Hard Wired

Posted on January 21, 2012 by ehurst

Coming to terms with human flaws requires you put them all in the same basket, your flaws with those of others.
My Dad was an abusive and hateful man. He came by it honestly, as both his parents were that way. I suppose it was just part of the hard poverty background. At any rate, my Dad’s overuse of intimidation gave me a very fearful childhood, replete with nightmares every time I fell asleep, and all sorts of other neuroses.
You have to understand how a person can love and despise the same person all at once. The Principle of Propinquity makes us care about people, even if we are ready to kill them, simply because of physical proximity over time. A portion of you realizes their welfare is your responsibility on some instinctive level, even when it all conflicts with your own sanity.
Sanity does not require you banish all compartmentalization. Otherwise, a great many more people would have died by murder and neglect than is already the case.
At some point, I decided to use my spite for Dad to reject copying his ways. That didn’t prevent me having some of the same reflexes, but it did prevent me ending up like him. To this day, I am certain he does not think he was abusive. Not quite psychopathic, but he never understood empathy, never had any. By contrast, I am burdened with excessive empathy, which is precisely how I remained so fearful so long. My sensing of human emotion was overwhelming and I had no filtering mechanism. I remained emotionally swamped long into my young adulthood. I also learned to act to cover it all up.
At some point, I found out where to turn it off. At first, during my adolescence, I could only turn it off all together, so as to perform some acts which remain tender scars on my soul even now. But with time, I learned some fine control, and how to avoid bumping old wounds most of the time. The coping mechanisms are now pretty strong, and the skills to act on the resolve to do good for others has grown to a satisfactory level.
The hardest thing is letting stuff go because I simply cannot do any good with it. Stupid can’t be fixed.
I live in close proximity to someone who can just barely function because she can’t differentiate between major and minor. She will obsess over things which simply do not matter, will pick over them endlessly, making all Creation wait until she’s satisfied some utterly insignificant detail is fixed to her liking. That’s not as much hyperbole as you might think, because it borders on OCD. You may have seen the video of the guy you can’t let the fringe on his floor rug get out of perfect combed alignment. He spends hours dragging his fingers across the edges of his rug because it drives him mad to see the threads not perfectly straight. He can’t control this, so far as anyone can tell. This person I deal with can control it, but gets angry and takes it as some grand personal insult when you suggest these little things are not a priority. The OCD guy knows it’s crazy; she rejects the truth.
So, every day we have to tiptoe around her defenses and help her understand there are things she can’t fix. That is, they can’t be fixed without unreasonable effort compared to what difference it makes. The reason it’s a problem is she gets so tired working over silly stuff, she has no energy for things which do matter. So on the one hand, she makes everyone wait, even to the point of denying her children food for hours at a time while she picks over the silliest details of food preparation. Breakfast started at 7AM is finally ready at 9. This is not healthy. On the other hand, she never washes the dishes because she simply has too many other things to do. Her kitchen is counter is covered in dirty dishes, and you can’t find the sink. Dishes get washed when someone else does them.
The only thing worse would be involving the county child welfare, because those people are all far worse, the scum of the earth, psychopaths. They seriously need adult supervision.
But I can’t fix her problem, either. Yes, there has been progress. I limit what I work on with her, and let the rest go. I refuse to stop trying. It’s the same business of human character, following the impulses which drive each one of us.
Inside that whiny little boy I was, there lived a grand risk taker. Not in the sense of big, heroic deeds for all to see, but in the sense I’ll push myself to extremes. I like to hike six or more miles at a time, despite my knees and hip hurting. I ride my bicycle 20-30 miles over some very hilly terrain because it feels good in one sense, even though it makes my old leg muscles hurt. I’ll push until I drop, if there seems even a scintilla of a reason. It answers some deep, nameless need. I know it’s not trying to prove anything; I’m just having fun. My brand of “fun.”
I recall at age 12 playing in a sand and gravel pit on Saturdays when the workmen were gone. The sand was piled up like a massive mountain, but packed on top. They would pull from one side, building from the other, marching the whole thing across the open gravel bottom over a month or so, then back. I’d climb the hard packed side, then run and jump as far as I could off the cliff where they pulled it. Given the lateral distance off the face, I’d drop some 30 feet (9m) into the soft sand below, buried up to my hips from the momentum. Then I’d leapfrog, or roll sideways, the rest of the way down to the bottom. Repeat no less than a dozen times. It took a good bit of shaking and slapping to get the sand out of my clothes when I was done.
During the very worst period of my knee troubles, I was with a group of teenagers at a woodland camp during a winter break from school. The camp offered a High Ropes Course — a confidence challenge course with more than adequate safety measures. Our first event that day found us sitting at the foot of two massive hardwood trees. Between were a stacked series of small platforms. The objective was to climb a rope ladder to the first platform well over head height. Jump across some 3-4 feet (1m) to the other platform, and climb another rope ladder. Repeat as needed up to six levels. I was really out of shape, and couldn’t stand on my feet longer than some fifteen minutes at a time. I walked with a cane because my wheelchair could not navigate this place. But when no one moved to be first, I jumped up. I made it up three levels before I simply ran out of breath and got dizzy from the effort. The leap across the gap was piddling by my standards, and we were all connected to a safety line from above, but I was a fat wimp who needed his wheelchair. My measure of success got them going, and most of them cleared more than I did.
It’s the same personality that keeps doing the dishes for this crazy woman.

