Psalm 56

Posted on June 27, 2015 by ehurst

This psalm refers to events in 1 Samuel 21:10-15, and precedes the moment celebrated in Psalm 34. This is very much a Covenant song. The Law of God promises divine protection among other blessings to those who obey. On the one hand, David is willing to give his life as the price of God’s favor. He knows that God has called him and the Prophet Samuel had anointed him the next king of Israel. But the Law says David must wait until God deals with the reigning King Saul. So David flees to the Philistines and would have lived quietly among them. The Philistines surely knew of court politics in Israel and why David was among them. Still, some insisted he could not take refuge among them. It was easy to seize David, since he had nowhere else to go. This was his prayer during that time of custody.

We note in passing the header refers to some long lost tune more commonly known then as “The Silent Dove in Distant Lands.”

David calls first for God’s mercy, since there is precious little mercy from the people around him. He pictures them crowing at the chance to take revenge on someone who had been obedient to Jehovah in all things. It is very obviously a reference to armed military men, and David is hounded at home and abroad. His fears David can handle, but he must trust in God to handle his enemies, as they are God’s enemies, too. As such, they are mere men who cannot defy God.

David is in dire straights. It’s not just one or two, but a whole herd of folks investing significant effort and resources in capturing him like a trophy. He prays God to keep track of all this sorrow as evidence against them. Every tear should be saved up in a water skin as evidence for the divine court. Every detail is already noted in Heaven’s record of events.

Indeed, if they knew just Who was supporting and protecting David, they would immediately flee when David cried out His name. David suffers no doubt in the favor of his Lord. God has committed Himself with a solemn vow to those who trust Him, and that includes David. Again, what human can oppose Almighty God? Without His permission, they can do nothing to David. For his part, David is committed to God’s glory and intends to uphold his end of the Covenant. Nothing could be sweeter in this life.

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End of an Empire

Posted on June 27, 2015 by ehurst

This is just me, my own personal ruminations.

These brooding thoughts build on the basis of a solid prophetic conviction. Some years ago I became utterly certain that if America attacks Iran, God will grant Iran victory over us. It has nothing to do with means and methods, nor any consideration for possible assistance from third parties. It came to me as an unshakable vision of our troops lying scattered across the battle grounds, equipment in shattered smoking ruins. This image is still burned into my consciousness and is most emphatically symbolic, not literal. The whole point was that God would not allow the US and allies to go beyond a certain moral boundary line. Please don’t get hung up how such things work, because it is largely a reflection of my personal communion with God. Nothing says you have to buy into this.

The shadow government of the West has openly published plans to take down all the countries near Israel that she doesn’t like. Hunt down the Brookings Institute and the title Which Path to Persia? on your favorite search engine. The plans have been largely successful so far. The countries weren’t actually conquered, just hammered until the stable government imploded and Western-sponsored terrorist were imported to insure the country could never regain its viability. In other words, all the misery of conquest but none of the blessings of imperial rule, as the places now exist in a state of unending warfare. Do I have to explain how unspeakably immoral this is?

I don’t pretend to understand any of the details of God’s plans on this. I don’t believe it works like that; it’s far more subtle and complex. I do believe I know how it will turn out, given the context of my general grasp of His revelation, His character, and what He seems to tell me about these things. Those published strategic plans put Syria next in line. As I noted more than once in the past, I am certain that Syria will get the same deal as places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Given what little I can pretend to know about the current context, I tend to think that this could pull in Iran almost immediately — never mind who else.

I suppose I should mention that the vision I had implies the Empire comes apart with that failure of military action. Do you see what I see? Stuff like this cannot pass over us unnoticed. It will most certainly mean that all of the hateful misery we have inflicted on others will come home to roost in our rafters. That’s how divine justice works. It could still be years away, but the moral impact of all of this makes it feel very close.

Do I have to spell it out? This includes a healthy dose of natural disasters. It includes a very large permit for demonic activity, meaning that people will go absolute bonkers in ways that are inexplicable. Lots of them. All over the country. Stuff you cannot imagine. And if you don’t have a grasp of the shepherd’s soul in all of this, you won’t really understand why this puts me in a dark mood. You also won’t understand why I simply cannot remain silent: People you know and love will suffer and there is little you can do to stop it. You should try to help, but make sure it comes within the boundaries of your divine calling.

Search your own heart and make sure you have your hands on the task God appointed for you. Rest assured that if you are obedient, Creation itself sings of the redemption your obedience brings. Your obedience doing what little you know will bring glory to His name is easily the best thing for all the universe. It is morally the same as feeding orphans in places you never heard of, and healing wounds you never inflicted.

I strive to know and take my place because this is my part in His glory.

