Political Dead Ends

Posted on March 26, 2014 by ehurst

My flesh is hesitant to discuss it, but my spirit drives through to the truth: Political activism is downright stupid.

Let’s talk reality, dear political activists. If all you want is a slice of the pie, you can get it. That means you have to compete and disenfranchise someone else, because the shares available are limited. You’ll either take your place at the trough among the other servants of evil, or you’ll go hungry. Change the system? That’s just too freaking braindead to justify taking you seriously, because you aren’t willing to do what it takes to really change anything.

So, let’s say for example you want to press forward with something like the old Occupy movement. You plan to have people gather in mass numbers in peaceful protests, crowding into various symbolic places and refusing to leave. You want to “scare” the 1% folks with your ability to marshal and offer some vague threat to their position and power.

Let’s presume for a moment that this somehow has a real effect. What’s the mechanism for change? How do you get them to let go of their power? Are you simply pissed that someone has the audacity to use the current system to their personal advantage? Are you so utterly stupid as to think human nature can be adjusted based on some dream of peaceful coexistence and appeal to their better nature? You deserve to starve, you fraudulent waste of oxygen. However, I wonder if you see past your anger and impatience at these rich oppressors to how you would remove them from power. Do you even know much about the system that keeps them there? Are you prepared to take over, because I can guarantee you they won’t simply shake in their boots and dismantle the system for you. What stands behind them?

That’s why it’s a pipe-dream. Yeah, it’s fun and entertaining, and you’ll feel good about yourself and the fight for moral good, as you imagine it could be. But if you understood any part of what holds it all together, your tactics would be totally different. What you might gain is attention and some superficial changes that cynically pretend to accede to your demands, but nothing fundamental will be different.

Do not underestimate their willingness to see you all slaughtered. The only reason they haven’t already done so is because it costs money. They are seeking the lowest cost to themselves in keeping things where they want it. Yes, there will be some moral outrage if they do that, but as long as the only real loss is a few numbers in electronic banking accounts due to a few lawsuits, the system is working just fine for them. Guess where that settlement money is coming from? The folks you pretend to represent, not the 1%. You might be skimming off a little from their broader source of revenue at best. It’s not the quickly inflating dollar figures that bother them. It’s the system that serves their desires. Screaming at materialism doesn’t make it go away.

And if all you want is to root out some evil folks and put in their place your own, forget it. Different ideas about how to distribute the mass of human productivity will only go so far before the people are bought off or removed again from the system. Musical chairs might get you a cake, but they won’t throw away the chairs or the game. You are still just kids being pacified. You aren’t reckoning with the people who keep this whole thing in place. If the system cannot seduce you, it will chew you up and spit you out.

Real change only comes when you kill the people who actually run things. Not all of them, of course, but a whole lot more than you might imagine. You still have no idea who they are. It’s not as if you couldn’t find out, but your silly posturing in naming a few with dark tales of plutocrat intrigue is not going to remove them from power. You’ll have to assemble an army of elite assassins who can’t be bought, and they’ll have to employ tools you can’t imagine and kill an awful lot of people in a short time.

Then you’ll have to implement something totally different, which means fighting a mass of humanity who don’t like change. That means facing protests worse than the ones you are willing to engage yourselves right now. Are you ready to kill a bunch of them, too? Do you imagine you can pacify all that with simple education? That’s been tried, and the only thing that works is a multi-generational program of religious structure. How do you think we got into this mess in the first place? Humans are inherently religious and always will be, so if you don’t give them good religion, you’ll end up with lots of bad ones.

It has nothing to do with positive vibes and all that garbage. Don’t be so stupid as to imagine that hasn’t been tried with endless flavors of failure. It didn’t fail because someone didn’t get the formula quite right; it failed because the inputs available cannot possibly bring forth the outputs you seek. All that hope and dream stuff can work, but not for the goals you imagine are worthy. Your single greatest mistake is assuming that changing the political situation can possibly bring good. That is, so long as you are willing to let the global nation-state system exist, then nothing has changed. If you aren’t willing to turn civilization itself upside down and bring about a global revolution in how people live, things will not be any different in the future. And I’m willing to bet what really can work, what has worked for thousands of years of human history, is unacceptable to you. The majority of you insist we can have it all, keeping all our modern conveniences and style of life with everyone singing Kumbaya. Peace and prosperity arises from a fundamental moral code woven into the universe, and you don’t have a clue about that code.