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Herding Logic and SOPA/PIPA (Updated)

Posted on January 20, 2012 by ehurst

Taking down MegaUpload was a calculated PsyOp.
It’s not hard to understand. While I admire the heroics of blacking out the the entry page to numerous websites, the psychopaths will not be bullied. The language used by Chris Dodd should be enough to demonstrate these people don’t care about truth, facts, or humans. It’s all about power. They aren’t going to be turned away from it. If you brutally and publicly slaughtered Dodd, some other ugly SOB would put his face on TV seconds later.
Stop and think for a second. Did they take down MegaUpload without the benefit of SOPA/PIPA? No problem, just some extra paper work. Why them? Because they dared to post a video of all the “clients” of Chris Dodd’s criminal extortionist gang, clients who dared to advertise for MegaUpload as one of the greatest supports for their art. These people, who know the MAFIAA have them by the short-and-curlies, realize the best thing that can happen to them is for their artwork to escape the controls of the MAFIAA. The only people who could possibly be hurt by this is the MAFIAA extortionists. The logic of real Internet marketing escapes most people. So MAFIAA had to make an example of them.
And who would have guessed Anonymous would have responded? Weren’t you so surprised by that? But this isn’t the core group, of course, because it was nothing more than punks with a DDoS. We all know the real core of Anonymous would actually crack into the servers, not simply swamp them with traffic. But the punks who pretend they are hackers are by far so predictable, are they not?
This is precisely what Dodd and friends knew would happen. Now we have a valid excuse to push through SOPA/PIPA without any modifications. Problem solved — two at once, in fact. Sometimes you wonder how much this reflects simple infiltration at 4chan.
We’ll know something useful was done when, as Vox suggests, we see personal details of the psychopaths’ lives released for publication at Pastebin. Or other, juicy revelations from actually getting inside the server networks of these thugs. It can be done; trust me. Whether it answers the need for Anonymous, or the rest of us, remains to be decided by those who can do it.
It’s the same as the government having the power to take down any site they choose, and arrest the admins and owners. They could have taken MegaUpload anytime since it came online. It has gotten easier lately, but what almost nobody wants to admit is how SOPA/PIPA won’t make it all the much easier. The Feds and MAFIAA simply want it on paper what they plan to do anyway, and the opposition wants to pretend not getting those laws is going to make any difference. The psychopaths already have that power; it’s just a question of how much paper work is involved. That it was announced at all was an open provocation.
Meanwhile, the only difference between our version of “democracy” versus naked oppression is the fun and games of manipulation.
Addenda: Okay, I forgot to mention the fellow behind MegaUpload (Kimble Schmitz, AKA “Kim Dotcom”) is a bona fide crook and probably an intelligence asset for someone. I’m not here to praise MegaUpload. What I wanted to point out was how patently silly it is to ignore the timing, as if it were simply an accident. John Young at Cryptome makes the case this was almost certainly done using military grade security tools — “counter-terrorism” — for a rather petty criminal case. Every time the government promises this is not what will happen, it has become the single primary use of the thing in question.
We aren’t cynical enough.