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Communion = Dependence

Posted on June 26, 2015 by ehurst

We are designed for communion. While the priority is on communion with our Creator, it seems rather necessary that we are able to commune with our own inner selves first. However, at some point you quickly run into the necessity of communion with the rest of Creation because we find ourselves inextricably a part of it, and it a part of us. This whole existence is a form of communion with our context. It requires recognizing God as a Person and His Creation as a person; at times it is alternatively many persons. At some point it requires we pull in other humans as part of the context.

Any sense of separation is falsehood, though moral reality means keeping track of that sense of separation and isolation on many levels. What separates us from God is a lie. It’s the same lie that makes us unable to commune with Creation as we were designed, and most specifically, it makes it hard for us to commune with other humans.

So on some level, if you live in this world, you are a burden on others. The question, then, is how much and what kind of burdening is appropriate compared against the revelation of God. What were His intentions for our interdependence on the rest of Creation? If you can’t sense that most humans answer this question poorly, you must be seriously morally blind. If nothing else, you would blind because there is no simple single answer. It’s not that kind of question. The question is never answered, except in the sense that once the moment is passed, you have to answer the same question again in the moments to come. We know instinctively that we cannot rewrite the past. We can pretend a lot of bullshit about the past, but the moment is gone.

What’s left in front of us is some effort to gain some clarity about the past, if only to know where we are now. However, if you assume you can somehow register in your awareness mere facts alone, you are pretending bullshit again. The most useful and important question is not really the mere facts but your moral accountability, and what God can and will do to redeem something that cannot ever be perfect. The concept alone of objective accuracy is another of those bullshit pretenses, a distraction to prevent moral accountability.

The single biggest and most complex lie we tell ourselves deals with the question of dependence. It’s all deeply entangled and massively confused. Any clarity at all is a good thing in itself, because we still must operate under the realization that it will never quite be fully detangled. We depend — that much is painfully obvious. God has asserted in no uncertain terms that we do — and that we must assume it is good, right and necessary. The confusion is upon whom and for what.

(Necessary diversion here: The accusation that we “anthropomorphize” nonhuman factors in our world is a lie. We don’t treat Creation as human; we treat Creation as living in its own right. We do so in part because it’s how God spoke to humanity in the first place. It’s the proper perspective God used to help us understand Him and His requirements. If you see Creation as inanimate and inert, you are calling God a liar. Not because we pretend it’s more than a figure of speech or symbolic language in the Bible that speaks so, but because His very actions reinforce the concept that all Creation is a living thing. All parts of it are living things in varying degrees of contextual independence. Our culture demands we ignore all this.)

We as humans depend. God explains adequately how to make the most of this so that our dependence on others feeds back to them and the rest of Creation as blessing. In various ways, on various levels and to varying degrees, we have the opportunity to bless His name and participate in His glory by how we come to grips with His way of doing things. We take our place in His Creation and find the best of all possible living.

Western Civilization as it now exists demands we submit for dependence on all the wrong points. In essence, the West is a vehicle for a whole host of evil dependence. It’s not some throw-away line to suggest that Western customs and theories were designed by Satan to keep you within his power. Not so much in terms of precise planning and design, but his plans are discernible in terms of the broader effect. He can’t keep Christ from awakening our dead spirits to eternal life, but Satan has a very effective means of ensuring we fail to share in God’s glory in the meantime. You should understand this as an active attempt to deny God the glory due Him. Being Western in itself is being a sucker for Satan’s plans, because the very foundation of what we now know of as Western Civilization was the result of suckering organized Christianity into major moral compromise.

Here’s a concrete example of how bad things are: Vaccination is not a good idea. There are better ways to do the same thing, but they aren’t efficient as Westerners view such things. However, the current vaccination procedures appear to work, in part because certain people control the flow of information. It doesn’t matter whether the people involved know that they are violating God’s revelation; they are still wrong, still promoting evil. On top of that, current vaccine production is flatly and knowingly evil because the primary consideration is profit, not human health. You would be hard pressed to point to an example of a vaccine available right now that isn’t inherently toxic. Even among those who truly believe vaccines can work are a large number of muzzled voices who aren’t happy with the vaccine industry.

As a result, it’s virtually impossible to accept vaccination without a serious risk of major debilitating toxicity. It hardly matters that every individual involved is not necessarily trying to harm you; that’s the net result. Western Civilization not only rejects the person-hood of God and His Creation, but tends to dehumanize people, as well. The powers that be are determined that this is good, right and necessary, and they’ll point guns at us to make sure it all happens that way.

What to do about that is a whole raft of other posts already published here. The main point here is that you grasp the bigger picture. So long as you believe in the system, you cannot hope to receive the blessings God offers so freely and abundantly. So long as you believe in any part of the system, you support the Devil’s work in calling God a liar. The theory itself is a lie. It’s hard to commune with God and His Creation when you still believe in the system, even if only in theory.

