Cursing and Blessing

Posted on October 13, 2015 by ehurst

The image of the evil witch stirring a foul-smelling cauldron and uttering dark curses on a stormy night is entirely Western and entirely absent from Scripture.

The foundation of all things in the Bible is recognizing the moral fabric of Creation. If we embrace Jehovah (by that name or any other name you prefer) as Creator and God Almighty, then it stands to reason His creation would bear the imprint of His moral character. His revelation insists that Creation is a living thing, eagerly desiring His truth be revealed. That “truth,” insofar as anyone could explain it, is His moral character. His Son Jesus Christ was the clearest expression of that truth and character, so our task is to understand Jesus the man.

I warn you that all the Western hagiography and sacerdotal human-centered bullshit about Him and His time in the flesh is not from God. Our only hope to get a clear view of God is to sweep away the entire range of Western Civilization and start back in the ancient Hebrew people fresh from the Wilderness Wandering. Only rarely did they have a better grasp of God’s character and revelation than they did at the start of the Conquest (think about Jericho) and at a few other moments during their history before God handed them over to the Gentiles. We cannot understand Jesus until we understand the vast difference in intellectual assumptions between our world today and His people at their best.

What I share with you is not at all new; I learned it from people far smarter and better educated. I’m just offering a small sample distilled from years of study. I’m just a messenger boy and you don’t have to take my word for it; I invite you to go and see for yourself.

What I saw in that ancient world is that we should realize we have an option to join ourselves with God’s Creation and embrace His moral character, or we can be morally blind and try to figure things out with our pitiful human talents. As you might expect, most of the world, including virtually every part of organized Christianity, has chosen the latter path. Ask any church member if they know much about the sensory heart and how seriously the Hebrew people took the idea that your heart had its own “mind” well above the brain’s intellect. The Bible is loaded with references to the heart as having its own awareness and logical processes, but most Westerners blow it off as figurative language. God gave us a heart-mind because that is the only way we can perceive His character and our place in the moral fabric of Creation. He does not speak to the intellect, so all those miracles and messages of God are impossible without letting your heart rule your mind. You cannot know God with your mind, but your mind can be trained to organize and implement His will by letting the heart rule.

Thus, with a heart primed to lead your consciousness in obedience to His moral character, you are ready to discover where He intends you to be at any given moment. That is, you will “confess” His truth before a watching Creation (which is far bigger than our cosmos). That old word we stole from Latin — “confess” — means to stand alongside someone in a public demonstration of support for whatever they assert and do. To “confess” Christ is to echo His message from our hearts.

When we “confess” the truth of God, Creation itself moves to respond with positive support, including us in its own blessed obedience to His character. That’s what that shalom stuff was all about in the Old Testament. The Covenant of Moses was a specific application of the universal divine justice, binding on that people, in that context, in that land. Needless to say, they abrogated that covenant. How do we know? Because the covenant itself offered explanations of how to reap the blessings and how to provoke the curses inherent in God’s character in Creation.

Even if you failed to drag your resisting flesh into full obedience, there was plenty of room for repentance if you truly wanted to please God. If my heart tells me that some action or statement is consistent with God’s character, I am duty-bound to “confess” that word or action. If my heart tells me that some word or action is contrary to His character, then I must denounce that thing, and thus “confess” the truth of God.

By doing so, it is not my power over these things that matters. I’m only exercising the moral dominion God has given me over my own existence. Rather, I am “confessing” the truth as best I can and making sure Creation knows my stance. In that sense, I can “bless” or “curse” anyone and anything and share in the blessing or curse based on the moral accuracy of my confession. You’ll notice I said nothing about orthodoxy — literally “right thinking.” It’s not a question that the mind can judge, nor can any human mind formulate some mythical “propositional truth” that binds others. It is a matter of my own conscience and convictions before God.

So, for example I warn you today the Yes Communities is accursed. I am so utterly certain of this that I am making a strong effort to sell this mobile home in which I live because God has not put me in a place to move it. So as far as I am concerned, it can stay here or someone else can come and take it away, but my obedience to the truth-leading of my heart is to fulfill my moral obligations with all haste and get myself out of here. This is my confession that God will no longer restrain natural and supernatural harm to this place, in particular as it applies to me. I can’t count how often disasters passed all around us without hitting this place, but those days are gone. In order to avoid falling in the hands of Satan, I have to get out of here.