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Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Posted on January 19, 2012 by ehurst

Cherry picking your facts is actually a bigger lie than simply stating falsehoods.
On 3 May 1999, we had a bit of wind and rain outside our home. That’s the facts, but not the truth. Okay, it’s only some of the facts. We had several days of tornadoes in Oklahoma, and on that day it passed within a quarter-mile of our home — a mobile home. Our yard was covered with debris ripped from all those fancy houses. What if the path had been over ours? But if I were trying to sell real estate in that neighborhood, I might not want to discuss Oklahoma’s tornadoes.
If I’m trying to sell other things, like ideas, I’m sure to leave out pertinent information in order to press the case I wish to make. So we have millions of dollars’ worth of prize photography from the likes of National Geographic, whose editors hope you buy into the UN dominated program which grants them full power to decide when and where you can go to the potty, among other things.
If I wanted you to think I’m not going to conduct warfare against Iran, I’ll tell you some missile drill in Israel with American troops was called off. Meanwhile, the majority of all Western nuclear powered aircraft carriers were recently moved within flight range of Iran. And of course, I would not want officials admitting publicly that if Iran simply dismantled every fragment of their nuclear program altogether, it would not change the plans to attack them, but I would have to come up with a new excuse.
But if I was trying to sell Global Warming and draconian controls guaranteed to make Ethiopian refugees look wealthy, I wouldn’t just cherry-pick the facts, I’d invent new “facts” and change all the numbers to suit my theories.
Human activity in the main is a broad mixture of good and bad. Sometimes the precise same small action is both. I don’t begrudge the crackers digging up information, but I wish they’d avoid breaking stuff and pulling out credit card numbers. Still, the overall effect is probably salutary. If Bradley Manning did what they say, he broke the law while making us more free. There are a lot of things we might not know about were it not for the habits of computer crackers, things we really should know. Or could, if we bothered.
The Internet has done two things. First, it democratized global information sharing and retrieval. Pictures of the tornado damaged mentioned above were available by TV right away, but the Internet saved a copy and keeps it available. It’s not just fast and cheap, but durable. Plus, anyone who was there could take their own pictures and share them, and not rely on some editorial staff to put it into their broadcast. So we can catch videos of that otherwise unreported murder at the hands of police officers in some pricey shopping district, and see it posted on YouTube in seconds after it happened.
Second, the Net has democratized sharing of passions. The problem is, passions aren’t always interested in truth, nor even facts. They most often attach themselves to lies, frankly. Now more people in more places on the earth can have their brains rotted by Lady Gaga’s filthy music videos. And more people in more places can absorb the National Geographic vile hatred for freedom of human choice, and all the various shills of evil power pushing their lies.
It also allows me to share my own passions, for whatever value readers find in them. I’m not sure I know the truth of things, only what drives me. I certainly don’t want control over others, nor their stuff. I can handle National Geographic, just look at their pictures and videos and ignore their message. And not contribute any money directly. I’m pretty sure the Climategate “scientists” deserve far worse than they’ll ever get, which is nothing new.
The means to communicate is always a double-edged sword.

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The Spent Nuclear Fuel Scandal