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Fukushima: Not Much You Can Do

Posted on June 25, 2015 by ehurst

If you bother to read this blog, one of the basic concepts you have to tolerate is the biblical doctrine of the Fall. Not so much the traditional Western Christian view of it, but you have to understand that our current reality is permanently broken. This world cannot be fixed. The whole point of Christ on the Cross starts with the idea that you intend to end up somewhere else. We are leaving this world for a better existence and we are working on the issue of preparation for that journey. This whole business of holiness in the here-and-now is to work on modifications of your self, not your world.

I’ll do all I can to help you understand this, but it is not a matter for debate.

That doesn’t mean we don’t care about things in this life. Christian Mysticism as we teach it here is by far more pragmatic than anything else I’ve seen so far, and I’ve gone out of my way to examine all sorts of wide and varying viewpoints on reality. Learning how to live in eternity means learning how to handle things here according to God’s revelation. You get better acquainted with God by seeking His character in His Laws. It’s all about the Person of God. We live as best we can in a manifestation of that character. We take seriously the implications of His Laws regarding how we interact with Creation.

You can find a really nice review of the Fukushima situation here. There are other summaries, but I like this one for balancing between we-got-issues and scared-shitless. This thing is uncharted territory in the broad human experience. Nobody knows exactly what’s coming next, but we do have some projections that take into account what little we do know.

Whatever is going on in those three little stinking craters on the coast of Japan is self-sustaining for a long time to come. It’s the concept of Critical Mass. Basic nuclear physics says that as long as a certain critical minimum mass of stable isotope molecules remain in close proximity, this mass of stuff will remain incredibly hot in temperature and highly radioactive. It’s a question of the type of material and how much is one place. Break it down into smaller pieces that are not so close together and it cools off and the radiation will reduce to some lower level inherent in the material itself. Eventually this stuff will burn itself out, but not during any human lifetime. As noted in the article, our best estimate of burn-out time puts it centuries in the future.

Unless you live in or near Japan, the biggest issue is the radioactive pollution of the Pacific Ocean, and the secondary pollution of the air and soil that comes into contact with this nasty water. Alaska is already affected, as is some portion of the North American West Coast. The rest of the Pacific area will get it soon enough. What they get, we hardly know at this point. Given the nature of the oceanic water exchange on this planet, as well as atmospheric mixing, this thing will spread globally and be diluted at the same time. God alone knows how that will affect you and me, but it will affect us.

My point here is, even if it turns out there is no practical measure for avoiding the effects, awareness of it means you can make an informed response to the call of God to act according to His Word. We still teach here that you need to live in your heart, not in your head. You still need that sweet provision God granted the human race to commune with His Creation directly through the higher awareness of your heart. You need to commune with your whole body, with attention to the “brain” near the bottom of your spine. That’s not some weird Asian thing, but is discussed openly in Scripture. We miss it because of our Western intellectual biases; it’s in the Bible. You have to let your heart read the communion of your spirit with the Holy Spirit, because your intellect is incapable of it. All of that still applies here, but we do want the brain properly informed so it knows what to make of things the heart has to tell it.

Only then can we understand God’s priorities in the midst of all this nasty stuff we see.

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On Being Your Own God

Posted on June 24, 2015 by ehurst

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I am by no means a gamer. I am somewhat of a computer geek, but it’s just a tool for something much more important. If the Internet and computers all died tomorrow, I’d simply find another tool for the job. This one happens to be the best available right now. Further, I don’t particularly care for most of the gamers I’ve encountered. They tend to be arrogant little shits who have a poor grasp of reality, who dig so deeply into virtual worlds because they have trouble with the real world.

But so do most other humans, just in different ways. The average Joe and Jane Sixpack prefer to chase their false reality passively through TV and other forms of entertainment. Gamers end up being closer to reality because the rest of the world refuses to get involved in the first place. The fake world of gaming comes closer to the truth for that reason, and gamers deserve at least that little bit of respect.

Let me lay a proper foundation for this discussion. A critical element in the Fall Narrative is this:

And the serpent said to the woman, “You shall not surely die, for God knows that in the day you eat of it, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4-5 MKJV)

Some of this is translated poorly by tradition, and in part because the subtle nuances of Hebrew contextual and symbolic logic are alien to Westerners. The business of “knowing good and evil” carries the idea of having the authority to decide. Satan makes a subtle accusation that God is hogging all the best toys of life for Himself when He’s no better than anyone else. Who made Him God? Anyone from that ancient culture would immediately recognize how utterly preposterous Satan’s comment is.