I can tell other folks that this park is accursed (and any other properties Yes manages), but it’s up to God to convince them. Otherwise, it’s either not true for them or it simply won’t make any difference to them in the first place. The point is not some mysterious power in my words, but the very limited power I have to align myself with God’s truth for me. While it’s possible I am the only person under threat of a curse for staying here, my heart tells me Yes Communities itself is doomed, wholly delivered over to Satan for his dark purposes. All I can do is play messenger boy and pronounce a curse on this place.

I’m not “casting a spell” on anything, just telling the story of my heart.

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The Real Normal

Posted on October 12, 2015 by ehurst

Revelation is inherently symbolic, non-literal parables.

Do you suppose there might be a reason God’s first revelation to fallen mankind was to assert the truth of The Fall? That’s what that business of the Flaming Sword was about at the entrance to Eden. Whatever it is you imagine Eden might be, you can still get there, but not without passing that Flaming Sword. It deters only those unwilling to forsake this life and embrace the Spirit Realm.

But the initial redemptive outreach of God was His moral law. The biblical narrative seems to assume we really have no use for the specific details of life back then, so it tosses out symbols and characters to establish a narrative matrix on which to hang our limited human grasp of something so very far about us. In essence, God said He would open the way to redemption and restoration, but on His terms as Creator. You have to act as if those wild stories are at least symbolically accurate.

In the New Testament, we learn that you have to come through God’s divine Living Law. Not some written covenant, which can only give some simulacrum of what His Law looks like in certain contexts, but His Son Jesus Christ as the Living Law. Jesus is the Law. When you understand Jesus the Man of men, you understand the revelation all the way back to that Flaming Sword. As my regular readers know, that means you have to know at least something of the Hebrew intellectual and cultural background, because that’s who Jesus was and is. That background was designed by God to reflect how humans are designed to think and operate.

And of course Jesus’ followers were told to study that Covenant of Moses and all the included narrative that is more or less today’s Old Testament. You further have to study it in its own context; you cannot pretend to extract verbal principles that apply universally for the brain’s convenience. You have study them as something that lives and breathes inside of you. You cannot build an intellectual and logical abstraction of divine justice in your head; you must build a moral abstraction in your heart-mind.

In summary, laying hold of God’s grace requires you first pass through His Law. We offer His grace to all around us, but if folks cannot recognize grace, we have to show them the mercy of the Law. We have to let them taste the moral boundaries whether or not they can make sense of them. We have to act in this world according to His divine character, and the Law is as much of His character as the fallen soul can grasp. Indeed, it’s a bit too much, but that’s the whole point. The demands of the Law are the demands of the entire cosmos on human behavior. If people won’t embrace the grace God has given you, then you must handle them according to the Law. Their understanding, or lack of it, is between them and God. We aren’t called to be efficient, but faithful.

All this Westernized bullshit about being “nice Christians” is a perversion, a blasphemous insult to God. You cannot discern God by the prevailing cultural orthodoxy.

In the heat of the moment, you heart knows, even when your mind is lost and dragged along by the heels. It is a good thing to spend time in contemplation every time a feeling arises — anger, fear, sadness, happiness, etc. — to discern its cause. At first you’ll be hesitant as you accept a temporary understanding that changes with more time and exposure to the wisdom of your heart. The mind is a truculent rebellious thing that is loath to learn subjection to the heart. Still, there comes a point when you are confident enough to act and willingly accept the consequences. You can’t hide out in the monastery forever. The whole point is that you take your broken vessel into a world of even more badly broken vessels and splash some truth around. Some of it by intention, but plenty of it will leak out despite your mind’s preoccupations.

Our goal is to make more of our lives a matter of conscious obedience to the moral imperatives in the heart. It’s a lot more fun that way. It means rejecting forcefully every part of Western cultural orthodoxy and building a fresh living understanding of the ancient ways of God’s people. Yes, there are always mitigations due to contextual variations, but your heart always knows what to do to please God. Always.