Posted on January 18, 2012 by ehurst

It has been proven that nuclear fuel rods can be used up and rendered pretty much inert.
I suppose it depends on how much you know about nuclear energy. In the first place, had we gone with the thorium process, none of this would be a problem. Look it up. Thorium nuclear power generation is better in every measure, but one thing prevents development: It would remove control from the vested interests run by psychopaths in uranium production.
But even uranium and plutonium nuclear power generation need not produce the so-called nuclear waste which threatens every life on this planet. The main problem with Fukushima is not the reactors, but the stored nuclear waste sitting in the pools above the reactors. The meltdown is an additional problem. Had the US under Carter not been so utterly stupid in making fuel reprocessing illegal here and elsewhere, there would be no nuclear waste.
At the risk of oversimplifying, let me draw the following image. The whole idea is based on isotopes. An isotope is a natural element with extra neutrons. It’s the same material; it has the same properties in the sense it has the same number of protons and electrons, which is the very essence of what gives it its identity. But it’s got some extra goodies packed in there called neutrons. The stable form has X number of them, while the form with extra neutrons is X+ some higher number. This is unstable in the sense it kicks out lots of energy trying to get rid of the excess. Stick enough of this material together in one place and it starts to get hot because all that radiating energy is hitting the other atoms and making them even more unstable. A nuclear bomb results from letting enough of this stuff collect in one place it can’t stay in one piece any more, and the whole thing kicks out it’s energy all at once.
Bombs require that the heavy isotope of the radioactive metal be something like 90-95% pure of that one isotope. Using these unstable metals to create heat to boil water and make a giant steam generator means using a far less purity, something like 5-10% (medical uses require about 25-30% pure). You cannot make a bomb easily from the generator grade metal. The whole thing of purifying is incredibly expensive and finicky just to get the 5%, and monumentally difficult for the bomb grade, such that only wealthy governments even think about it. The equipment runs into the billions of dollars just to get tiny amounts of just the low-grade stuff. It requires entirely different equipment to get above that. (Hint: Iran doesn’t even have the equipment to make bombs.)
So the generator grade is easier and cheaper, but still radioactive so as to get hot enough to boil water. The process of using uranium and plutonium to generate power requires a fairly simple mix,  in the sense that the radioactive parts all are the same isotope, the same “grade” of the metal with the same radioactive properties. They break down a little as they continue kicking out this energy. The process eventually makes it a little unstable because it becomes a mixture of more than one isotope after awhile. Once this stuff gets degraded by some 5%, the current policy is to pull them out. Keep in mind, this is 5% used up of that 5% pure metal isotope.
They have to do something with them because they can’t be used in the same simple process. They are still radioactive, but if you separate the rods and cushion them from each other with water, for instance, they are still dangerous to be around, but not going to heat up much. Ideally, you could take these rods and put them into a different kind of steam generator, which uses something other than water in a more expensive and complicated process, but it basically burns off those impurities. When the impurities are gone, it no longer works in this other process, so you pull them out and they are ready to go back into the first one again. We call this secondary process “reprocessing” the fuel.
You can trade them back and forth until the metal rods are stable, so stable you can handle them with your bare hands safely. Somehow, the idiots in government allowed the psychopaths in mining to convince them this was somehow risky, that there was some danger the stuff could be diverted from this exchange process and and used in bombs. That is, of course, not possible. As noted above, the process of making them safe for use in generating power makes them too wimpy for bombs.
Instead, our policy is to pull those rods after they are only 5% used up, and let them sit in a temporary bath until there’s no room left. Then we try to find places to store them. Is this not insane? It’s an incredible, massive waste-fraud-and-abuse. The process of running them back and forth between two types of reactor would lower the price of electricity, cutting the price by about 90%. That’s even after you purchase the much more expensive secondary reactors. It would also reduce the massive profits of the industry which lobbied and lied to Congress about the safety factors involved.
As I understand it, other countries, our allies, begged to buy up this “spent fuel” so they could use it in their secondary reactor system, and Congress refuses to sell. The US government continues operating based on mythology, while the psychopaths get rich and pass off some graft to the bureaucrats called “regulators” — they regulate everyone except the folks they were appointed to watch.
Once again, you need to understand something: Most of what’s wrong with government is special interests. What most people don’t understand is virtually nothing in government is left to run its own course. Not a single item in the massive regulations is left untouched. It’s pervasive. Every single item in the trillions of dollars government spends is subjected to this corruption. This business of nuclear energy is nasty only because of politics, but it wouldn’t matter what we are talking about, because politics has taken over the entire nation at every level of human activity. To use biblical terminology, you cannot lift a hand or foot anywhere in the world without someone in US government trying to tax it or confiscate whatever can be moved.
This is why people who actually know what’s going on will tell you our government cannot be fixed, because there is nothing to reform; this is the nature of the beast itself.

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Trust Requires Breathing Room

Posted on January 17, 2012 by ehurst

People scrambling for limited living space tend to screw over almost everyone they encounter.

My friend Robert mentioned something fundamental to human nature. When you squish people together in a small space, there is a powerful tendency for trust to die.

The problem with us Chinese — mind, not so much the Hong Kong and overseas Chinese as it’s more in the case with Chinese mainlanders — is that even primitive levels of trust have now disappeared from their society. The fast and radical economic and social changes in China after it had reintegrated with the rest of the world 30 years ago just ended up creating a dog-eat-dog world over there.

Notice where it is the strongest in the PRC itself. Take the same people out of that setting, and they tend to change their basic assumptions about survival’s necessities. Something in the cultural mix of Hong Kong, something about the British influence, dampens this tendency, the same as simply moving to a Western country, for example. This, despite the very high density of humanity in Hong Kong.

I tend to think this reflects a very basic human instinct about enemies. If you have enemies, you naturally want to band with others to face them. That element of recognized or felt commonality under threat is the key to organizing defense. It makes politics useful and possible. If all your enemies are too far away, then all your threats are your own kind. It’s not as if the PRC has no enemies, but in the awareness of the people, they are all far away. Instead, one’s own kin may be the worst enemy, but almost surely someone geographically close but not directly dependent on you is your enemy. As a consequence, politics are nearly impossible.