Yet this is the very same accusation so commonly used by people seeking an excuse to reject revelation. This serves to emphasize the vast difference between our modern world with its common assumptions against those of Ancient Near East (ANE). Without bothering to walk through the entire thought process, Satan jumps right down into a raft of unspoken assumptions, including the notion that there is some objective standard out there somewhere against which we can compare God. Further, Satan implies that if they reject God’s revelation and assert the authority to use their own powers of reasoning to discern this objective truth (the meaning of the symbol “Forbidden Fruit”), they can tell God where to get off.

It won’t matter what brand of logic and reasoning you choose, asserting that as your standard to which God must appeal, the standard itself is a false god. It’s idolizing your own reason and all the failings built into it. It’s an internal attempt to tell God that He isn’t really God. Were He as angry and implacable as most Westerners assume without thinking, everyone making that error would immediately go to Hell. God’s patience is misread as inability to act, or lack of concern. In essence, it provides a false cover, a pretense of holding forth reason when the real issue is one’s personal petty wishes. This is a lie we tell ourselves in Western thinking — and at that, it’s only when we are at our best. Western heritage offers a plethora of even worse logic and self-centered thinking.

This is the fundamental flaw in the whole range of Western assertions of authority. We raise the pretense of some objective standard, but it’s a standard loaded with a million loopholes so folks can grant themselves extra privileges because it’s just part of the job of being boss, a basic necessity for getting the job done. It becomes the excuse for shitting on a lot of other folks who might think differently about what that standard should be. And a whole world of people who simply want to be left alone, people who are unwilling to force their will on others, are treated as hideously evil because they won’t kiss the ass of someone who takes themselves too seriously.

You see it in politics, naturally. It’s prevalent in business, too. And if you don’t see it as part of organized religion, it’s because you refuse to see it. Why should we be surprised when people read their personal god-hood back into every institution that organizes human activity? It’s so ubiquitous that we forget it’s not right. If the people using this trick can get enough others to buy into the system, they will try to make you feel guilty for following your instinct to get away from this game.

And this is what’s behind the Gamergate thing. Wikipedia outright lies about the matter, taking the side of the godlings who demand people kiss their asses. The real story behind it is closer to this. We see that irresistible urge to play god and assert what is good or evil for others. Major businesses that consider their websites the arbiters of what digital games are and should be are now losing money because they weren’t as subtle as Satan in the Garden of Eden. The self-appointed gatekeepers of information about digital games wanted to have their cake and eat it, too, but failed to be the least bit subtle and polished. It was naked, visceral hatred for the people who make the gaming industry possible. Not just consumers, but the folks who design and write the software were vilified.

You’ll find precisely the same behavior in every human endeavor. Wherever you see this thing rear its ugly head, where the ostensible servants (game review business) attempt to assert mastery over those they serve (gamers), it’s a batch of godlings taking themselves too seriously. If there’s one thing so utterly typical of the West, and so utterly shocking to Ancient Near Eastern sensibilities, this is it. This is what sets apart our civilization from all the others. Jesus was the essential Hebrew man who would find our culture stomach-turning. This is why Westerners get so much of the Bible wrong. Organizations claiming to promote the message of Christ blatantly play the same games as you see in Gamergate.

Don’t tell me you are a Christian if you reject the most fundamental assumption of what Jesus taught. Keep your eye on this one thing, in the mirror and in the world around you. Expect it; take it for granted, but never lose sight of what is the fundamental error. One of the few really good things about the Internet is that it makes resistance possible, and the gamers have won this round, but you wouldn’t know that if you keep buying into the mainstream propaganda.

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Photo Log 8: Double Header in OKC

Posted on June 23, 2015 by ehurst

Today is a rather long trek over two different official bike trails. But it’s about ten miles just getting to the starting line of the first one. If this works out, I’ll ride straight west on SE 29th to the Tinker Diagonal and generally follow some varied surfaces that will take us all the way up to Reno Avenue and around onto Grand Boulevard. The Grand River Trail this all the way across town, up a few miles north and into the Oklahoma River Trail. We follow the south bank as far as we can go, given that the far end is still under some development. The final trail is mapped and named Eagle Lake Trail, but we’ll have to wait and see if it’s open for our passage. If so, we can get right back to the start of the Grand Boulevard Trail where I can retrace my route home again. In all it should be around 40 miles of fairly flat riding, over half on purpose-built cycling routes.

I’m torn about starting way early in the morning when it’s cooler, because the traffic will be heavy. By leaving closer to 8AM, it’s already down, but it means facing more of the mid-day heat. I chose the latter option.

I won’t recount all the details of the first few miles westbound. Once I got to the big shopping center outside the main gate of Tinker AFB, I followed the service roads for I-40. Starting from that gate, the interstate follows a near-straight diagonal path across a three-by-two mile rectangle where it intersects with I-35 — a section officially called the Tinker Diagonal. That western end is also very close to where I need to go for the Grand Boulevard Trail, so I stay on the north side road all the way up to SE 15th. I’m not sure anyone can explain why the service road forces you onto the interstate at that point, but I simply turned left on SE 15th until I got the Del City Library.