Revelation is you living by your heart, you as God’s parable among many, to symbolize His call to all that they become yet another parable themselves.

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The Lie of Normal

Posted on October 12, 2015 by ehurst

Sometimes I almost despair of explaining how radically different is the postmodern Western worldview versus that of the ancient Hebrew. We have two millennia of Christian history built on lies-in-effect because the words of Scripture are read through hostile alien eyes. The writings of the Early Church Fathers gives evidence that they had already ceased using their hearts to guide their minds. They succumbed to the lie that it was necessary to adopt whatever was the secular mindset in order to spread the gospel message.

The initial pressure for this came from the Judaizers, a manipulative trick to sidetrack true faith from the heart. Over the centuries more secularizing influences washed over the organized churches and by the time the leadership was confronted with the invading hordes of Germanic tribes, they simply made one more intellectual shift to accommodate an alien worldview that became the foundation of Western Christianity.

They had all forgotten what Paul had written about how God does the convicting and changing of hearts, that God alone can awaken spiritual awareness. The doctrine of our fallen nature was so thoroughly watered down that the Church leadership openly taught that the human intellect was not fallen, a flat contradiction to Scripture. The same burning desire for political power drove them to insist that faith could not be individual, but must fall under the control of religious leadership. The entire range of understanding of the Spirit Realm became superstitious woo-woo, a superstition the church adamantly embraced as a powerless orthodoxy.

While they used the same wording, the Church flatly denied the very real power of the heart-mind and its very real connection to the Moral Realm of revelation. The Western Church talks about heart-religion but had disemboweled its meaning and power long before it even became organized enough to publish the canon of Scripture.

Thus, any discussion of what constitutes a “normal Christian life” is so deeply stained with falsehood that we dare not accept any part of it. Rather, we are forced to rebuild the whole thing from our own individual heart-mind contemplation.

For example, when I tell you that you are obliged by the gospel to defend your dominion, you should naturally know that it encompasses the whole range of human possibilities. There is no one proper and orthodox response to a human intrusion into your divine calling. Your heart knows if you will listen, but it could be anything between silent resignation to active violent resistance. To exclude the latter end is a peculiar Western perversion that takes the teachings of Jesus out of their historical and moral context. Jesus the man would Himself reject the notion of “propositional truth” because it was alien to the assumptions behind Scripture itself.

To assert that physical violence itself is a sin amounts to slapping God in the face. We can surely assert with confidence that most human physical violence is wrong, but not because of the action itself, but the sinful motives. This whole debate comes in the same package that labels God’s Old Testament character as primitive an barbaric, as if our Western Civilization with all its prissy hypocrisy is somehow what God actually meant to create in the first place.

The real answer is that we refuse to engage in physical violence when it is inconsistent with His revelation. It’s a damned lie to insist that all violence is wrong. It would be more accurate to say that “most violence is wrong.” That’s because it’s not our default in broad terms, nor was it the default in the Old Testament. But to assert that the people of God did not actually know Him is beyond insane. To assert that He could not possibly command Israel to engage in what we now call “genocide” is also passing judgment on God Himself. Western Man, get over yourself.

As we seek to restore the God of Creation and the Father of Jesus Christ to our lives, it is not inherently evil to yell angrily at someone who goes too far in promoting evil. If your mind is not open to letting the heart choose that as an unpleasant option, then you are denying God and His revelation. People keep forgetting that Jesus cracked that whip in the Temple. They keep trying to explain that away. The Bible differentiates between a noble and just defense and violence as an evil reflex. We can’t use it for the same political ends as secular human culture, but we must follow the example of Our Savior in resisting — even if only symbolically — blasphemy. We always hold our redemption, but only on God’s terms.

Stop redefining God by the prevailing secular culture and get to know Him as a Person through the sensory heart. Don’t let your intellect rule, because that is the Fall in itself. Be cautions but not fearful. Accept the consequences because faithfulness starts with obeying your heart. We must dismiss the notion of making a heaven on earth, and seek to redeem each moment by pointing to things in a higher realm. Not some airy-fairy imaginary realm, but the Ultimate Reality that is more real than this world. Your heart is the only part of your consciousness capable of touching that Ultimate Reality.

