tendencies, both their own and that of others. They attempt to herd developers by offering decent pay for something developers genuinely love to do, but harnessed to merchant plans. Open Source takes away the merchant management but leaves the developers in charge, who as a class are so freaking twisted and abnormal that the resulting software is only slightly safer to use than commercial software, and at that only because it’s open to inspection. With marketers you at least have the leverage of being a consumer and if enough consumers are unhappy, the merchants will make adjustments. Open Source developers usually flip you the bird if they bother acknowledging you at all.
So if I tell you that the vast majority of computer users prefer a simple UI in tones of mostly gray and blue with rather squarish simulated 3D shapes, you aren’t surprised that commercial software tends to follow that trend. Nor are you surprised that Open Source does almost everything except follow that trend. Most Open Source developers are openly hostile to ordinary user sensibilities. By our good fortune, most projects do attract a few kind souls who attempt to ameliorate the hostility and their stuff is exceedingly popular, much to typical developer disgust. What makes one a talented developer requires a certain degree of perversion, particularly in their attitude of punishing ordinary users for being ordinary. There is some geek resentment that we exclude them from our social circles while using their talents. What makes someone fairly ordinary keeps him from having any interest in learning to develop software.
It’s just vaguely possible that some day a project will arise in the Open Source community that would seek to restore some leverage to typical users, but only when the mass of users are forced to switch to Open Source for some unforeseeable reason. Meanwhile, our best hope is the relative safety of merchants trying to market Open Source software; as you might expect, the Open Source purists generally hate those companies. You can never possibly get everything just the way you like it, but to the degree it matters to your divine calling, you’ll invest the energy to become more expert at choosing and making adjustments. Trust in God to fix things He said are not in your domain, and make the most of His blessings.
And it requires a little Holy Cynicism to see through the hyperbole of my characterizations, too. I’m trying to point out trends that most people wouldn’t notice because they keep thinking in terms of specifics. Again, there’s the Western tendency at self-deception in pursuit of concrete facts without the moral overview from revelation. But in the end, there’s really very little we can do to change those broad generalities. Because we are the sheep who prefer to hang close to the Shepherd out of a strong affection, we have to understand something of His thinking in order to avoid getting under foot. The whole point is that we consciously cooperate with His intent.
So we don’t take it as a personal affront when people act out of their fallen nature, any more than we should take offense when our flesh refuses for unknown reasons to go along with our convictions. Reflexes take some training, and that usually comes with a few painful failures. Don’t get all wound up if someone hates you, Jesus said, when the real problem is that they hated Him first (John 15:18).
This has nothing to do with whether you should run Windows on your PC or other device. I’m sharing these two items so that you’ll be aware and take appropriate action to maintain control over your computer, instead of letting someone else make all the important decisions for you.
1. Win10 Upgrade Becomes “Recommended Update” Next Year — In essence, you will have to fight to avoid an automated upgrade from Win7/8 to Win10. What happens is that MS moves the upgrade to the list of “Recommended Updates.” Virtually everyone I know has their computer set to automatically accept this class of update. If you don’t, you’ll get lots of complaints from Windows about reduced security and all that jazz. This crosses a thin line because they know this means the vast majority of folks running some other version of Windows can be hoodwinked into taking the upgrade. They claim you’ll have to choose to continue once the process starts, but I have to wonder if it will be obvious to most users, having been long conditioned to go along with everything that pops up like that.
At any rate, the remedy is to examine the settings for system updates in your Control Panel. For Win7, here is a good run-down. Please note the second image where you see a checkmark in the box “Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates” and uncheck that box. Now be ready every Patch Tuesday to have to pick through the recommended updates. (See what I mean about making it hard to say “No”?)
2. Win10 Abuses Your Bandwidth — It’s pretty cool when, on your office or corporate LAN, only one system has to download the updates from MS for your Win10 computers. The first one to get them will share those updates with all the others. I suppose that was the excuse, but what happens is that MS is using your bandwidth on the Internet itself, not on just your local network. Literally: Your Win10 computer is being used to save MS money by a default setting that makes your computer join a sort of torrent network and upload your updates to other computers randomly scattered around your region of the world. The link tells you how to fix this.
The Fall can be defined as usurping God’s throne in your own soul.
God is Creator, having woven into all Creation His moral character. To understand Creation at all is to understand first God’s moral character — AKA His divine justice. This obliges us to make a good faith effort to understand His character and justice through contemplation of His revealed Law Covenants. All truth is personal; acquaintance with the Person of God is acquaintance with ultimate reality. The point behind the Fall narrative is that we understand we are not naturally inclined to give a rat’s butt for what God says, and by nature are blind to His justice. More, we are arrogantly inclined to resist His revelation.