Dependency registers in the mind as not something we choose. Trust is something we have to choose. It’s always more complex than that, but we seldom understand what we cannot characterize and discuss in brief. Thus, I sense the Chinese mainlanders see themselves forced into a measure of dependence, and they take their independence where they can get it — mostly from each other. Robert notes you can’t go anywhere without having to watch intently for being shafted by anyone and everyone. There is no activity safe and regulated to the point you can trust it or the people involved.

Thus, we should hardly be surprised when outsourcing to China comes at the price of toxic dog food and baby formula. If you can’t play by their rules and watch them like a hawk, you won’t get what you expect. That’s not a put down; it’s the facts. I note this does not prevent businesses there prospering when they play by Western rules, but that’s another matter.

Of course, I’ve noticed a great many other Asian folks have some of this. There may be some adjustments over what they trust each other for, but there seems an element of distrust which is always sly and sneaky from people who live under the bootheel, as it were, of a particular type of oppression. Everyone is oppressed in one way or another, but it seems to me tied to a particular kind of oppression, and a particular sense of consciousness about it.

Naturally, I am only philosophizing from an outside position, so my own consciousness of the issues is limited. However, it seems to me at least half of the issue is consciousness for those under the gun. Few cultures understand serenity better than some of the Eastern religions and philosophies, but it would seem this treasure has been denied the masses.

Most of my readers would recognize the language of cultivating some mastery of your own destiny. We can’t simply ignore the moral context or we will be speaking the wrong language, and our assertion of self would mean nothing. I might have a tough time carrying my brand of manhood to any number of Asian cultures.

But at the bottom of things, I know trusting another human requires the sense I have some choice in the matter, as it does for everyone else.

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Sins of the Fathers

Posted on January 17, 2012 by ehurst

You have a limited choice about your native character.
People familiar with the Old Testament have likely run across something which seems ambiguous to our modern eyes. In one place it says flat out the children will pay for the sins of their fathers. God warns in the Books of Moses about visiting the sins of one generation upon the third generation. In yet another place, we are told in no uncertain terms, “the soul that sins, it shall die.” Indeed, Ezekiel goes on at length about the latter.
And this is the key. We happen to know Ezekiel was talking about the Law of Moses; specifically, it was about the individual obligation of every burn under the Covenant to live by it consciously. The specifics of Moses reflect a fundamental moral reality. On this plane of existence, if you walk in evil, then turn from that, you’ll find mercy and be forgiven. If you walk rightly, then turn and become evil, you’ll reap the consequences of God’s wrath. It’s simply a matter of actions, but what the actions say about what’s going on inside you. People make mistakes and regret them, and they tend to repent. People without regret are monsters, or in modern parlance, psychopaths.
Most Christians don’t realize — most openly deny — that there is a God of Laws over the Realm of Flesh. This is why most Western Christians are so utterly confused about morality, and so powerless to practice what they preach. They don’t understand the categories because they reject them.
But that business of “sins of the Father” is reference to another kind of sin. We recognize this as the influence of parents over their own children. The third generation is God’s general rule about how long it takes for a bad habit to be forgotten, barring other interventions. Thus, only after the third generation could certain resident aliens enjoy full citizenship privileges.
When I look in the mirror of my soul, I inevitably see the imprint of my dad. For the most part, we look nothing like each other, but there are distinct character traits from him for which I have no power to remove. They are burned into my very personality. By being aware of this, I am not powerless to turn his trash into some kind of treasure.
The trick is to first embrace the truth this is what I am. Then, I have to ensure I seek to understand human nature itself enough to recognize the difference between a manifestation and basic tendency. My dad expressed certain character traits in ways which didn’t work out for good to others. I have some of the same stuff in me, but I need not be bound to his way of expressing those things. I can choose to channel them in other ways. All I really need to do is understand what lay under the ugly manifestation. By rejecting his fears, angers, etc., I am able to be a different man. To suggest I’m actually “better” would be for later generations to say, since I am in the process creating my own huge mistakes. My son now has the task of deciding which of my traits are worthy of emulation, and which require adjustment.
You can’t fight evil until you understand the source.