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Anger: Ephesians 4:26

Posted on October 11, 2015 by ehurst

“Be angry and do not sin;” do not let the sun go down on your wrath. (Ephesians 4:26 NKJV)

Context: Paul quotes from Psalm 4:4, but we would not consider it a direct quote. The Hebrew passage from David paints a somewhat different image. Most translations have it that the Psalm says you should “tremble” with deep emotion at the majesty of God, and then lie quietly on your bed and contemplate what your heart can tell you about the deep things of God. The word translated “tremble” is ambiguous, sweeping in a whole range of human emotion that might cause you to shake or twitch.

Paul’s use of that text is consistent with the way Hebrew language in general, and revelation in particular, as supposed to work. It’s not easy for us to absorb something that seems so imprecise regarding divine revelation. However, that is precisely how divine revelation is. The whole point is to see with your heart the divine character of God and learn how He manifests His glory in differing contexts.

At the time Paul writes, the church body in Ephesus was some major part Jewish, but with a cosmopolitan mixture of Gentiles. As always, too many of the Jewish members were struggling to break free of Judaism and the Gentiles were fighting their heathen backgrounds. People in both groups would easily forget what they were fighting and fight each other, instead. This is the same book where Paul notes that we are not warring against flesh and blood, but demons who are using people (6:12). So there are two major problems Paul addresses in this letter: the infighting between Jew and Gentile, and the actual fight against the deeply mistaken understanding that both backgrounds left in their minds. Clean out your mental habits and let your heart rule.

The paragraph in which the above verse falls starts in verse 25. The preceding paragraph starts in verse 17. We discern that Paul is addressing the Gentiles most directly here. He encourages these members to leave behind the old heathen ways and most English translations are quite inspiring to us today. Because their “Bible” in those days was the Old Testament, and the Psalms were quite popular, Paul was pretty sure they would recognize his quotation without specific citation of the source.

I don’t agree with how the NKJV translators set their interpretive punctuation in the above verse. I contend that the whole verse is a quote, but not slavishly word for word. A Jewish mind would be more precise, but an Ancient Hebrew mind wouldn’t think it mattered. This is restating the same general moral doctrine in a different context. It’s what the ancients would call “targum” — not a literal translation, but giving the sense of things in the context.

God doesn’t reveal intellectual principles. The concept of “propositional truth” is foreign to the Hebrew intellectual background. It arises from the legalistic perversions of the Hellenized Jewish rabbis. God reveals His Person in the sense of His character as a divine Sheikh, an Ancient Near Eastern feudal lord. We are either some kin to Him or we are servants and slaves brought into the household. We can be adopted into His inheritance or remain outsiders. Such is the human condition in this Fallen Realm. Needless to say, this results in a highly subjective cast to revelation. We each must earnestly and honestly make the most of what we can grasp with our limited human minds. No one of us can really know Him because it is not possible to be Him. Only His Son can make that claim, and He was the final living revelation of the Father. He was not a bundle of “propositions” walking around in Hebrew sandals, nor was His teaching mere cerebral concepts.

So Paul teased out one of the implications from Psalm 4:4 as it applied in particular to the Gentile believers in Ephesus. In the wider context of Hebrew Scripture and Hebrew culture, anger was just a powerful tool that could be used or abused, like anything else in human nature. It’s a modern Western myth that anger is itself a sin. The Old Testament God is the same Father of Christ, and if His anger made Jesus crack the whip in the Court of Gentiles, we are obliged to understand that anger has its place. Fallen nature can abuse that tool, but you are obliged to learn the difference between spite and cleansing the Temple.

Either way, Paul restates David’s admonition to stop and consider the meaning of how you got that deep emotion. Making it a habit to analyze your own anger and what caused it will help you sift out when anger is calling for sin and when it calls for divine justice. Don’t be afraid to act on your anger. People will get hurt (as with the vendors in the Temple), but God can use your anger to accomplish His glory when you harness it to His character. Your heart-mind knows, so put yourself in a position to test your fleshly brain against the convictions written by God in your heart. Don’t let anger fester in the hidden recesses of your emotions. Pull it out and subject it to the light of glory.

