Radix Fidem Blog

Dodging That Slice

Posted on December 17, 2011 by ehurst

No matter where you live in this world, our insane SOPA and PIPA legislation is going to affect you.

That is, unless you have no dealings or contact with any American residents — in which case, you would not be reading this. Having observed politics most of my conscious existence, I feel certain these two abominations (eventually combined as one) will be passed into law before Christmas, or soon thereafter. The primary thrust of these two bills is to grant the MAFIAA (Music and Film Industry Association of America, a combination of the execrable MPAA and RIAA) more power to shut down anything they don’t like. Are you prepared to imagine they will exercise any scintilla of ethics in the use of such power? At their behest half the stuff on the Internet will disappear. At the same time, the protection of copyrighted material becomes the government’s excuse to persecute anything the arrogant officials dislike.

The question is not, “How can we stop or change this?” I am utterly certain we are past that point. The only variations at now are scripted far, far above the level of our concerns as users. In terms of the Net users, it’s the second edge of the same blade on the sword of state coercion. The first edge was the imposition of martial law, as noted in the posts of the past couple of days here. The question, then, is what can we do to dodge the swinging of that sword, which will surely come all too soon in our direction?

It depends on why you are connected to the Internet. What does it matter to you? For me, being the unrepentant loudmouth on the topics which interest me, it’s about communication and publication.

I always keep at least one off-shore email account. Right now, I have one in Germany (GMX.net) and one in Norway (mail.opera.com). Both happen to permit using regular mail clients as a full-bodied mail service, but when you run Windows, that’s unwise. Windows users should generally avoid downloading email directly to their systems. So in the case of GMX, it means knowing enough German to use the menus and such. There are lots of free webmail services all over the world, and in many languages. I’m pretty sure the Great Firewall of America (GFoA) will have numerous holes in it, and the proliferation of domains will keep things real.

For blogging, there are numerous options for me. Aside from the big ones we all know, there are several lesser known operations. Again, Opera in Norway hosts free blogs at My Opera. This is one of those community-oriented sites, where other users of the service are by default free to peruse and comment on your blog. There are others of varying fame, some listed here by links:

My Blogsite
Aeonity
Thoughts
SOS
Blogigo
Blogtext
Xanga

If you can tolerate something more primitive, but with vigorous resistance to take-down demands, you could try this rather versatile free site: Free Conversant. I used it once, but that was before I knew enough about CSS to get what I wanted from it. While it can be used as a blog, it’s basic design is more of a conversation site, almost a forum.

A technical note: From what I know of the DNS blocking planned for the GFoA, it’s much harder to block Americans from visiting your site if you are registered under some other domain as a subdomain. If you’ll notice the URLs for some of the blogs on these sites, the only personalization is adding your site nickname as part of a longer domain name. That comes as either a prefix, as here at WordPress, or as a subdomain under it at other sites — somesite.com/yoursite/ is common. With some, having multiple accounts is no problem, either, so you can keep the GFoA administrators guessing. Using your own registered domain name makes you an easier target for GFoA blocking. Instead, focus on keeping your personal brand name(s) (mine are “Kiln of the Soul” or “soulkiln” and “jehurst”) as part of the longer domain name so that your friends and readers can find you wherever you move.

For more fully developed websites, it’s a lot more work. There are hundreds of free hosting plans around the planet, with widely varying degrees of freedom for you as user to set up what you really want. The ease of use varies, as well. If it really matters, you’ll either have to learn webmastering, or get an associate who can do it for you. If showing up in the search engines matters to you, it’s not so much you need to learn SEO (search engine optimization) techniques — I don’t use them at all — but simply choosing a domain which gets indexed. Some of those obscure services see precious little webcrawling.

Another concern is backing up your material. For myself, there is plenty of stuff I can generate and regenerate in just an hour or so, from scratch. This is stuff written into my character, as it were. But to prevent having to do too much work, my static site — ~~Kiln of the Soul~~ (site is gone as of 2020) — is fully backed up. That is, I keep multiple copies of the whole thing; I even have one prepped for burning to a CD, complete with an autorun utility. It would be too easy to simply add excessive junk, but not everything I write is that critical to whatever I regard as my personal legacy. But the basic outline of what I consider important is all ready to upload, complete with landing page and all. I keep it all synchronized on all my backups, and follow the KISS principle. My basic material is all text; nothing dynamic, no JScript, no graphics, just simple XHTML pages. The nature of my work is textual in the first place, so your mileage will vary.

I’m not vain enough to imagine I have, or ever will have, any great following. Everything I have can be quickly reduced to plain text, just like we used to see in days of olde with electronic bulletin boards and slow dialup connections. It’s not simply removing the HTML tags, but replicating the markup according to some recognized standard which has been around for quite some time. If there were no readers at all, I’m not sure I would simply disappear from the Net. I’d keep at it until it was simply not possible within my skills and resources. There is little reference to any market, but the burning urge within.

Others would have to adjust their own plans based on what they imagine is the justification for it. I would have no trouble taking up one of those free Unix shell accounts wherever they are available in the world and producing a plain text blog. Can you imagine the URL — some-weird-place.net/soulkiln/blog.txt — for that? It may come to that someday all too soon.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged computers, government, internet, oppression, resistance | Comments Off

Inventory

Posted on December 16, 2011 by ehurst

Today’s a good day to consider what is before us.