Human reason is inherently arrogant while self-deceived. Our minds are wired to claim some objective reasoning and logic, when in reality it is simply self-will. And because we are not internally integrated in our fallen state, we can pretend our logic is something external to us because following that kind of reasoning tends to disappoint our grosser lusts. So we have enthroned our reason as the ultimate dictator in deciding what is good, right and moral. It comes from within, but we project it externally as our true god. Yet we find a great many different people pressing their own conflicting logical answers, and mutually excluding the very reasonable logic of others if the answers don’t please. “That makes no sense because it doesn’t meet the tests of my personal logic.” Everyone ignores how they are committed to something less than logical.
So long as we remain in the fallen state, the only alternative to reason is emotional desire and mere human sentiment. The intellect is inherently unable to rise above itself, so it cannot reason it’s way to a higher understanding. God’s truth is not within reach of the mind. Anything that doesn’t meet the tests of logic is rejected as something less than reason. God is excluded because His demands are most certainly unreasonable.
God in His revelation makes it plain that He alone can solve this intractable problem. He promises to plant His own Person in our souls, but only on the condition that we enthrone His Presence and force our minds to accept the role of servant. The mind is violently opposed to this demotion, so it requires a power greater than anything inside of us. We note that a great many people struggle with the most basic level of surrender. Whole swathes of Christianity insist that faith must meet the tests of logic. Believers evince a fear that they will be rejected by non-believers, not taken seriously, as if it were their personal responsibility to sell the gospel logically. It’s an attempt to manipulate people into a false faith. This is folly.
To fully appreciate anything we see around us requires that we examine it through eyes of faith. It also requires I take a moment to explain the meaning of that popular religious phrase, because eyes of faith are not eyes of reason or tradition, but eyes of some far higher capability that arise from God’s Presence in the soul. It is not merely a better informed logic, or a higher level of reason, but something entirely beyond logic and reason. It requires seeing the world in light of revelation, a much higher realm of thinking and understanding.
Reason asserts that because we can discern some elements of how people are guided in their decisions, then it must be a simple matter of adjusting those elements. But instead of a godly partnership with the person who needs adjustment, we seek ways to force those changes outside their cooperative will. Faith does not deny that humans are vulnerable to a certain amount of manipulation. It is a false trust in reason to assume we can resist on logic alone, even as we use logic to overcome free will. We deny that there could be a higher faculty above intellect, but revelation is how we understand by faith that without faith, we have no resistance to well-crafted manipulation.
This is how we come to the unspeakable evils of oppression, torture, and senseless slaughter. It turns the whole realm of moral consideration on its head; it is the very definition of perversion. This is why we can justly assert current Western education is from Hell. It bears almost no resemblance to what God intended and commanded in His revelation. It presumes to control a host of things inside the child that God said He alone must rule. Western education is inherently anti-God, as are most Western attempts to guide human behavior.
Western psychology presumes to muck about in God’s territory. While it is possible to use some portions of research into human behavior, it requires going back and reexamining everything from a wholly different orientation. The facts must be reordered by a divine purpose. It requires first and foremost embracing the revelation of God in terms of what He requires of people who lead and guide others, and forcefully rejecting all the intrusive and sick attempts to shape humans on some fundamental psychic level. We are not gods, able to so thoroughly understand human nature that we can usurp God’s designs and reshape people into our own image of perfection.
You cannot hope to please God when you rule out from the beginning everything He said He requires of us.
Attributed to Asaph, it could as easily be simply someone from his clan who wrote this. We do well to remind ourselves that the Hebrew culture saw no reason to be quite so precise about such things. Nor should we forget that there is an honored place for hyperbole in Hebrew poetry. It had long been acceptable in courtly protocols as a form or artistic expression, carrying none of the moral stain it holds in Western culture.
Even if we choose to read into this psalm a literal historical context that matches the imagery, we would still miss the point. This could have been a prophetic word long before any actual event matching the descriptions, but it’s more important to recognize the symbolism of how it feels when God allows things to happen in life that we don’t understand, or that we didn’t expect. We have ample record that God still responds favorably if only some tiny few among His people cry out for deliverance, so even if the sorrow is justified, God commands us to call on His name.
In the first line, the word typically translated “forever” carries the connotation of some far distant point or the idea of something constant or perpetual. Thus, it could as easily be “to the uttermost.” The second line is even more picturesque, with anger smoldering against helpless sheep. The psalmist calls to mind God’s heavy investment in choosing Israel. Then he describes a scene of shocking devastation and defilement in the Temple. Does God not Himself feel fouled by this gross insult to His reputation? Was it truly His plan that every shrine to His name be removed from the Land?