Whatever you do, stop reading the ambient culture of this damned Western social mythology back into the Bible.

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Psalm 71

Posted on October 10, 2015 by ehurst

It seems rather obvious from David’s choice of words that he wrote this rather late in his reign. On the other hand, he hardly offers any clues to the experience that provoked this soulful song.

Ever the proper feudal servant of God, David observes protocol in first declaring that he has always taken refuge in God. This is the God who is entirely able to see to it David has no reason to regret that trust. Let the Lord continue acting according to His own character in redeeming those who call on His name. God is like a mighty fortress and His revealed Word has the power to save. David can’t remember a time when he did not trust God. This is the same God who breathed David’s first breath of life into his body.

David’s life was legendary before he even got old, and he was aware of the adulation that often came with just being a man who walked in the power of the Lord. So David makes a point of passing the glory to the One who made his life possible. Let them praise the God of David more than David, as David himself intends to do.

And as his flesh begins to fail him due to aging, God is all the strength he needs. Even now David cannot simply grow old and die in peace, because the same plotting and scheming that followed him his whole life has not given up on taking him down. Let them know that God has not deserted David. May He shame them for His own name’s sake.

For David has never been disappointed with God’s plans for him. So David commits his last few remaining days and the breath yet in him to praising and glorifying God. From his youth to his current gray-headed age, David always felt the task of praise and thanks was as yet unfinished. He goes off on a lilting time of worship, declaring how God has always covered him from harm and carried him through every sorrow. David urges his stiffening hands to play the harp in praise yet one more time. He urges his voice to bear the load of divine glory again. The days are not long enough to complete his sense of duty to God’s praise.

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Prayer Request: I Gotta Move (Updated)

Posted on October 10, 2015 by ehurst

I won’t bore you with the details, but I got really angry today and yelled at some of the employees of the trailer park where I live. The new manager has pissed off just about every one and I honestly sense this signals the end of God’s hedge around this place. So I need to find another place to live because I cannot come to terms with their abusive treatment of residents.

And for the first time in my life, I have zero sense of guilt about being angry. You need to understand just how earth-shattering incredible that is. I’m not violent and have no intention of doing actual harm, but at this point my heart refuses to feel any pity at all for the folks who work here.

I’m quite willing to face whatever consequences come with the yelling I did. Something inside of me insists it’s going to be okay, that God will carry me through this, but I want other folks to know this signals to me that the world really has gone crazy.

Update: The primary issue as we see it is getting out from under the contract and mortgage on the trailer. We are willing to take a loss, but I can’t see much good coming from simply defaulting.

If you were to look over the Facebook page for Yes Communities, you would gain insight into just how hideous this company is. Employees last just long enough to be fired before they get their promotions, managers are changed and moved around almost monthly, all services have been cut back and rents are soaring, they lie about almost anything and everything, etc. In other words, it sounds like what has been happening here.

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Racism and Mythology

Posted on October 10, 2015 by ehurst

I suppose my regular readers, particularly those who live a heart-led existence, already understand this. All I’m doing is offering some cerebral support for manifest moral truth. For anyone else, I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to help except to assert what we believe and let God use our words for His purpose.

Whenever you read or hear words castigating someone or something as “racist,” you can figure out what folks are up to in terms of seeking to oppressively coerce others into some repulsive and immoral course of action. In other words, it’s rare when the word “racism” appears outside of propaganda. Sometimes I’ll mock the propaganda by using that label on something the SJWs want to protect. Feel free to label my rants as “propaganda” because I’m just as racist as you are.

It’s pretty tough to talk about what God intended us to be prior to the Fall. Anything we might say about it is of necessity parabolic in nature. Genuine moral truth is always expressed in parables, so even if I attempt clinical terminology and description, I can’t avoid using symbolic logic. Human language and cerebral process cannot contain the truth, only respond by embracing or rejecting that truth. But we are left mostly discussing God’s revelation in terms of fallen human nature, because that’s where we are now.