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The Boundaries of Sanity

Posted on January 16, 2012 by ehurst

There are some folks we cannot help.
It is particularly hard for evangelical Christians to grasp this: There are times and places where you shake the dust off your sandals and move on down the road. There are people in this world God did not appoint you to help. It’s not a limitation on truth, but a limitation built into each of us.
The fundamental flaw is the assumption logic is the right tool, or even the main tool. Humans use logic, but hardly operate by it. We should not expect them to do so, and it would be frankly wrong to believe reason is the best standard for human operations. It has a very limited application to reality. To believe the highest aspiration of humanity is to operate by reason is itself bad religion.
Jesus, the Son of God Himself, told His followers to shake the dust off their sandals when the message of truth was rejected. Persistence in loving is not the same as persistence in bugging someone. There is more than one meaning to, “True love waits.”
I belong to a mailing list for which I am a moderator. Of the small group who share this task, I have the most time, and I am the most active. I have to read all the messages, despite some of it grating on my nerves. We have at least one very educated Christian Pharisee. He’s not a cartoon Neocon. He is a Neocon, but not stupid. I don’t harass him or insult him. I do consider him irredeemable.
The nature of the Pharisee’s error is rather plain, to me at least, in the text of the New Testament and in the Talmud. Theirs is a closed system. Nicodemas gave us a hint during his discussion with Jesus that night in John 3. He saw the miracles of Jesus, felt the power of His teaching, but knew it was against everything he was taught on the way to his PhD. It didn’t fit; there was a jarring disconnect. What Jesus said confirmed it didn’t fit, because Nick was closed to the truth. It was impossible for him to absorb a standard Hebrew parable, the one about being reborn.
He and Jesus spoke in the Hebrew vernacular of the day, but we can be sure John recorded the gist of things in his schoolboy Greek. The term anothen offers a certain ambiguity to us, and from the ensuing discussion, we can safely assume it was equally confusing in Hebrew because Nick had a Greek mind. It is generally translated “above” and can imply “from the top” in the same sense we use that phrase. Unfortunately, the English phrase “born again” has taken on a lot of baggage which simply misses the point. Jesus was trying to warn Nicodemas his head was in the wrong world.
For at least three centuries, Nicodemas and his kind were pickled in Aristotelian logic, while trying to disengage his epistemology. The jarring disconnect between this and their acknowledgment of miracles, and things supernatural in general, forced them to create a mental space where the stuff they dared not deny as their entire national tradition was kept around as superstition. Sacred superstition, but really it was little more than magic, inexplicable and operating by obscure rules which didn’t make sense to them.
Jesus was telling this Dean of the Law School, as it were, he wasn’t even on the same planet as what Jesus was doing. Had the Judean leadership remained faithful to the Covenant of Moses, Jesus would not need to do these miracles. He was simply restoring the justice, the birthright of the Covenant, by correcting things Satan was permitted to break and pervert. The leadership had opened the gate to Satan’s evil power because they were no longer guarding the gate. They weren’t teaching the Law as Moses gave it, but were engaging all sorts of silly legalistic nonsense. The Covenant was not simply legislation, but an orientation toward justice. It was far more flexible and merciful than most of us grasp from where we stand today, because the Jews had turned it into a shallow caricature.
They were absorbed in the joys of analytical discussions of the words of Law on an intellectual level, without reverencing the fundamental mystical nature of the Law. They ended up embracing their logical analysis as more binding than the Law itself. To protect this body of analytical study, they built up a mythology of saying it was the oral tradition from the lips of Moses.
Scholars completely outside both Judaism and Christianity can see almost immediately how the Talmud (“Oral Torah”) is patently a rejection of the written Torah. There is a painfully obvious gap in the very assumptions about language and knowing itself between the two. The rabbinical scholars were reading the same old Hebrew words from an alien intellectual climate.
How many of us can recall the indescribable thrill when, in our youth as we clawed our way toward adulthood, we stumbled across the ability to reason and use logic? Somewhere beginning around age ten to twelve, humans develop the capacity for formal logic. With a good education, this can be a very heady experience. We suddenly reject all the past because we realize we can see through all the crap we’d been told by people who couldn’t be bothered to explain the whys and wherefores. We knew. Of course, we were full of crap, but with responsible teachers around us, we would have eventually worked that out.
There was nobody around to help the rabbinical scholars when they first discovered Aristotle, shortly after Alexander the Great conquered the region and brought his own very evangelistic Hellenism in tow. They bought it, were utterly thrilled with it, couldn’t resist the siren song of claiming mastery of mysteries. They had managed to bring God down to their inspection, and found themselves competent to decide what He could and could not be. This is what happened in the Garden of Eden when someone convinced Adam and Eve they could be like gods, judging good and evil for themselves — it was the very essence of the Fall.
Jesus had the mission to offer the Pharisees a corrective. Most of them rejected it. These were the same folks Paul faced later in his churches as a threat to genuine faith in Christ. We today refer to these very beguiling and charismatic Pharisee preachers as “Judaizers.” They claimed they were seeking to bring Gentile Christians back to Moses, but they didn’t even comprehend Moses. They were dragging the Christians by various deceptions into what we now call Gnosticism. That’s because the Judaizer heresies drifted naturally in that direction. Kabbalism is simply a derivative of this from a yet later period. The nation of Judea had plenty of problems already, but none of that would have happened without embracing Hellenism. Something unique about the way this intellectual trap works in the mind creates a fortress which serves to imprison those taken by it.
It works precisely the same in modern evangelical Christianity. Not everyone is that way, any more than was every Judean in Jesus’ day. However, it is so deeply rooted in the core leadership, it’s almost impossible to break the rest free. Having been inside and outside and all around this thing, I can now smell them at a distance. Sure, I’ll give them a chance to see some light, but they almost uniformly denounce it as darkness. There are some, like Nicodemas, who can probably stumble through the darkness into the light, as I did. Sadly, so far, most do not.
When I run into them, I refuse to debate with them. Debate itself as a form of exchange is simply meeting them on their own turf. I simply state the truth when the opportunity is given, help those who reach out for it, and let the rest wallow in their graves. I can’t fix that. I’ve been crucified plenty of times, and I’m glad for the opportunity to share in my Savior’s sacrifice. It has nothing to do with whether they will some day met me in Heaven. I have no idea what their eternal destiny is, any more than they do about mine. What I do know is I don’t have to work with them, nor take them seriously, any more than context itself requires while I carry out my mission from God.
But logic is not the answer; it is the jail which holds them.