You aren’t smart enough to change the world.

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Bits & Pieces 15

Posted on March 25, 2014 by ehurst

I really don’t like gatekeepers when it comes to information. I recognize the necessity of paying to get online and that the Internet would not exist without all that expensive hardware. However, the virtual world is itself an entirely different thing. So long as the same protocols are used, it won’t matter if you replace all the hardware and use a different technology for networking. Once you breathe life into it, the Net takes on a separate life of its own. The barriers to wide open access are all entirely artificial; sooner or later someone will breach them all.

Whether Greenwald choose it consciously or not, his game with allowing little bits of the documents to dribble out serves the purpose of keeping everyone fearful and leaves the NSA completely in control. Snowden made a huge, massive mistake. Allowing someone to become gatekeeper of all that stuff merely keeps the spooks safe in their position of power.

Truth is a Person. Truth is not the sum or summation of all facts, known or undiscovered. Get it all and you still won’t have truth. Nor can you abstract all knowledge — past, present and future — and arrive at truth. Truth is still a living being rooted outside of our universe, yet reaching out to touch each of us. Truth will of necessity become known to mankind only through people who express the Person of God.

I don’t consider people themselves inherently evil so much as just fools serving evil purposes. I don’t hate policemen, but I’d never trust them. Individual officers could work to gain my trust, same as anyone else. However, that badge tends to represent a purpose at odds with moral justice. It’s the same with any other government function. We know that what God said is utterly foreign to our world, so we don’t really expect much. We know what God requires of us, and the better we understand His call, the easier it is to let stuff slide that really doesn’t matter. So we tend to go along with government abuses so long as they don’t seriously hinder some imperative from God.

Activists are silly if they keep using computer OSes that are wide open to manipulation. Rudkowski isn’t the only guy to be hit with planted evidence of crimes. A primary MO of various government agencies is to get one of their spooks to plant something like child porn on a system used by some troublemaker. However, it’s been proven that this only happens on Windows computers, and perhaps once on a Mac. To my knowledge, they haven’t been able to do it with a properly configured Linux system. Linux is not holy and righteous; it’s just a much harder target.

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Sample Chapter from AI’s Children

Posted on March 24, 2014 by ehurst

In which I begin forming the nemesis to the children; you need not take seriously what these people believe about themselves.

The elder sage pulled him aside in the foyer of the temple academy. Despite the pressing need to catch the train back to his quarters, he would never dream of inconveniencing the elder. He would rather miss the train and walk the whole way; such was his devotion to their ways.
While it was hardly his native tongue, the old man affected the speech pattern of those long dead in the soft sounds of their obscure religious language. “Tell me what you know of this Brotherhood, Jesse.”

It was the nickname by which only those in the temple academy knew him. “Sir, I would imagine I know less about it than you. It’s not exactly a secret society, just exceedingly difficult to penetrate. It’s also not a cult, but more like a family, yet few of them share any DNA or cultural heritage. It seems to me the primary barrier to infiltration is the truly odd philosophy they espouse.”

The elder was quick. “Our council has for generations been connoisseurs of human philosophies, going back into the mists of ancient history. Is it so far outside our range of experience?”

Jesse was never sure if the elder was testing him or actually seeking information. Such was the way of things in the Council. “Our ways are easily superior to theirs.” It was a verbal genuflection. “They have latched onto something we found inadequate long ago. But no one in the Council living today has encountered such a philosophy. Reading back in the archives, it seems much more challenging to grasp than some of the dead languages that we study in seeking to understand all human history.”