We are hard-wired to be racist. Fighting that is not redemptive because it simply is not possible nor is it God’s will to pretend we can remove racist wiring. It’s just about as goofy as claiming we can remove the impulse to have sex; it operates on that same level of fleshly impulses God put there. It’s how we handle that impulse that can be sinful or redemptive. Redemption is subjecting the perfectly normal human appetites to a structure defined by God in His Word. We channel those things to bring His name glory.

Whatever human impulse lies behind what folks today call “racism” is properly channeled in tribal social structure, God’s design for human society after the Fall. If we aren’t living in a tribal social atmosphere, we cannot claim to fulfill the Word of God. All the bullshit about how bad it is to live that way draws pictures of failed examples, and flatly ignores the vast ocean of good implementations in human history. It’s part of the same truculent and egregious stupidity that decries slavery while building prisons — slavery and prison are morally equivalent in God’s eyes. Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudal social structures are God’s idea for human redemption and all the other social and political theories come from Satan.

In our context today, the closest we can come to that divine ideal is the church family. Not the faux democratic or presbyterial or magisterial church organizational styles broadly seen today, but the church as an ANE feudal institution as God intended. Further, because God says that covenant trumps DNA, we don’t actually have to make our churches literal families because the moral covenant relationship is really the whole point. We emulate the ANE tribal society by our covenant relations. We embrace God’s reality and simply regard each other in the same manner as if we were actual blood kin, because what matters is the spiritual DNA we share in the Blood of Christ.

There is nothing wrong with learning how to answer the social propaganda of today, or how to artfully ignore it and assert God’s truth. We can discuss how to implement our natural human tastes over cultural expressions — which is generally the only real issue here — but whatever it is the propagandists mean by “racism” is not a sin. If you come at me with some SJW bullshit, I’m likely to use sarcasm just to shock you into silence.

Anyone with a functioning brain cell knows that the issue is not skin color or other obvious features, per se, but typically associated cultural expectations. If your culture annoys me, I could care less that my dislike offends you. If you want me around, accommodate the differences and be friendly; if I want to be around you I’ll hold myself to same standard. If I don’t want to be around you, there is not a damned thing you can do to force the issue without provoking any number of unpleasant responses from me. In so doing, I will act according to my best understanding of what God requires of me. That understanding descends to my mind from my heart and it’s connection to the Spirit Realm.

Good luck arguing with that, because it’s way above any presumed human authority.

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Immoral Collusion: Church-n-State

Posted on October 9, 2015 by ehurst

I’m not sure what to make of this — Churches Are Paying the Gov’t up to $100 a Month to Spy on Families! As one comment said, this is kind of the “hair-on-fire” stuff we see all the time. I didn’t chase all the links. As with most things, a little skepticism is in order. On the other hand, this is an example of why your virtual pastor’s only link to a physical religious organization happens to be the informal church that meets in his home. This article describes a level of compromise that makes me raise my own cynical eyebrows.

Maybe you’ve heard of FEMA’s effort to raise and army of compromised pastors (“Clergy Response Teams”) who would herd their own parishioners into surrendering everything FEMA demands during any officially declared emergency. However much of this is factually accurate simply extends that sort of thinking, making the church serve the secular state.

Whatever the facts behind this, look for it to spread.

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Adblocking: I’ll Take That Risk

Posted on October 9, 2015 by ehurst

Let me reiterate a point from yesterday’s post “Virtual Resistance” — the network is content neutral. The neutrality ends with the receiving party. Recall my persistent reference to World of Ends. Things have not changed since Doc Searles and David Weinberger wrote that ancient treatise. Pretending that the network can be turned into a passive consumption medium, and that devices can be turned into fancy TVs, is flatly immoral.

It is our moral duty to express ourselves. Whether we struggle with that socially and psychologically is beside the point; the Creator demands that we communicate with others. Barring His choice to limit or remove your ability to react and interact, you are obliged to express your uniqueness. This is inherent in His divine sovereign initiative in making us each different. The mere existence of DNA demands you express yourself. No one else has authority to decide what you should be; it’s between you and God. Just so, your place on the Net obliges you to distinguish between what is and what is not acceptable to you individually on your end, because that in itself becomes the absolute minimum means of expression.

