The Power of Transparency

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

This is a distinctly Hebrew concept, though it is recognized in other cultures. In Hebrew intellectual traditions, the heart is the seat of the will, the seat of your commitments. It is not a metaphor for your emotions or feelings; that would be the bowels (“belly”) in Hebrew thinking. The heart is where you find your convictions. The first and biggest step toward inner peace is conscious recognition of what holds you; you hold your opinions, but your convictions hold you. The first step in adjusting your moral consciousness is recognizing where you are in the first place. Any degree of blindness will lead to misguided attempts to fix things that aren’t broken in your soul, never fixing the things that are.

Once you clarify your own true value system, you are in a position to correct any flaws. Without that clarity, nothing can possibly change. In the opening quote above, Jesus calls for people to spend some time bouncing things off their own commitments until they understand what’s in their hearts. What does it take to be consistent to your own true self?

Purity means purging conflicts. It means digging around in the roots of your soul until you know enough to throw aside false beliefs. This has nothing to do with what’s actually factual or true in some objective sense; that’s a chimera. This is all about what is really in you. Until you cast off the externally induced shame and cultural mythology, you can’t possibly understand what really drives you. The whole point is ripping pretense to shreds and letting it fall away, then embracing what you find as your true self.

Only then can you bring it to feet of Christ and begin communion with Him that brings about a change. The power to transform is not in changing the world; God alone does that. The power to transform is in changing you. That power remains hidden as mere potential so long as you are blind to your true nature. Only with clarity and conscious recognition can the power of truth come to life. I get so tired of people talking about the power of the Scripture, as if quoting the words in any particular language will change the universe. No; the change that you seek is in you. The words mean nothing until you are standing in purity of heart. You can’t build a religion that’s real, you can’t build a life free or neurosis, you can’t touch your world for His glory until you are transparent. The whole point is to move you into Heaven; the world around you cannot ever go there.

It’s a process which begins with some moment of truth. You look inside and realize there is a power to change, but only when you bring an undivided loyalty to the One who made you. You have to accept what He has done and embrace it. That’s the only way His revelation can have any meaning.

Scripture is just ink on paper, electrons on a screen or sound vibrations in the air, but it’s not the Word of God until it is incarnated in your true nature.

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Job 6

Job addresses his friends together as if they had all agreed with the words of Eliphaz. What kind of arrogance is it that dismisses the suffering of another simply because one feels no pain? Job begins by reasserting that this is no minor discomfort as Eliphaz suggests. Job’s words seemed a little extravagant in his sorrow because he actually couldn’t begin to tell how bad it was. To our Western minds it seems Job is accusing God of targeting him unfairly, but that’s the wrong emphasis. The point is how severe and relentless is the suffering because it’s not something cooked up in this world, but clearly the result of events outside this world. This is truly deep suffering.

Animals don’t complain when they have everything they need. They don’t make a lot of noise for no reason. So distracting is this whole experience that Job can hardly eat. The finest cuisine seems tasteless to him. What would be the point if all food is uniformly unpleasant? Even that simple joy is denied him.

Job would be glad to embrace the mortality of which Eliphaz spoke. Dying would be a relief, at least. It’s a puzzle why God prolongs Job’s life with all this sorrow. If he simply knew it was coming in due time, he would be able to rejoice in the midst of pain. But because he knows he has not defied God’s revelation, Job worries death will remain far from him. How does a man bear such things? Job admits he’s whining because it hurts so much.

But adding insult to injury, his friends pick at him as if it was all his own fault. Not a single tear was shed. It was like a wandering caravan coming to look for a stream bed that was dryer than the surrounding hills. It’s hard to picture the sense of disappointment having come so far out of their way to a place where they should have surely found some relief. Job has none from his dearest friends, either. Were they afraid God would do the same to them if they showed any sympathy for Job? Has he requested anything from them that would compromise their own sense of safety? Was their own righteousness so very fragile?