The elder man’s face offered a hint of mild reproof. “No one questions your devotion to the Council. But you are currently the point man in cracking this puzzle, and I want to know what these people are up to. What is their agenda? Are they a threat, a possible resource, something of both? They clearly possess knowledge and technology we can use, but it seems they are holding out on us. They exchanged some of their technology for policy compromises from the government, yet the government scientists and the military,” with a knowing look at Jesse, “have been unable to fathom the full scope of what they have done. Is their science all that advanced and difficult to understand? There’s no harm in letting them cling to their silly ways, but we cannot afford to let stand any entity that has any leverage at all over the government. Your mission is to identify the fulcrum and remove it.”

“I embrace the mission, sir.” Jesse tilted his head forward just enough to represent a symbolic bowing. “We have two men working even now to infiltrate.”

The sage nodded somewhat impatiently. “No women? Are they so saintly as to resist all temptation to vice?”

“This Brotherhood pretends to hold to some thin slice of our ancient truths. They do not accept the social orthodoxy of gender equality, at least in terms of decision making. We have already encountered their teaching on this, but it’s not the same as the false masculinity we promote among the sheep. It’s not simply reactionary to the female emancipation we also promote to keep them distracted. Rather, it’s something much older, more like shepherding. I believe we may be seeing a revival of things we once thought dead.”

The intensity was undisguised by the soft sounds the elder’s voice made. “This time we cannot afford to let them fester for centuries before we subvert the nature of their identity. We must entangle them quickly. Even at the cost of actually letting them gain a few converts from the institutions we control, we cannot let them remain outside our reach. Discover what binds them together and weaken it. Create avenues of compromise to their core existence. If there is nothing they want, then stir a sense of wanting so we can make them dependent.”

Jesse bowed his head more deeply this time and said nothing.

The elder went on, “As for this supposed advanced technology? We aren’t fools; no genie can be put back into the bottle. But if we cannot find the key, the Tetragrammaton they use to control this, then we may well have to destroy them and let their secret die with them. This is our world, and we will not surrender so much as a gnat’s footprint to anyone.”

Despite the muffling effect of the ritual drapery in the foyer, the soft whispers of the elder sage echoed like an earthquake in Jesse’s mind. The aftershocks continued to rattle him between those few moments he could steal away from his duties to gather with his people in the temple, temblors no one but Jesse felt when he wore his adjutant’s uniform. The elder said he was the steel prow pushing aside the storms that gathered over his people always.

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Taming Kubuntu

Posted on March 23, 2014 by ehurst

Whew! It’s too long to post here on the blog, so I have a draft version in good ol’ HTML here (gone now). Just click the link and you should get a fairly long tutorial. I need feeback. This will eventually be another of my books.

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Marx, Strauss and Mass Manipulation

Posted on March 23, 2014 by ehurst

What do you say to a man born and raised on the East Coast who is a rabid fan of some West Coast football team?

There are a lot more of such people than you might expect. Throughout history it has been easy to find “traitors” in very large numbers who were cheerleaders for the enemies of their neighbors. Not just paid activists, but true believers that the other side really does have the right answer and a divine appointment to rule.

Perhaps you are familiar with Leo Strauss and his neocon theories. In his work as a professor of political theory, he made it very clear that it didn’t matter what his religion was. What mattered is that the population as a whole be taught to believe in religion because that was how you manipulate them into doing what’s best for mankind. His theories do present a very strong viewpoint of what is best for humanity, and it starts with a massive deep layer of deception. Instead of simply assuming people are stupid, it was important to make them stupid. His disciples are now sprinkled among the top offices of US government.

It was totally elitist and no bones about it. Such an approach is hardly new. While it’s possible to trace the threads of his ideas back through history, what matters is that he was preceded in this by the founder of the erstwhile opposing political theory: Karl Marx.

If you examine the full range of things Marx wrote and records of his conversations with people, you discover he hardly believed in communism himself. Rather, it was a theory he promoted as an elitist steering mechanism to weaken the unity of the population. He wanted the European governments destabilized, not because it would lead to some communist Utopia, but because it meant some group he favored would gain more power than they had. Marx was a brilliant political manipulator serving a group who despised humanity at large. (And he stole his communist theories from someone else.)

Here’s the thing: Both Marx and Strauss were serving the interests of the same bunch of plutocrats. It won’t help much to name them because the plutocrats themselves have worked hard to confuse the labeling. That’s why I use the generic term “Cabal.” Both the current conservative and progressive political activists in the US today are serving the same end by creating an atmosphere of instability and rivalry over things that only appear to matter.