The argument has gone on since the day pitchmen found they could use the Internet: Where are the moral boundaries? Whose presumed rights of free expression shall dominate? We keep seeing this same dispute periodically, and this link to Slashdot is just another example. Look at the comments on that post. If you have time, wade through them.

We know how it works. Advertisers lobby the browser makers to remove user options and force users to endure manipulations, along with every measure (such as tracking and profiling) to allow the manipulation to be more effective. The advertisers want your money, but they seem to enjoy taking advantage of human psychological weaknesses as a game versus simply robbing you at gunpoint. There is some variation in resistance, but certain things are a simple matter of human wiring and we cannot pretend it’s possible to ignore everything that appears before our eyeballs. Fallen human nature alone will make that impossible, but we also have a vast ocean of social and cultural conditioning on top of that. Has it occurred to you that the debate itself is partly psychological manipulation?

And it is so annoying that, just when we think we can rely on one type of browser (anything related to Mozilla, for example) is actually tilting the game in our favor, they suddenly capitulate to the anti-user side and produce a damned sneaky propaganda attempt to justify betraying their user base. And Google? They are far worse, but produce a much better performing browser, too. It doesn’t matter if you choose the likes of Opera, because it’s hampered by the same basic greed for advertising dollars and using the crippled base underlying Google Chrome. Open Source means nothing if the fundamental design prevents options that users prefer. The project is directed by folks who are paid to ignore your requests, so it won’t matter if any of the developers are sympathetic to us.

Right now, the only other game in town is using minority browsers most of you never heard of in the first place. Even that runs into problems with way too many systems administrators outright blocking some browsers from requesting content. I ran into that just this morning, with a site responding to my page request with a “forbidden” code — my browser was forbidden to connect with their servers.

So what happens if we all simply block advertising and all that ad-supported content is lost? Most Internet users have no idea what it was like in the days before it was commercialized. I got in rather early after the commercialization, so I was exposed to a lot of discussion that gave me a feel for earlier times. It was damned expensive to get online until the advertisers got involved. When profits depend on wider access, you can bet any medium gets cheaper. And then there is the always utterly incompetent regulatory measures from government dweebs who remain truculently clueless about how it all works. We cannot go back to that earlier age now. If the war somehow tilts too long in favor of the ordinary user, the greedy psychopaths will purchase more and more painful regulations. The threat of losing content because advertisers pull support from content creators is bogus.

What’s left is frankly unknown territory. We cannot reliably predict how things will go, but change itself is a constant. So I’ll keep using my preferred plain-text or minimal graphics browsers* and let it be. This is the ultimate safe-surfing and adblocking. I’ll do my best to find ways to express my individuality and strive to pay whatever costs are involved. My content will continue because I cannot be silent.

[*] Lynx is plain-text only. So is Elinks but it works differently and is no longer actively developed. Links2 has an option to run with just static images. There are other browsers that compromise between plain-text and full graphical browsers, but they all have their own drawbacks.

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Photolog: Sooner Road

Posted on October 8, 2015 by ehurst

You would have to imagine that I’ve driven all over eastern Oklahoma County at one time or another, but only on the main routes to get somewhere. Wandering the back roads on my bicycle reveals sights I never knew were there. Today I chose Wilshire Boulevard between Hiwasee and the North Canadian River as the initial exploration.

(Click on the thumbnails for an enlarged view.)

12400blkEWilshireThis meant riding north from the house up Hiwasee Road and simply turning left on Wilshire. Immediately I saw a temporary sign warning the road was out. Hoping I wouldn’t actually have to backtrack much, I pushed on to see this scene on the right. But it was no disaster, just unfinished work.12300blkEWilshire This image on the left is looking back after I crossed the work area.

The rest of the way along Wilshire was just a collection of mostly older structures.AndersonnWilshire This ancient oil well storage site was already starting to look like it simply belonged there. It fit right in with all the older homes, along with this old church house, on which the sign read “St. Paul Baptist Church.”StPaulBaptJones Once I crossed Spencer-Jones Road and the railroad tracks, I was suddenly among very high-priced homes. Most of them were hidden behind trees. Beyond those I was back out in pasture lands, and this place had an entirely different feel to it.