Yet for their sharpness of tongue, they could produce no evidence that Job had sinned. Their logical arguments were empty and missing the facts of the case. Their pitiful theology had huge holes in it. All they’ve done is pick at his words, not beginning to address reality. That sort of cheap moral reasoning would lead them to casting lots to divvy up homeless orphans because there’s no one to protect them, or auction off your friends to slavery because of a small debt. This is not the argument of someone who actually cares about people; it’s a lifeless legalism.

Had they paid any attention at all how he must have felt? Had they given a moment’s real consideration to what was happening before their very eyes? This was Job the Righteous they were discussing with such glib dismissal.

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Moral Transparency Online

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: You cannot have privacy online.

It’s the nature of the beast. Sure, you can encrypt and make it difficult, but that’s about the same as any lock on any door — it only keeps the decent people honest. Those determined to get in will do so. Privacy isn’t about secrecy; it’s simply keeping your clothes on among folks with no business seeing your naked body, or in contexts where nudity is a problem.

Let me settle the burning question in the minds of those seeking any chink in the armor: I find nudity annoying for the most part. I don’t care for public displays; there’s something fundamentally disturbing about that. We might debate how much is too much, but the principle stands on its own. A private unveiling in one thing; open flashing is revolting. When you spend time exploring your own heart and learning your own secret desires, it’s easier to come to terms with God’s moral demands and actually live them.

The metaphor of nudity applies widely. When you engage the Internet, you are virtually nude. It’s not a matter of keeping your real identity secret; you couldn’t carry it into the virtual world in the first place. It’s not like the real world in that respect. You are whom you are at the moment, but your identity will always be an artifact of those you encounter, and those who pay any attention at all to you. That can easily mean a very real friendship with the person on the other end, but only if some element of your online presence is transparent in terms of you having a clear vision of why you are there as a human being.

You have to meet the virtual world on its own terms. A basic fact: If you digitize it, anyone can see it. Transmission across the network is de facto exposure. You have to adjust your thinking and your reactions; you have to adopt the cultural mythology that belongs to the virtual world. You may have noticed we have made no conscious effort to do this, so it’s currently shaped by those who built the darn thing and keep it working. Those folks are seldom average Joes and Janes; they are mostly some truly different folks. Many of them are total social failures in meat space and found themselves at home in virtual reality. A significant portion of them are seeking revenge for what they view as persecution in meat space for being different. Along with them is a fat layer of predatory marketers who recognize no boundaries in the first place, but they can get away with even more online than they could in meat space.

While the predatory souls currently have serious leverage in things online, they can’t keep it if the rest of us learn our way around. Once we adopt the a proper understanding of how things work, we can build a new civilization consciously. We don’t have to let it take shape in the hands of those hostile to our interests. It certainly won’t shape itself. But we do have to think about this and stop imagining we can drag our meat space habits and thinking into cyberspace.

For example, given the complete insanity of imagining anything I do online could be private, I simply shape my activities to match the reality. In one sense, I could care less if the NSA or some other entity has a bug on my computer, capturing my behavior and looking over my shoulder, as it were. As long as their activities don’t interfere with mine, it’s a fine coexistence. I come to the Net for a certain purpose and calling. I’ll fight to keep that purpose alive, but there’s little I can do about snooping. So by operating consciously in transparency, there is no threat. I need only fight the advertising malware and other hindrances, and would never pretend what I do is private.

Keep your privates offline.

It’s really that simple. If you are vapid enough to show your genitals in public, then feel free to send your naked selfies across the Net. Just don’t complain when they are held up to the public eye. Our problem is not the lack of network security; our problem is our moral insecurity and our refusal to understand reality.

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Quantum Morality and the NSA

Life sucks and then you die.

If you understand anything at all about the God of the Bible, dying is a time to rejoice. We do not place any value on our lives here in this world. We are here because Our Lord wants to use us for His glory. He knows first hand what it’s like to suffer here, and He has provided the means and desire to leave and be with Him. Until then, we cling to His revelation about how to make the most of things.