It’s all the same bunch of people at the top steering this stuff to keep us riled up. Most of what really matters never appears in the campaign sloganeering. Everyone hypes the cheer-leading and rivalry because it’s profitable for the party leaders who then gather at some posh private dinner and script the next drama for public consumption.

We who serve Christ have no intention of ruling anyone on this earth. We willingly tell the whole truth to anyone who will listen. There is no secret agenda; those who espouse one are not a part of us. We aren’t trying to herd people into a fake psychological conversion, as if that somehow changes eternal reality. We display the joys of Heaven to see who will be attracted in hopes we can convince them take a taste for themselves.

We don’t have a team in the game.

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Job 32

Posted on March 22, 2014 by ehurst

People in the Ancient Near East would recognize that most moral questions can be answered differently on different levels. They were untroubled by apparent paradoxes and reversals of good and evil when viewing the exact same issue from different contexts. Sin was seldom black and white in their world, and seldom all that simple in Scripture. Western absolutism and simplistic moral understanding is closer to what the trio thought than it is to what God said in His Word.

This fellow arose from the Tribe of Buz, living on the border of Edom. Elihu observed proper protocol and waited his turn, which was last in line because he was the youngest. The narrative tells us he was angry with the three men for being such idiots, but angry with Job for partly missing the whole point. When Job allowed the trio to provoke him, his answer went off course. Job felt compelled to defend himself when he should have set that question aside and focused on their false ideas about God.

We note this younger man is careful to clear the path for his bellyful of impatience. Then he again reminds all who listen that he is not taking sides with any human, but with God, as he sees it.

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Saturday Report — 22 March 2014

Posted on March 22, 2014 by ehurst

The second book in The Brotherhood series is taking a little longer to get rolling. The story is more difficult, as I’m trying to spread it among a trio of primary characters and creating some bad guys with more substance. As you might expect, I’m promoting my favorite wild ideas about epistemology and Law. At any rate, this one will take a little longer to write, and I’ve only gotten a couple of chapters since publishing the first.

A recurring theme in all of my writing is the vast gulf of understanding between us and the rest of the world. Sometimes it’s just the usual partisan idiocy. A particular democrat activist I know is actually proclaiming that the administration is really getting to Putin, seriously causing trouble for the Russians. All I can do is note how some people will deceive themselves in all sorts of ways to cling to some precious lie. Most of those precious lies are connected, even when it appears they conflict. They all assume the same basic deceptions about humanity and human nature. I don’t expect my books to solve that problem. I expect my books to help a few people who are searching for the truth, not a new distraction.

On the other end of the false spectrum of political opinion, I see lots of people saying crazy things about the plutocrats’ plans for us. Does anyone recall back in the 1980s when a right-wing activist was making all this noise about having seen multicolored currency at the US Mint? It was a big hullabaloo about how the US government was planning to devalue the dollar and replace it with a new currency at about 10 to 1. The facts? The US Mint prints the currency for a lot of other countries. What that man saw was a pallet of foreign currency and blew it all out of proportion and mixed it with a bunch of standard conspiracy crap. A large number of standard theories are kept alive, but somehow they never seem to come true.

Folks, we are headed for a rough patch here. I can’t tell you definitively that the US will be destroyed this time around, only that God eventually will do that. His plans on that level are seldom revealed to us in advance. Just my own prophetic warnings alone are sufficient to satisfy His promises to call His people back to holiness; there are others offering warnings that get far better publicity. Sooner or later every human government is destroyed and replaced. How much change does it take before we call it something new, regardless of whether the label has changed? My point is that the US has been particularly egregious in flouting God’s Laws, so we should expect to have a rougher time than most other nations.