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New Year Grammar Grouch 2

Posted on January 15, 2012 by ehurst

This should be pretty simple.
there = a location, any place which can’t be called “here”
their = the possessive of they — “It’s their choice.”
they’re = a contraction for “they are”
All pronounced very much alike, though actually the last one offers a subtle difference most people don’t catch in ordinary conversation. That’s a function of our sloppy American mispronunciation of English, which is a known contributing cause of much misspelling. While the American dialect isn’t supposed to sound like any of the various colloquial dialects from the British Empire, it does have it’s own precision if we bothered.
Did you ever notice most popular singers perform English language songs with a flattened American accent? And why does one seldom see reference to a Canadian accent? Newfies, of course, but the great North American Heartland is pretty vanilla all the way up to the ice. Each regional dialect is the result of particular waves of immigration. I guarantee George Washington bore a proper upper class British sound.
I reject all arguments any one dialect is pure or original English. Few of us could understand spoken Middle English, much less Old English. Nor is “proper” necessarily whatever folks do where you are located. Proper is whatever those most careful in your area taught you, but includes your relative ability to absorb and blend in with what you hear around you when you move to another place.
It isn’t proper to correct anyone’s grammar unless it is your civil duty. That is, if you are a teacher or custodial/leading adult of children, your job is to help them get it right for the context in which they live at the time. If your relative position otherwise qualifies you as someone expected to do this for whatever reason, in some contexts you can get away with it.
Otherwise, civility requires you avoid correcting others. Granted, you can subtly do a lot of correcting simply by making sure you do it right yourself. Someone does it wrong, and you simply stick to your guns and ignore their mistakes, with the possible exception of asking what they meant. Be tactful.
I get grouchy with folks running around correcting everyone else. I do all my grammar grouching where people can safely ignore me.