Worse, it seems God is silent, offering no explanation through the normal means of prophets and other recognizable signs. How can God be silent in face of such blasphemy? The writer renews his call on God to act, for there is no doubt who holds the real authority here. This is Jehovah, God of the Exodus. He fed His people on the carcass of Egypt (symbolized by beasts). With one hand He flooded the land and with the other divided the flood. He is the Creator who made all things.
No one denies that His people have failed Him, but are they truly now His enemy? The psalmist paints Israel as helpless and precious to Him. While His people do fall into sin, who else can bear His name to the nations? Restore Your honor, O Lord!
For the record: I am willing to work for free for anyone or any agency that needs help installing and learning how to use Linux on the desktop, laptops, or as workstations in general. All the more so if you discover a need to migrate from Windows to Linux. Hint: Unless you want to purchase commercial support (in which case you won’t need my help) you don’t have to pay anything at all for Linux software.
Naturally I cannot guarantee it will work with all hardware, any more than some versions of Windows. What I can guarantee is that if it works on your hardware, I can take you far enough down the road to using it that you and your agency can become self-sufficient. And I can assure you that Linux is more likely to work quite well on older hardware no longer supported by current versions of Windows. Further, we can probably allow you to run your WinXP stuff (or older) on your Linux machines.
And while I do have some limited experience with various networking services, I am not a Linux network technician. I’m willing to bet we could find someone to volunteer their expertise on that, but my point is that if you can take care of the travel and basic life support while I’m doing the work, you don’t have to pay me any wages or fees. Even if it means Spartan military-grade transportation and barely adequate life support, chances are we can make it happen.
Check out my free instructional books on the subject:
Geoff stirred and stuck his head down inside the sleeping bag. Turning his left wrist, he pressed the light button on the watch with his right thumb. Just a few minutes before 0200 hours and he almost chuckled at how at least one part of his aging body had already synchronized with the local time zone. Freeing his right arm from the sleeping bag, he reached for the large-mouthed empty bottle he kept under his cot for such cases. No need to leave a warm sleeping bag for such things.
Others were apparently poorly prepared for such Spartan living conditions. Somewhere in the distance was the faint sound of retching and moaning, almost taken away by the moderate winds blowing over the tent. One of the last things he had done before night fell was wander around the area collecting rocks to hold down the windward side of the tent skirting. Apparently it was enough, because there was no significant draught. More importantly, no one in this tent was affected by what brought at least one man so much misery in one of the other two tents.
Geoff had been watching out the window of the Chinook in the glow of early dawn as they passed over this little draw on the way to the LZ. After the choppers touched down, the men exited the tail ramps, clinging to the loose ends of their carry-on baggage against the artificial tornado of the still spinning tail rotors. Prominent in his mind as Geoff trudged with the others toward the edge of the village while the chopper crews pushed out the heavy cargo pallets was what had occupied that little draw their chief indicated as their new home: goats. There were a couple of stone-walled pens at the bottom of the draw.
There were two different teams on the choppers with their gear. This village was chosen because it was far enough from the operations areas that they would have plenty of lead time if the order came to bug out. Not because everyone was expecting to stay here that long, but because the larger team was there to build a fleet depot for supply trucks, and eventually to construct an airstrip in the valley below. They were rowdy and rude. Geoff was on the team that would stay only long enough to set up communications, to include generators. Most of them were some kind of geek, and suffered some measure of abuse from the construction guys. As the choppers lifted off and the men began unpacking their pallets, another chopper came in low from the opposite direction and disgorged a couple dozen troops. Geoff snorted and mumbled something about advance-party security.
However, the troops were sharp enough to quickly secure the draw with the goat pens and palaver with the older men from the village about some kind of compensation for the losses. This was supposed to have been pre-arranged, Geoff had heard, but that didn’t stop the locals from whining to improve their payoff. Apparently this was so common that troop leaders actually carried extra cash for it.
As the other team began aggressively laying claim to the choice siting for tents within the existing stone enclosures, Geoff held a hasty conference with his team chief. Pointing to a large rock ledge half-way up the northern ridge, he convinced his boss that they were better off erecting their quonset-hut tent there.
Geoff didn’t like the idea that military contractors and troops were so brutal about evicting folks from favorable spots like this draw, but he was far more worried about something else. Though not exactly a country boy, Geoff had been around domestic herd animals enough to remember the peculiar stink that clung to any place occupied by goats. These were not the same breed as the critters common in his home state; still, Geoff had never encountered goats that didn’t have some version of that stink, especially when they were clustered together in a small space. The weather was cool this time of year up in these mountains, so those tents were heated. The loosely packed sand left from removing the stones to make the pens would be warmed after a few hours, especially around the heaters. Warm air rises along with whatever smells it carries, and then runs back down along the tent walls where cots were placed. The communications team had been careful to sweep all loose material off the flat stone surface off their tent site.