On the other hand, I have heard through academic channels that somewhere along this section of Crutcho Creek, construction crews stumbled into a minor cache of Native American artifacts. The area is in or near Ray Trent Park. That was probably back in the 1960s and politics have changed a lot since then. So while no one has the money to do a proper archaeological dig, the place is quietly protected from any further construction digging. Any development plans are restricted to the top foot or so of soil.I40-Crutcho

So once I pass under the highway at Crutcho Creek, it’s just a short run across a bit of grass to get back onto the service road and ride all the way to Reno Avenue. Less than a quarter mile along Reno is the turn onto the old Grand Boulevard heading south. We take a jog around the historic Townley’s Dairy plant and follow the twisting Grand to the far eastern end of the Grand Boulevard Trail. I recommend you not park here to ride the trail unless you leave a guard. Transients of highly varying morals like to camp near here.GrandTrlStart

Grand Boulevard Trail from the east

About a century ago the OKC management planned Grand Boulevard to circle the city somewhat near the boundary lines. It was a big curving loop. Since then, several sections have disappeared under highways and then later highways on top of those. What’s left has served to confuse the heck out of people unfamiliar with the city layout, because long sections are scattered all over town and the labeling follows no obvious pattern any more, unless you can make out the quadrants of NW, NE, SE and SW. This southern section remains mostly intact and curves nicely from around the eastern end of the complex junction between I-40 and I-35, down and across some decent neighborhoods at roughly SE 36th, turning into SW 36th, then heading north up along I-44. We won’t trace Grand any farther, leaving it for the path along the Canadian River.

The first three miles or so cross either fallow terrain or pass by some very old industrial facilities, mostly related to petroleum drilling or construction. It’s actually rather quiet and desolate on the trail itself, despite crossing some busy thoroughfares along the way. Just short of SE 29th, we are shoved over to the other side of Grand just as we pass the biggest OKC Animal Shelter. Across SE 29th we begin curving back westward around the backside of Trosper Park. The place is a little rough around the edges because this park is a favorite haunt for those dealing in illegal vices of various sorts, mostly the kind without victims. It remains pretty quiet until we get around to I-35, which is pretty much an artificial canyon below the natural terrain level. Once across that, it’s much more parklike for the next few miles. This is where the old Grand Boulevard remains divided by a narrow greenbelt of sorts.GrandTrlI35

The city fathers have been spending money along this route to remove what folks call “blight,” but it’s mostly about rousting gangs. It was about this point I realized I probably looked a lot like OKC Police Bike Patrols, with my black long-legged shorts and pale gray t-shirt, and black cycling helmet. I thought the locals were acting a little odd until I realized what they must have thought they were seeing. At any rate, a mile west the trail runs out because that section of Grand was never widened. You can take the sidewalk on the south side, but the street is a designated bikeway and faded white stencils on the pavement are still just visible. The route widens again about a half-mile later on the other side of the ever-busy Shields Boulevard, right about the time we hit Lightening Creek.

During rain storms this place gets a lot of mention. So much of it runs through concrete canyons that, as you might expect, kids play in it and think all the extra water is so much fun on a hot summer day. But this last few storms was enough to washout even the bike path. A large section of asphalt was floated out its bed and pushed aside.BTrlWashout

Farther along, I suppose the city planners couldn’t find an easy way to cross Western Avenue, which is the single busiest north-south artery out here on Southside. Thus, whether you dismount or not, you are forced to use pedestrian accommodations to get across. On the other side the original extra-wide concrete sidewalk from way-back-when obviates the need for a separate bike path. It runs like that for a mile or so. Eventually the newer asphalt trail shows up again and takes us all the way across May Avenue and into yet another decent spot, Woodson Park. The city began revamping and renewing these facilities a while back, so it’s not too bad. The trail runs around the backside next to I-44, then abruptly turns left and up a very steep overpass.I44-Xover

Hit the brakes coming down because it’s a sharp right on the other side. We pick up the bike path more or less on the old Grand route, cutting back across SW 29th and chasing another wide sidewalk back onto a street actually named Grand. Take advantage of the hill and don’t slow down; at the bottom is a genuine rough neighborhood. Not everyone is a thug, but there are a greater density of troublesome folks here than in most places. When a sidewalk reappears on the right, grab that ramp because this saves us a big detour at SW 15th. You have to yield, but it’s a straight shot down a nice bike path while viewing the splendor of Dell’s OKC Campus on your left. Their computers suck less than most others, so I tend to prefer them. This campus is a customer phone support center and that’s where they suck. I run Linux on my Dells. In the picture you can see where the far western end of the Grand Boulevard Trail ends at the OK River Trail.DellOKCCampus