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We All Need a Human Touch

Posted on January 15, 2012 by ehurst

“Mama! She’s looking at me!”
Childish whining of this sort deserves punishment. No one should be permitted to demand the rest of the world bend to their outrageous requirements and whims. I’ll bet you’ve seen teenage girls in schools dress like whores, then complain because the wrong guy — the social outcast — looks at them. It’s wonderful when the popular Alpha males ogle them, but not okay when the Omega stares from a distance. Notice there was nothing about anyone touching, or even speaking to them; it was merely that the Omega was permitted to enjoy the view to which they objected.
Sorry, but your body in a public place is not like a password protected website.
So much we understand as mature adults. What riles me even more is the “no touching” rules creeping into modern Western society of late. It reflects the same coddling of petulence which destroys the world for the sake of one person’s reasonable demands. That some single individual is troubled cannot be used to justify chaining all mankind. As a prophet of God, I tell you this is evil. It indicates a much deeper error.
Humans are wired to interact. We deeply need some visual, verbal and physical interaction within our capabilities. Yes, our fallen nature creates lots of problems with this, but it’s no excuse for refusing to work around them with sane customs and habits. Utopia cannot exist, and pining for it is sin. For every school administrator who thinks making blanket rules about no touching, you deserve to go to Hell, because you are defying God’s revealed intention. Yes, it’s that serious, and it applies to corporate management, as well as every other human institution. This hyper-sensitive whining political correctness is an abomination.
If you as leader/manager are unwilling to accept the challenge of constructing sane and flexible organizational rules about human interaction, resign now. God judges rulers more harshly than those ruled. Yes, people will transgress every policy, pretending they have observed the precise wording. Punish that legalistic silly attitude in the first place as a separate violation, then punish them for fudging the rules and ignoring the intended result.
Society is going to Hell in a literal sense because no one is willing to accept reality. Normal humans touch each other as part of communication. It is healthy, and a revulsion to human touch is mental illness. You may have rules about whom you permit inside certain degrees of proximity and interaction, but you cannot exclude all humanity, nor can you torture humanity with highly variable whims about it. We can’t read your mind, and we shouldn’t be obliged to try. That’s the core of damned feminism (that adjective means “Satan likes it”), and it has no place in human society. It’s evil to whine about touching in itself. If you want to avoid touching, stay away from other people; keep your sickness to yourself. If you insist people gather in close proximity for more than a few seconds at a time, or insist on participating in the benefits of such congregating, expect touching and make sane and predictable rules.
There will always be places on people you don’t touch, and we should always seek to correct “bad touches.” Grab me or my family members certain places and God says I really must punch your lights out. And I would rightly expect the same be applied back on me. There are contexts which change how those rules apply, and we are all intelligent enough to understand that. Complications are a part of the business of breathing the air.
The Ancient Near Eastern cultures did it best. They recognized the very real need for human touch even as they carefully kept the sexes segregated. Most Westerners would be embarrassed by the degree of physical closeness proper for ANE men, because most Westerners reject reality in the first place. We think we can dictate by some misbegotten logic what reality ought to be, instead of trying to understand a very real need for human emotional health. People are not entirely rational by any standard, nor have we any business expecting it. That in itself is irrational. We have enough perversions arising from very real fallen nature without aggravating things through intransigence.
In every part of the world, there are various customs regarding give and take, who does what to whom. Everyone, even the lowest members of every society, have God’s permission for some outlet to the normal expression of the same human needs we all have. Touching is a very real human need. With no outlet, or with unreasonable restrictions, we justly call such customs evil. There is a divine standard which judges all human constructs, and is the only one this writer will recognize. There is always room for debate, reform and improvement of things. Don’t run from your responsibilities by simply blocking off whole areas of human need.
Thus saith Lord, so argue with Him.

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New Year's Grammar Grouch

Posted on January 14, 2012 by ehurst

Granted, in English we seldom differentiate between the direct and indirect object, but we do retain a distinct difference in pronouns for subject and object. The problem is, nobody wants to use it when we come to the various forms of the word “who.”
We generally use it as pronoun, but because it indicates an unknown person, folks get confused. It’s really not that hard. I ask you is pretty obvious, no? The reverse is you ask me. Notice what happens to “I” becoming “me”. One is for the subject of the sentence — what’s this about? The other is the object — what is the recipient the action? But just because “who” rhymes with “you” is no cause to think they take the same form. We could make it really clear if we make it all a little silly so it becomes obvious.
You ask you.
I ask me.
He asks him.
She asks her.
Who asks whom?
Now was that so hard? If you are using “who” as a pronoun for the subject, it remains in that form. When “who” becomes the object, it changes shape to “whom.” If you need a clue, use the masculine third person he and him as an indicator.
Addenda: Just now, after posting this, I ran into something related. Try to keep in mind, despite the political correctness idiocy, in the English language the masculine is inclusive. That is, when you don’t know which gender is precisely applicable, use the masculine. This is reflected in the various forms of “who”. So:
who’s = who is
whose = belonging to whom
It’s the same is he’s and his.
It matters.

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