That’s what my blather about quantum morality should show — you have to understand things on multiple levels at the same time. We know most of humanity shares none of our hope for what comes beyond death. We know humanity as a whole cannot comprehend how we face suffering and sorrow with joy that drives us back into our Savior’s arms. We know that our true understanding of His life on this earth means chasing down multiple threads of paradoxical and symbolic logic and seeing how the same fact can be three kinds of bad and four kinds of good. We understand how those conflicting evaluations may have little to do with what God wants from us in any given context.

We understand how our generation cannot comprehend any of that. We understand how Western Civilization is the product of Hell, a means to enslave mankind under a false perspective. That false perspective steers virtually the entire purpose and activity of our US government. It has nothing to do with whether genuine believers and followers of Christ are employed in the various positions in our government offices. Most Western Christians are also captive to that false perception. There’s no reason for hostility, but sorrow and pity for what these fools are hoping to gain. They have turned away from all the blessings of moral truth and have embraced every lie imaginable.

I mentioned yesterday that the US government is actually multiple governments competing for the power and spoils of a system that is hopeless. Right now, our government’s official policy regarding Syria and all those military assets sitting near there reflect for the most part the interests of faceless plutocrats, essentially bankers and financiers. They aren’t worried about whether Russia will fight our troops and whether it might start WW3, because they figure they’ll be fine either way.

Whether knowingly or not, the NSA as a whole serves the purposes of those same plutocrats. They don’t give a rat’s ass about you and I. A great many of the folks there probably believe it’s all in our best interests. But their primary mission is scooping up all the data which might possibly be of interest to the plutocrats and keeping anyone else from accessing that data. They process the data to identify threats to the plutocrats. If the threat is something they can attack directly themselves using information as a weapon, they’ll do it. Otherwise, they’ll pass to other agencies something about the threat, such information as would cause them to take action. They seek to control the entire narrative. It has nothing to do with truth or falsehood; it’s just information processing.

From our Father’s moral character revealed in His Word, we know this dehumanizes people. That is all we have to know to understand we should treat the NSA as evil. Not an enemy we fight; that’s not how we operate. We go to Our Father’s throne and seek His face, asking how He wants us to handle them within our individual callings. The real business of crushing them is His business. God judges evil in His wrath; we need to know only how we are to act for His glory.

For me, trying to avoid their snooping is pointless. If they seek to harm me for any reason, they have to pass my Father’s hand. It may well turn into a Job experience; that’s not for me to say. The point is that my God is sovereign. What comes into my life in pursuit of His glory is for His glory. Only to the degree I have fallen short of His glory should I need to fear the consequences. Even then, His mercy calls to me daily and I can see His healing hands on things I could never touch. I strive to view it all from His moral perspective. When the time comes in God’s plans, the NSA will destroy itself along with the rest of the US government system and everything in it. They don’t have a clue what matters; the truth has always been in plain sight and no one can hide it from God’s eyes or His revealing hand.

We know the secrets and mysteries that really matter, the stuff the NSA is incapable of seeing, much less recording and hiding. Let’s not lose our focus on what God says really matters.

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God Favors the Russians?

Let’s keep this on track: The US is utterly and irretrievably evil. You can discern that if you understand God’s Laws within their own context. You can discern that if you can compare the ideals and blather against the real actions and lies. And if you know much about the broader human context and social sciences, you can see the US is doomed, crumbling from within. As a political entity, it cannot be saved.

While I differentiate between the US government and her citizens, that’s not to say the American people are any angels, either. Still, we are talking about the institution of government. It has no moral grounds for expecting anything but hostility from both citizens and foreigners. Anyone who’s paying attention knows the US people as a whole are not in favor of what our government is doing for the most part. No one is surprised that the rest of the world, both governments and citizens, hates the US government, too.

So, it makes little difference whether Wikileaks, Assange, Snowden and Greenwald are red agents of the Ruskies or simply independent agents for transparency as they claim. It’s not as if I’m suggesting Russia is God’s country. I will most certainly affirm Russia’s government is just a bit closer to God’s Laws than ours. That’s not saying much, since ours is so horrendous.