Will the dollar collapse? Eventually. Will there be chaos, starvation and blood in the streets? In some places, most likely large cities. But you knew that already. Any concentration of population and wealth can survive only with a heavy life-support system. The farther a city has to reach to find the necessities of life, the more fragile that life becomes. That’s not news. What’s news is that God will add in all His fine handiwork along with the typical human entropy: earthquakes, radical shifts in weather, diseases, etc. Americans have earned it. All the great and good things we do make not a bit of difference if we carry on in open rejection of fundamental Laws of Creation. Despite the imagery of God weighing out the good and bad, that only applies if you build on a just foundation. Western Civilization is inherently unjust, so we lose on that one.

Again, the plutocrats are not one big united team. Some want to slaughter us, some want to enslave us, some want other things entirely. There are partisan agendas and different religions among them. Their grip on human politics is tenuous despite their mighty efforts to coordinate. The whole thing has already begun to rupture. That’s why things are going to be rough; there’s a new generation of plutocrats and they aren’t all buying into the heavy legacy of their past. Even when they do, a generational shift in thinking is unavoidable. They are still humans with very real limits. Their greatest power is in secrecy and that’s been ripped to shreds by the Internet and crowd-sourced intelligence. Look at all the struggle they’ve had keeping the truth buried under vast loads of propaganda. That’s expensive.

There is no single answer, no one means of countering their efforts. We all have our own divine calling. In the future here on this blog you’ll read more of the same stuff. I’ll be working on a project to make the path from Windows to Linux a lot shorter. This calls for testing the latest Kubuntu offering. I happen to think that when Ubuntu dropped full official support for the Kubuntu/KDE branch, it set the K folks free to avoid the more onerous new tricks Canonical started pushing on their users. I’ll be playing with the beta release for 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) and preparing to write a guide that will allow bewildered Windows refugees a sane approach to migration. Part of the reason is that Debian itself doesn’t have an auto-update feature; Kubuntu will handle more stuff with less fuss. Windows folks can keep most of their habits and not come to harm.

And I’ll keep writing about the different worldview in my fiction, self-help and Bible studies.

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Quantum Privacy

Posted on March 21, 2014 by ehurst

If you render it into a digital format, it’s public domain.

When the only thing protecting you is government policy, you have no protection at all. The mere existence of any entity’s access means it will be used and abused. It’s not so much that government employees are immoral, but that their individual moral barriers are always low in areas where the system demands they be. A government employee possessed of high moral standards against government intrusion will be out of a job sooner or later.

Technology? The Internet has virtually no inherent ability to maintain your privacy. It was not designed for secrecy, either. The problem is that the information is accessible even after it has been encrypted. The existence of a networking link to any machine containing data is an invitation to snoop. Transmitting it might as well be broadcasting.

If you use encryption and password locking, you have some slim hope of keeping it private/secret. The trick after that is keeping things off the radar. If someone wants it bad enough, they are likely to eventually crack it. What protects most of us is the vast volume of data, and that most of it is of no interest to those who can crack it.

In quantum moral terms, you should never pretend that you have any real control over anything digitized. Government snooping is something you should take for granted. Private snooping is but a different flavor of the same thing. Encryption merely raises the price tag on access; complete denial simply does not exist. This is the primary flaw in government access control policies: They seldom formulate plans for the inevitable disclosure. Don’t make that mistake. Assume eventual disclosure of everything.

All this huff and puff about invasion of privacy/secrecy is egregiously dishonest, no more than the silliest acts of kids who say, “Let’s pretend.” Stop pretending.

It’s the same with any calculus for connecting to the Internet in the first place. You’d be a fool to count on your Windows OS and protective software to protect your privacy. Most of the threats you face are those randomly aimed at known vulnerabilities in the system almost everybody else is using. There are numerous prosperous companies and individuals doing nothing more than discovering and selling information about Windows vulnerabilities that remain unknown to Microsoft and unpatched. There is some reason to believe Microsoft leaves some of those doors open intentionally. MS owns the OS; you are just renting a copy. They retain the power and legal right to disable it any time they choose for no reason at all.

On top of the inherent insecurity of Windows, even the options to harden the system are well-hidden and never turned on by default. It requires a highly specialized knowledge to engage even the simplest low levels of genuine system security on Windows.