Oklahoma River Trail

OKRiverTrlThe OK River project goes like this: The North Canadian River was tamed, widened and given heavy rip-rap sides. It now consists of a pair of very long navigable lakes right downtown OKC. There is a sort of dam at the west end near where I got on the trail — a trail that is mostly mirrored on the north bank. There is another dam about half-way down. This first section is for motorized boats mostly. The second section is all about that human-powered boating stuff. You’ll ride quite a ways east before you see it, following a few bends in the river. Down on the right side is a picture of the Devon Boathouse; it quickly became a major rowing competition site and they aren’t through with it, yet.MidLocksOKRiver

Staying along the south bank, you will encounter a number of spotter’s towers for the races. Before this was all fancied up, the trail ended right about the 1000 meter mark. You could roll down a dirt road a short distance under I-35 and find a locked gate on the other side. However, I’m told riders have found the gate open rather often, now that maintenance crews have to access the spotters towers farther down. That’s how I found it today and rode the dirt road all around behind the as-yet unfinished American Indian Cultural Center and Museum (often referred to unofficially as the Heritage Center). This is pretty much what you might see because not much has been done in two years.OKCRegatta

Eagle Lake Trail

This dirt road runs right into the new Eagle Lake Trail, so we get a free bonus. It drops under Eastern Avenue and stays relatively close to the south bank of the North Canadian. Near the lake you get to run a large loop under a bridge and around to cross it over the substantial Crooked Oak Creek. If you look at the maps, you’ll see it’s just a couple of miles along the trail to Eagle Lake, a very old oxbow lake that officials reinforced with a huge dike for recreational use. It’s in the far northwest corner of Del City, and pretty ordinary as lakes go.

This was reasonably close, just a half-mile, from where I started the Grand Boulevard Trail, so it was a nice clean finish to the exploratory portion of the ride. The main entrance to Eagle Lake is on Reno right near Scott Street where I could easily drop back down to the Tinker Diagonal. Aside from taking a slightly different route avoiding the main thoroughfares, it looked to be a pretty boring and hot ten miles home, but I was waylaid for a birthday luncheon at the Chili’s in that huge shopping area outside Tinker. It provided a good rest and respite for the final six miles home.

In all, about five hours riding time to cover a little over 40 miles.

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Compsec: Proof of What We Suspected

Posted on June 23, 2015 by ehurst

Maybe I was a little slow, but at some point I realized that digital security never was, for the most part.

We who work or play in the field of computer security (CompSec) have been trading stories of government intrusion into everything digital. While there is plenty of legend and silly speculation, it’s not paranoia if you see actual evidence. For example, while repairing a used computer someone got third hand, my friend and I encountered a section of wire with a chip inline that he recognized as a short-range transmitter. He showed me the reference numbers on the chip compared against a list of standard electronics parts numbers to prove he was justified in being so animated about this discovery. It had no legitimate computing function. What do you tell the owner? If they believe your report, you gain respect and trust. If not, you become marginalized as a kook. Then again maybe it’s a trap for you, the repairman.

You have to be a little nutty to get involved in computer stuff in the first place. But enough of us faced various forms of harassment from various levels of government that we never trusted anyone without a long informal probation of sorts. The same goes for too many companies involved in computer manufacture, but we reserved our greatest distrust for anyone making money from software. Not in the sense of malicious intent — such as we might expect from government agents — but because the profit motive made folks sloppy. We did place a little hope in security software makers, but no real trust.

While none of us are surprised by reports like this, we are entertained by the back-n-forth verbal shots between spokesmen for government and security software vendors. You learn to suspect that government espionage is like that, but it’s almost worth crowing over such specific revelations as this article offers. Granted, I still believe The Intercept is hiding something themselves, but that’s another story. The point is, this much is documented and we have no reason to doubt what they chose to reveal.

Thus, the recent announcement from Kaspersky about Duqu 2.0 found on their servers is just another exchange of virtual gunfire. It’s hardly new, just another incident in the long term war, and you can be sure we aren’t getting the whole story. At the very least, we learn that you are really very lucky if you can just keep using your own computer for your limited purposes.

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Laugh or Not?

Posted on June 22, 2015 by ehurst

It’s blasphemy.

Having a sense of humor is a universal human trait, but so is shame. Thus, what we find funny may be highly influenced by culture, but it will always be moderated through our individual personality. Most of us fail to notice that human personality is contextual in itself, so that humor of the moment tends to vary. However, the last thing you want to do is try to squelch someone else’s sense of humor. It can be godly to help someone who falls under your dominion, to help people be more conscious about internal processes, but there is precious little you can do in shaping the outcomes without violating morality itself.