Most modern governments are shot through with vast layers of deception and double-dealing, using front groups, false flag operations, etc. What we see right now is how God Himself is attacking the US by ripping the cover off our filthy psychopathic rulers. His plans for Russia are another matter entirely and I’m not called to prophesy about that. With tens of thousands of actual payroll employees and countless contractors working alongside them, the NSA is too complex to describe as totally evil or good. They do not work for the citizens; so much is patently obvious. Whether they should is another question, but their whole business is deception, so you should never trust anyone who claims to represent their point of view. Their size and power makes them a de facto government in themselves; one of several entangled in what we think of as our federal government. We don’t really have a single government, to be honest. It has nothing to do with the standard partisan theatrics, either.

Nobody is going to reveal the facts. We will probably never know the whole story about any human event so long as we are human ourselves. That’s the whole point of this blog: The most important issue is the moral character of God at work in our world. We are permitted to see only what He shows us individually. I can only tell you what God shows me; I am obliged to share it here even if my eyes are the only ones to see the words. What I see is God’s wrath all over the US as a whole and most folks who come out alive will still have no clue what happened.

20committee, feel free to delete my track back.

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Ego and Accountability

Be yourself; stop demanding the world be you.

I saw it again today — solipsism syndrome in action. This isn’t the philosophical position you may have read about, but a psychological loss of ego boundaries. Infants are born incapable of differentiating themselves from the universe. When they are hungry, the whole universe is hungry. What they want the universe wants. It’s why little kids insist some small animal wants the kid to hold it, while we watch the animal desperately clawing to get away. It’s normal for children and we strive to teach them, often by making them experience what they have done to others.

We know that current social trends in America foster the solipsism syndrome. There can be no external standard applied to her/him, no accountability even as she/he holds the entire world accountable to her/his wishes. You’ll find it more often among females than males because it’s exacerbated by feminism. It sneaks into the churches via highly evolved doctrines about charity and what’s in someone’s best interest. It creates a smug superiority and damns American Christianity.

The quintessential type is a young mother who smothers her kids and demands they conform instantly, while making no effort to understand why they do what they do. That’s because the mother is simply a bigger kid, basically a bully. Everything she wants is “common sense” and everything she doesn’t want is inherently evil by definition, even when the definition changes with the moment. “How could you possibly want something different from what I want?” We call this an extreme case of projection: Projecting one’s own thoughts onto others. There is a complete failure to develop ego boundaries, even while denying responsibility to any external standards. She never does anything wrong, so she seldom apologizes without a seriously poor job of faking it. This is the kind of young mother who often riles her husband and can’t possibly imagine why he’s angry. She’s just a poor victim of his violent nature, never noticing how she has prodded him every possible way.

Churches are loaded with women like that, but the ones outside the church tend to be more honest about it, more bold and blatant. They openly admit they don’t give a rat’s butt about the rest of the world. Church ladies insist their men don’t understand what God demands, as if their own thoughts are God’s.

Whether male or female, learn to recognize this and avoid it like the plague. God help you’ve if you married it already; while doable, it’s a load of work.

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Mortality and Sorrow Norms

God is slowly crushing the Prosperity Gospel heresy.

It’s not as if folks didn’t prosper, but it wasn’t by the gospel. Savvy folks will still prosper just fine in the coming economic troubles, gospel or not. That’s the way it is in this fallen world. The story of Job is enough to shoot down the Prosperity Gospel, but most Westerners are too Western to get the message. The Prosperity Gospel is nothing more than the message of the Pharisees plastered over the Cross; it’s still the worship of Mammon. Every day I still run into people who insist the Fall wasn’t permanent.

An email from a friend reminded me so much how good spiritual people can suffer. Like Job, though righteous, things aren’t so pleasant. This particular friend knows better than to whine, but answered a question honestly. It’s not as if she hasn’t laid hold of God’s Laws; she is faithful and obedient inasmuch as she can understand. Meanwhile, she’s focused on her calling and mission. It would be hard to imagine her doing any better. That doesn’t prevent her ailments, nor those of her family members. They are all living with the results of some admitted mistakes and a vast ocean of unrepented sin from those around them.