The road took me past a substantial hill and then dropped quickly into the river bottom. There was an odd presence of signs warning folks not to park on the roadway, but I saw nothing that would draw a crowd. Where Wilshire ends against the river bank, it turns south onto Douglas Boulevard.DouglasBlvdnrWilshire2 The years of life hit me hard at that moment, because this ancient road running through a tunnel of arched tree limbs felt just like I entered a parallel universe where time stood stood more than 50 years ago. Then I saw why the parking signs stood along the road fronting on that ranch, because there was another ranch that was a public business: Honey Lee Ranch (they have a Facebook page, too). At the moment I passed there were large dogs lying all along the fence and, without knowing what kind of place it was, I was loath to stop and take a picture lest I wake them and get their attention.

6900NDouglasBlvdStill, the whole mile-long stretch down to NE 63rd felt just like my world did when I was about 6 years old. There were several old places like this one (left). Down on NE 63rd I turned right and crossed the river to find another. This one was clearly no longer occupied, but the land is still actively farmed (right).8700blkNE63rdJones This brought me back to that huge open space along the North Canadian where NE 63rd crosses Midwest Boulevard. Today I skipped the construction site near the bridge on Midwest Boulevard and kept going west along NE 63rd. I wanted to find that old school house.

7301NE63rdOKCFaulty memories had me thinking it was stone, but it’s brick. On the left is what you are likely to glimpse driving by on the road.SunnysideSchool1928 My wife tells me that back in the 1960s she had a friend who lived near there. The house is gone, but the school still stands, abandoned in the 1970s. If you get close enough to see through the foliage, you can spot the old concrete plaque informing you this is Sunnyside School built in 1928. (Note: This paragraph was edited to correct factual errors.)

Up and over the hill, I headed toward an orphaned section of Air Depot Boulevard, running south along the river bank. I’d never seen that area before, and it was frankly unremarkable — just some hidden rural land hosting a single newer home with a gate saying Moon Land Ranch. The road was quite rough, and where it ended, turning west as NE 50th, it was very rough. In fact, it was simply a stretch of cratered asphalt, more holes than road. Up on the hill to the right stands a pair of expensive buildings. One is a psychiatric clinic and the other is a residential care place. The first is relatively new, but the other was being used as a safe residence for kids from unstable homes. Back in the late 1990s when I was still substitute teaching for Mid-Del Schools, this was one of their lesser well-known assignments. They still provide the in-house education for those kids, but things have changed a lot since I came and went a few times. The staff was oddly remote and generally unsupportive of substitute teachers, though the classroom aides were decent enough. Foliage kept me from taking pictures.NCdnRatNE36thOKC

Once I got back to Sooner Road, I turned south. There is a big disjuncture in Sooner Road at NE 36th where the latter crosses the river. Sooner ends on the west bank and resumes on the east. EastOakLandfillOKCThe view here (left) is southward showing how the local governments are trying to make much of the river a recreation area. I note the view on the other side of the bridge is totally natural and covered in trees, but this is what it looks like all the way upriver to the Oklahoma River boating area. This area has seen both sand and gravel mining and has been the single largest landfill in the county for quite some years. NEcorner23rdSoonerRdOn the right (slightly above) is the entrance East Oak Landfill — AKA “Mount Trashmore” — sitting on the northern half of the entire square-mile section bounded by Sooner on the west, NE 36th on the north, NE 23rd on the south and Air Depot (in theory) on the east. I went back down to Sooner and rode down to the corner of NE 23rd where I turned back to take this shot (left) across the inactive sand extraction lagoon.EastOakaerialshot It’s a great swimming hole but don’t get caught. Just for clarity’s sake I stole this aerial shot from Google Earth showing how there are several lagoons from sand and gravel mining, all now closed or used for other purposes. The massive mound is in the upper right corner of the image.

North of this still-active landfill, across NE 36th is the site of the older landfill. This was back in the days when a “clean landfill” meant long parallel trenches filled with solid waste, the covered with dirt from between the rows. Over the past decade the trees and underbrush have gotten so dense you can no longer see the long humps running parallel to the road.

From there I headed on south along Sooner Road and turned east along Reno and began zig-zagging through the neighborhood streets back home.

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