Go ahead and laugh. While it’s obvious Maher attempts to counteract a very ugly, intolerant social trend, his own choice is intolerant in a different sense. Quite literally, wars get started over much lesser concerns than that. That Maher feels a need to engage the issue shows we have a major cultural flaw, but the flaw lurks in the dialog itself. We can’t even call it feminism or Victorian sensibilities, but those influences are present in the problem. This video clip is one nanny scolding another. You can laugh at his presentation within the context, but if you actually belong to any part of this, that’s very sad.

The whole thing is an artifact of a dying, demonic and damned culture that just happens to rule over most of humanity right now. This thing has been pushed upon humanity with a bloodthirsty arrogance that is hard to grasp. The level of absorption varies across the globe, but it’s presence is undeniable. You cannot stand within this tradition and pretend to judge the results of it. You cannot pretend your particular version is the proper human default. Yet the jokes Maher uses themselves reflect that kind of arrogance.

And it’s okay, in that sense. The sin is not in finding this funny, but in belonging to the context itself. To follow Christ means withdrawing from this very worldly frame of reference, not arguing with it. This is highly contextual and culturally based humor. What makes us laugh is fundamentally contextual, because humor itself is nearly impossible to define. It’s a human response to a context. Step into that world just far enough to laugh, but realize it’s not your home. Don’t be confined by it.

Rather, try to understand how this video clip represents a very thin slice, a highly contextual manifestation of something much bigger. Those of us comfortable with being human, who are somewhat aware of our foibles and willing to live with it, are the ones most likely to have the freedom to laugh about some things in life, at least. It’s people who don’t laugh that are sick, twisted and perverted.

Within this broader expectation, we do find that most people who have the internal freedom to laugh will tend to exhibit a signature, a fairly consistent character to what they find funny. The one real immorality here is when people are offended at the expressed humor of another. Apparently that internal freedom is highly conditional in most of humanity, because the impulse to take offense at things others find funny, and in particular offense that they find it funny, reflects the internal mechanism of idolatry. It’s an attempt to demand control of things God placed under no human authority.

In that sense, taking offense at the laughter of another is blasphemy.

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Moral Clarity Cannot Be Objective

Posted on June 21, 2015 by ehurst

If you can understand the Ancient Near Eastern intellectual context of the Bible, then you easily realize that the Scripture aims to present God’s moral character. That it may also reveal a little about history and other types of data that humans tend to consider far more important is accidental. The Bible is not about facts and history. It is about the character of God, in the packaging God chose to reveal Himself.

A critical element in this revelation is the packaging. We are obliged to approach Him on His terms. He demands that we take the time to shed our intellectual and cultural biases. Not so we can pretend we are objective about this, but He demands that we embrace the cultural and intellectual background He designed for the purpose. Not every detail of that cultural and historical packaging, but we are commanded to make some effort to discern what matters. I assure you most humans today are not taking this challenge seriously. There is a pernicious tendency to assume our current cultural packaging is good, right, essential. We suffer a complete lack of comprehension that ours is unfit for understanding God’s moral character. The cultural context in which we live militantly denies such a possibility, so we end up with people insisting God has to meet them on their terms.

Sometimes we have to stop and point this out. Not just in my writing, but in my meat-space conversations, one of my favorite shock lines to get things out in the open is something like this: No on on this earth has any business ruling your life unless they are first related to you by blood or marriage. This is little more than a restatement of God’s moral laws. Most people can’t even imagine a world like that, and keep reading such a social and political context out of Scripture by reading their own secular Nation-State context back into it. Folks, the Treaty of Westphalia did not come from the Bible. That historical document represents the fundamental end of allowing people to obey God on this point. The treaty was not about self-determination of people, but asserted as orthodoxy the right of various plutocrat authorities to ignore tribal family government outside of their own ruling families.

In effect, all persons residing within the borders of some arbitrary territory became slaves of the ruling clique. The pretense was some idealized objective rule of law, but laws have to be enforced by people, and the people who have the power are the ones who decide what the law means and how it should be enforced. The residents were no long members of a family, but were subject to the interfering whims of some wholly unrelated and hostile bunch of folks who could not and would not suffer any accountability to God on the matter. They simply cut through all the inconveniences God designed to frustrate oppression. This is part of what the Tower of Babel was all about; God broke up centralized authority by making it nearly impossible for that context. It was a signal, which signal mankind has consistently rejected ever since. (We are headed for another round of God teaching the lesson, another experience of “Babylon is fallen!”)

You’ll notice how everything you read universally excoriates as wholly and utterly immoral the natural human instinct to cling to our mutually unintelligible languages and customs. Yet such “parochialism” is precisely what God commanded of the human race. Try telling that one in your next church gathering.