Other operating systems will make your computer a harder target. Not only are they inherently more difficult to crack, but the extra measures of security are often presented in-your-face in the process of installing it. But because humans are writing the software, security will always be relative. Other OSes have their own on-going discovery of security holes. For the most part, Open Source software tends to be fixed more quickly because the entire process is so very public. Shame is a powerful motivator.

You’ll need to balance between the collection of reasons and needs for which you use a computer versus the risk of cracking and intrusion by governments and private enterprise, along with criminal interests. Snooping will happen because the Internet is simply not designed for privacy. Get over it.

You want privacy? Reconstruct the tribal social structure where your whole clan can deny physical access to the enclave, and make your communications face-to-face. Otherwise, privacy is just a fable — all the more so on the Internet.

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Idolatry of Reason

Posted on March 20, 2014 by ehurst

Call it what you like; divine moral justice is nearly impossible to put into words.

We can characterize it. That’s what parabolic language is for and Jesus used parables as the primary means to teaching. People whose spirits are alive and aware will recognize the truth within characterizations, but their minds will struggle some. People whose spirits are dead have no clue.

We can abstract it. We can discern an application that fits the context. It works a whole lot better if we’ve invested ourselves in training our minds to obey the spirit. We come into this with our minds highly conditioned in every direction except the right one. So we spend most of our time simply teaching our minds what is not justice. That’s a big part of what is meant by “tearing down strongholds” — impediments within our souls built on the shifting sands of human awareness without the spirit.

This is the religion I teach here. You fill in the intellectual content from your own interaction with the moral truth woven into our universe. It is not possible to offer a unified body of propositional truth because such things are inherently derived, not received. What is received from above can only lodge in your spirit, which is far above your intellect and not directly connected. The assumption that your derived “truth” is somehow universal is the worst damned nonsense that ever arose from human thought to imprison the truth.

It’s not as there are no strong statements that can be applied to everyone, but Scripture of itself and within its own context is more than enough of that. To extrapolate is blasphemous, if you attempt to apply that extrapolation beyond your own personal domain. Our single biggest problem in churchianity is people refusing to observe the limits on their intellect. Keeping your reason on the throne is kicking God out because human reason is fallen, too. Elevating reason to a position of infallibility is just an excuse for self-idolatry.

The pinnacle of revelation was a human being who embodied the model of moral purity. We would naturally debate and even dispute how to apply what we learn from Him, but if we neglect the basic understanding that you cannot run Him through a grinder to spit out mere intellectual principles, then we cannot pretend to follow Him. He was not a collection of ideas and ideals, but a person who was a close as any human could get to the Divine Person.

Truth is a Person.

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Moving from Windows

Posted on March 19, 2014 by ehurst

After some feedback from users who are migrating from Windows to Linux, I realize XFCE probably isn’t the best choice for most of them. So after a little chatter here with someone about my various desktop concerns, I think I’ll be recommending most folks use KDE. To be honest, it’s about as close as you’ll get, demanding the fewest adaptations for the user.

I do think it’s best to change the defaults. For example, one of the biggest headaches from anyone who isn’t a fan boy is the Panel. It really needs taming, so I recommend this Plasma theme which should restore some sanity. It requires you understand how to unzip it and move the folder into your home file system:

~/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/

That way you can choose it as your “Workspace Theme” and maybe get some work done. And since most folks like having icons on the desktop, I recommend you right click on the wallpaper and select “Desktop Settings” and change the Layout to “Folder view”. Otherwise your icons will be stuck in some little window on the desktop and it tends to hide itself from time to time.

The primary problem with KDE is there are way too many settings exposed to users who lack the experience. KMail, for example, is not at all self-explanatory and it does require some experience and expertise. However, it is by far one of the best email clients, bar none. Another nifty trick is that the file manager (Dolphin) can connect to your Windows boxes on the same network. Just click on the network links and work your way down to the machine in question and be ready to log in.

So if you are migrating from Windows to Linux in keeping with my information activist urging, I recommend you pick Debian with the KDE desktop, Kubuntu, or one of the others that appeals to you. If you choose Debian I’ll be glad to help you, and you can ask all the questions you need. For Debian go here and select debian-7.4.0-i386-kde-CD-1.iso.

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