I’ve often warned that America is in for a rough ride. I’ve know that for years in both the practical and prophetic sense. We are doomed, and I suppose it signals something similar for much of the rest of the world. I’m not called to prophesy to those other nations, so it’s not for me to say. Still, things are tough all over and getting worse for quite some time to come. No apocalypse, this stuff will tend to grind things down until certain features of the political landscape collapse, but the whole thing isn’t going to suddenly break down everywhere at once. It will seem that way to folks on the losing end of things, but for us who are sitting off to one side watching, it won’t really be too much change.

The world will still suck in roughly the same ways it did before. The only real change will be the credit reset. It won’t matter who claims to hold what; an awful lot of debt will be repudiated and some will simply be written off. I can’t predict how the system will change, but it will. With that change will come lots of other changes. Bits and pieces of it will be dramatic, but overall things will simply drift farther along the same awful path until God has had enough. That final end will be entirely unexpected on the human level.

Meanwhile, we who are watching this transition stand to suffer significantly. Much of what we thought was normal was actually front-loading through the credit system. We consumed our future; now the past will catch up with us. More than simple monetary poverty, this thing has a moral element. The entire range of Western Christianity has been chasing phantoms and these will finally fade to reveal the lies. What makes me just a little sick is knowing almost everyone involved is not going to have a clue, nor will they be capable of getting a clue when it’s offered. This thing will be explained just about every way you can imagine except for the truth. Eternal destinies remain in the hands of God, but everything we could and should have in this life will have been missed completely and never recovered.

There will be a measure of religious revival coming; it always happens. Bad times brings about a revival in religion, typically false piety. It will be emotionally based. Perhaps some slender minority will catch on, but the majority will continue chasing everything except the truth about how religion is supposed to work. You should not expect to see much of what I described in a previous post. The Harlot Church isn’t going anywhere until the final end of all things.

Stand back and take a good long look. Understand that all the misguided hope and thrill is just standard human response. Understand that the only solution is the same one that’s been around since Christ floated off up into the clouds. It will be the same solution that keeps a few of us on track when He comes back on those same clouds. This world is permanently subjected to futility, and only a precious few in any generation catch on to what’s real. The real eschatology is the one that recognizes things will follow no precise pattern, and recognizes that most of the Scripture about End Times is figurative and symbolic. Jesus is coming back quite literally, but most of what folks tend to believe comes with that is pure sewage. Yeah, the Prosperity Gospel will come back again, but God has warned us that most of the world will always worship Mammon in one form or another, and that includes most of organized Christianity. They want power in the here and now, and insist it be offered on human terms, not on the divine otherworldly terms.

Here in this world, the real saints of God will tribulate.

Edit: Add the following video —

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbnot1g5-T4

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Syria Follies Not Over

More and more ships and other military assets continue gathering off the Syrian coast. Both US and Russia are moving stuff around. Currently the congressional leadership are all on board with this. Since the first lie didn’t work to excuse an attack, they are cooking up alternatives, but the likelihood this will fade away are just about zero.

Just as a reminder: This is a banking war. Syria is the current target for trying to break outside the dollar-denominated trade and defying the global banking cartel. We could talk about several related issues, but the real matter is banking and control over the debt. The plutocrats won’t be hurt by this stuff regardless of how it turns out militarily. I sense this could be a make-or-break for them in the sense of whether they’ll have to change the game in future rounds.

So it won’t matter what excuse has to appear; they shall have their war on any terms. We should expect any number of really nasty surprises here in the US and just about anywhere we have “interests.” I’m willing to bet one portion of this will be some kind of false flag incident. I shudder to think of the suffering it will mean for innocent folks.

One of the things I’m keeping an eye out for is relatively harmless in that sense: some kind of doomsday virus or malware. There have been some really nasty hints in this direction slipping out of government offices. I can’t say what sort of targeting we might see, but a part of me wonders if there won’t be a general threat hitting a really large number of computers. Naturally, whatever comes in terms of cyber-warfare will be blamed on the whipping boy of the day — in this case, Syria. It’s probably one of the few things where I have some hope of helping in some significant way once it happens.