This is the background for understanding what God says is good, right and just in this fallen world. Not that we become political activists to demand our “right” to live in tribal communities, but that we develop so much of that as the context allows by creating a virtual clan in forming our churches. A church is fundamentally a household bound by covenant, by a shared spiritual DNA in Christ’s blood. In the Bible, covenant commitments took precedence over literal blood ties, though ideally they would coincide. On this earth we are bound first and foremost to our covenant with Christ, then with those who share that commitment. Yes, we vary our cooperation based on a thousand human factors, because the issue is not control in the first place, but communion and seeking God’s calling. We fully expect our world to be hostile. Worse, we also have a vast ocean of those who somehow still claim Christ while rejecting just about everything He taught.

It’s complex. Now let me recommend, if you have time for a relatively long read, a speech by Paul Craig Roberts. You would have to know this man does not share much of what I wrote above. Still, he offers some useful insights from within his own context. Being a fallen human, same as the rest of us, he carries a load of bias for which he will answer to God in due time. We recognize the very fact of bias itself and go into reading anything like this with a measure of cynical distrust. I suppose he would understand that on some level himself, but this is what caught my attention from the article:

Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neoconservative, penned the Wolfowitz Doctrine… Notice that Washington’s “first objective” is not peace, not prosperity, not human rights, not democracy, not justice. Washington’s “first objective” is world hegemony….

Washington’s position is not negotiable. Washington has no interest in compromising with Russia or China. Washington has no interest in any facts. Washington’s deal is this: “You can be part of our world order as our vassals, but not otherwise.”

Perhaps the statement is not so shocking in itself but it’s how Roberts brings us to that bottom line, offering documentation that bluntly states this as the truth. So you can ignore all the sweet sounding junk that newsreaders and loyal journalists tell you about US national goals in this world. It’s bullshit. Roberts goes on to show how the bankers find this policy consistent with their own dreams of global domination.

He also tries to whip on liberals and slings the neocon label around, but don’t be fooled. A lot of other labels would fit just as well. The plutocrats at the top are people and they are people who want money and power, and the issue is not their identity but their identifiable plans and goals. Calling this or that person a neocon is not a matter of some personal devotion to the philosophy, but the net result of their actions. Put them under pressure and few of them would cling to anything except their own personal interests.

This is, of course, the fundamental lie behind claims of objective reasoning as the driving force. Objective Truth is the false god of the Western world, a world that vehemently denies there is anything beyond this realm of existence. Because our loyalty is outside the human realm, we will find ourselves accused of the same moral weakness and lack of commitment to principle because most of the world presumes that morality is a matter of objective truth. As is frequently stated here, that is the single biggest lie that binds humanity today.

Morality is the Person of God Himself, dynamic and personal in nature.

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Psalm 55

Posted on June 20, 2015 by ehurst

Echoing similar thoughts to Psalm 41 and regardless of the specific context in David’s mind, this psalm best fits the betrayal of Ahitophel, David’s trusted adviser, during Absalom’s Revolt. Even in this, we should not read Western cultural meaning back into this song. David is not whining about some mere personal misfortune or political upset. He was always willing to surrender his throne at God’s command, and was fully aware when certain situations were the result of his own sin. Such had no bearing on the nature of this complaint.

Given the broader context of what we know of Ahitophel, we could suggest he was playing David for a sucker the whole time. He pretended to be a man after the king’s own heart, but it seems likely he was secretly advising Absalom, too. The moral implication is not that Ahitophel merely hedged his bets, but David makes him out the kind of man who preyed on him by deceit, doing his best to get David to spill his guts. Thus, few men could better estimate what David might do.

The opening is a grandly eloquent protocol of calling upon one’s feudal lord. While it was common enough for hucksters in the Ancient Near East to pour it on thick for trifles, they were typically obvious to anyone. There is nothing fake or routine here. Under the Lord’s jurisdiction, one is besieging another unjustly, and only the sovereign can understand the heart of the matter well enough to act.

David asks if the Lord would rather get him out of the way for awhile. He’s quite willing to leave behind everything and go back to his simple life on the run during the reign of Saul. When he asks God to frustrate the evil plot against him, this was consistent with what is recorded in David’s prayer regarding Ahitophel’s betrayal in 2 Samuel 15:31. He notes the violence in Jerusalem that followed, a vengeful and senseless slaughter that no man could justify before a living God.

Then he describes the alleged violator. God was a witness; all of this took place in the Presence of God Almighty, David reminds his Lord. Do not such people belong to Hell in the first place? So David requests God render them to the domain of Satan, the Eternal Jailer. But David insists that he will trust in God, not human talents or political maneuvering. God had never failed him in all his life. David lies prostrate before God, but men like Ahitophel never reverenced Him in the first place.

Then David lays out the details of his case against the traitor. Ahitophel enticed him to vulnerability, acting as a friend David willingly embraced and trusted. What a contrast to Jehovah! Don’t trust in men, but save your heart for God. He alone knows what is just and how to discern the hearts of men.

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