Geoff replayed all of that in his mind as he lay in his sleeping bag. More of the construction crewmen were awake now, as their grousing occasionally drifted up against the wind. For all the noise, he managed to drift back off to sleep with a faint smile on his lips.
While there are fundamental differences, in some ways we can draw parallels between virtual and meat space. Being healthy equates to having a device capable of connecting and providing the type and degree of access desired by the user. It includes keeping the device and data under the user’s control, however much the user wants it (I fold together with data the control over transmission or “free exchange”). At a more fundamental level, the user and his device are able to assume the status of an equal node on the network.
Violence is just about anything that interferes with that, whether intended or not. Warfare is, by extension, violence on a wider scale, particularly between various identifiable entities. Here is where it gets difficult, because a great many political entities in meat space falsely imagine that it’s all the same on the Net. It’s not that users connected to the Net cannot operate as a community based on their meat space identities, but that virtual communities are not confined to just that. Any sense of community and affiliation forms the basis for a “political entity” in virtual terms.
Furthermore, while data is never truly forgotten on the Net, the human identity behind any virtual entity is forever in flux. An entity composed of network nodes is never more nor less than what it is at the moment of consideration. Human minds without proper training struggle with that concept. The network is self-aware in the sense of combined user awareness, but that amounts to what it is only at the moment of inspection. The moment you ask the question, the answer changes before you get it back. Every node that constitutes the network is free to cease existing, or to come back into existence, at will. It’s hard to get your head around that.
Humans capable of adapting to virtual reality have an advantage over users with less of that awareness. While the devices remain theoretically equal, the capabilities of the users constitutes a very real meritocracy. In the middle space between the bare network device reality and the human operators is another kind of quasi-meritocracy of software. In terms of capability, some software is distinctly better than others on the Net, though it largely reflects human capability in terms of design and implementation.
In virtual warfare, a better machine is a better gun. Better software is better ammunition. A better soldier using them is pretty much the same anywhere: part training plus experience and part talent. And espionage is exploiting weaknesses in any defense system.
One could be more pedantic about the analogies, but I think you get the idea. It provides a background for understanding the importance of this article on Tech Dirt. Regardless of meat space identities, the non-state computer security researchers are a virtual army. Those with some measure of loyalty to the users as a whole are de facto the enemy of state-sponsored spying agencies. The various government agencies are indistinguishable from criminals in this respect, because they seek opportunities to commit violence as I defined it above — seizing control of data and device from the nominal owner (user).
That there is also a meat space component of this war, with very real threats to life and limb, doesn’t change the picture much. To the degree any state manages to protect any user, it is purely by accident. Anyone paying attention can see that states consistently demonstrate their lack of concern for those who pay their salaries in meat space. The real interest of the user is control over device and data. Anyone supporting that end is the user’s true ally. It has nothing to do with official declarations in meat space, but actual effect on the Net.
Our challenge is that actual control over this issue remains rooted in meat space politics. The likes of NSA might understand some of this the same way, but have no intention of helping us ordinary users, despite their official mission statement requiring that. Even in meat space the state has no interest in the wishes of those governed and actively seeks to extend the same kind of oppression into virtual space. For now, we have still have some choices.
Make no mistake: The spiritual forces of Darkness have an interest in this, too. The definitions of divine justice are a little harder to explain for virtual space, but Our Creator is at work here.
At a minimum, if you use Windows, consider paying for your AV protection. The moment I make a specific recommendation of one vendor or another, things could change, since we are talking about commercial operations run by humans. Some are better at marketing than others, which includes deception. For example, I highly recommend you not trust McAfee, Norton or Trend Micro, but only because of their reputation from previous decades is wholly unconnected to their current shoddy products. They may have well gotten the message in recent months, but I don’t trust them on the human level, having struggled myself against the damage they did to my tech support clients. So I’ll just say you can test the free versions of almost any other vendor and pay for the one you like best. Virtually all of them have security researchers on staff who merit your support. A much bigger issue is customer support and the user’s perception of usability.
Otherwise, invest time and effort in learning something a little harder to crack. It really depends on your temperament and use pattern, so I can’t summarize that here. Anyone who checks previous posts using the search box on this blog can discern my preferences, but you aren’t me. More important is that you sensibly assess how important computer use is to your divine calling and mission, and act accordingly. Think and pray before you act.