Meanwhile, there remains yet much sorrow to come as the plutocrats will be forced to show their hand, in that they will have to come right out and defy the whole world in attacking Syria. I have no doubt they mean to have their war at any cost to the rest of us.

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Win8 Start Button Follies

First, take a look at this little gem.

Back when MS user interface (UI) designers actually studied how humans used computers, they came up with the classic Windows desktop interface. It worked so well, other OSes copied it. That’s because it’s one of the best balanced compromises between what a computer can do and what people tend to do by reflex. You can’t imagine how much work went into it and how many man-hours of study and testing were involved. It’s still the best paradigm for a desktop interface. It may not be true in future generations, but for as long as people use desktop computers, I’m quite certain the original UI research was not flawed. There’s nothing wrong with a cellphone interface for cellphones and tablets, but not on the desktop.

So because MS steadfastly refuses to hear what their paying customers are saying, here’s a few fixes.

1. Spotted in the comments on a ZDNet article:

For a simple “start button” at no expense, create a quick launch toolbar and point it to ProgramData> Microsoft> Windows> Start Menu. Inside that folder is a Programs folder with most if not all of the shortcuts there. If one is not there, just put it there.

You will have an arrow on the taskbar instead of the Start Orb, but it works just as well and is actually less confusing for the average user.

2. IObit Start Menu looks good.

3. Pokki takes a different approach that might be better for some.

4. Classic Shell is what I would be more likely to use.

The one real problem no one seems to be able to fix is the serious networking problems in Win8: It keeps dropping connections, wireless and wired. I’m waiting to see how that comes out.

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Fork in the Path of Ministry

God said I had the choice, but I’d be a fool for saying “no.”

Warning to regular readers: There will be an increase in the number of posts regarding computer ministry issues. The reason is I sense a shift in calling to be ready for more calls from people who need my help. Already I have gained the confidence of at least one client who didn’t like the way MS tech support did things. I suppose it’s because I always make it a point to explain what I’m doing and how it works, insofar as I can get them to understand. And I really do go to great lengths to find ways to explain how computers work in layman’s terms. It’s all about the people, not the computers, for me.

Naturally, I’ll be posting a lot about Windows because that’s what most people use. I think I’ll add a new feature of anecdotes on the work I’m doing.

For example, I just discovered that Vista by default does not limit the cache on Internet Explorer. Client bought it six years ago and wondered why his hard drive was so full, when the files he knew about didn’t take up more than 5% of the drive space. When he had a problem with some malware, I came to help and as part of the process decided to run an intensive virus scanner (boots and runs from CD). I had already tried MS’s Windows Defender Offline boot CD (I keep a copy of both 32-bit and 64-bit with me), and it found the Trojan, but not the payload. The client is pretty savvy, being in the technology field professionally, but not a computer geek. He was game to experiment because I admitted I’m not a real technician, just a power user somewhere down the road in front of him. So we left the scanner running … and running.

It’s now been over 48 hours, and it has been chugging away at his IE cache for all but two of those hours. Over 5 million files in his cache and still scanning. Chances are the malware is somewhere in that cache; it’s where I usually find the one affecting his computer. Later today we are cutting it off and I’m going to run one of the many LiveCD distros of Linux on his computer. I’ll mount his hard drive and delete the cache, which Vista hides:

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\systemprofile\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\

(Edit: In some cases there are even more intervening folders, such as AppData\Local, etc.)

There are subfolders in there with random-sequence names. Together they take up some 90% of his hard drive. Then I’ll copy over a different kind of scanner which can run from the Rescue Console of Windows, if necessary (Vipre Resuce). It scans with a different set of heuristics, and should find stuff the other scanner might have missed. With the cache emptied, it shouldn’t taken nearly as long.

If this sort of thing entertains or informs you, look for a new title tag: CM (for computer ministry). The nickname I gave my computer ministry is CentOK-CM = Central Oklahoma Computer Ministry. Computer tech support ministry is not the sort of thing that shows up in books too well; it’s obsolete in a matter of months most of the time.

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