As noted yesterday here, martial law is now officially the law of the land. I still believe it will take awhile for things to gear up. However, crushing dissent has already begun in earnest against various mandated government orthodoxies, as noted in the other post yesterday.

At various times I have stated some basic principles of operation here.

1. I can’t shut up. In order to be me, there is a fundamental requirement to write and publish. This and other places on the Net fulfill that necessity for me.

2. I’m a pacifist. I refuse to get involved in fighting and actively resisting the police state. Indeed, I refuse even to protest publicly.

3. That’s because I am utterly certain God has ordained this nastiness as punishment for our gross national sins. (It has nothing to do with grace, Jesus on the Cross, or any of that other stuff; it’s strictly a matter of His Laws.) So any form of active resistance is a sin.

4. Flight is not a sin. If you can get out of Dodge, get out. If you can only flee to some isolated area about which no one else cares much, that may be sufficient. Part of what I am doing in terms of physical fitness is keeping an eye on the necessity of playing cat-n-mouse. I openly encourage and profess my own plans for avoiding arrest under this new system.

5. There is some room to maneuver. Because I’m not a significant threat, and there are only so many badge-bearing thugs against a really huge number of folks who are easily more offensive to the system, they’ll probably not come after me, or people like me, anytime soon. I don’t see any evidence of gearing up right away for a mass movement to crush dissent just yet. Stuff like that inevitably leaks out. Our only real problem is false leaks which promote senseless behavior.

To my advantage is the complete lack of need to hide or keep private any of my grouching and mutterings. There are no secrets here. I may use plenty of sarcasm and humor, but the only thing I can’t let hang out there in plain sight is the Truth itself, since by its nature it must be presented in parabolic and symbolic terms. Even then, I often struggle mightily to make it as obvious as my talents allow.

But I suppose at some point it will become pretty inconvenient to keep mouthing off here on this blog. Simultaneous with the imposition of martial law and the police state in meat space, we have at least two serious proposals for crimping things here in virtual space. All in the name of protecting copyright, you understand. It’s altogether possible WordPress and other free blog space providers will be forced to take action to shut down certain types of dissent. I’m expecting the rise of popularity for more “bullet proof” services in the near future. If that fails, I’ll have to move my publication to something more obscure.

Given what amuses me, it also raises again the question of operating systems and computer software. I have noted in the past the only real advantage of using Linux or other Open Source is how much control the user has. That control is limited if the user doesn’t write code, but you don’t have to worry about secret back doors and commercial exploitation. Windows has those doors wide open, but has certainly improved on resisting outright criminal exploitation and basic system stability. So I may end up having to consider and discuss, and act on, such things in detail sometime soon.

This, in the context of considering my audience. When I write about computer stuff, I get tons of traffic from people who seldom bother to interact. They matter to me, in the sense I get the chance to help someone do something they couldn’t otherwise. For those who come here because they actually like my writing in general, these few folks are of a sort who are already fairly savvy about life in general. At least, they have been asking the right questions long before they happened upon this blog. If I have to “go underground” with those things about which I simply cannot shut up, you’ll probably know where to find me, provided you have leisure to spare much effort on such things. If I stop posting here, you already know how to get hold of me to find out what’s up. If you don’t, simply email me at the address on my ~~resume~~ (gone now) and I’ll provide a half-dozen email addresses, etc.

But we’ve got some time. Frankly, I expect the evil doers will run out of resources before they get to me. That doesn’t mean I won’t take some heat, but I believe I’m prepared for that. Meanwhile, I still believe in the God who made and rules the universe, and I’m sure He has plans incomprehensible to us all. I am aware of that, even as I profess no particular ideas what that would mean for me specifically for this discussion.

We can still get some popcorn and put up our feet.

Posted in personal, sanity | Tagged government, internet, law, oppression, survival | 2 Comments

For My Next Adventure… (Updated)

Posted on December 15, 2011 by ehurst

I’m getting older, but I’m not yet old enough to have lost all wanderlust.
Sadly, my next adventure could be some form of custody. Yes, there is much hyperbole there. I rather expect I would have some form of lead time by virtue of being so insignificant on the scale of things. There are several classes of dissenting voices and I don’t rate up there with the big whistleblowers. And since I’ve written so little on Climategate or Climategate 2.0, it seems I’ll be out of the loop on this battle. Why would I write about something so painfully obvious a fraud as AGW?
Indeed, I’m really not much of whistleblower at all. I’m just a muttering grouch crouching at the end of a dark country road out in flyover country. There was a time I was under surveillance, but that died not too long after it began. It’s vaguely possible someone is still checking my blogs, and I’m quite sure my email is being read, but so is yours. I doubt it’s human eyes reading my routine personal traffic, and I really don’t send any important stuff. Okay, it’s important to me and my radical religion, but I have to wonder if they even have a clue what it’s about.
But just in case, here goes: Should I cease posting for, say, three days straight, chances are I have no Net access. You can provide your own guess why that might be, but Cox Cable has an excellent record, and there is lots of free wifi just a bike ride away from here. If my laptop dies, there are two other systems in this house, and several neighbors who would gladly let me use theirs for something important. If it’s some sort of disaster, it would make the news. Central Oklahoma is your clue there. I suppose if someone nuked Tinker AFB, it would affect my life, being only five miles away. So if I stop posting and you can’t find anything obvious, it’s most likely because something unexpected has separated me from the Net.
That could range between illness and death on the one hand. I’ve given my wife all my passwords, but she’s shy and not a writer. I’ll have to compose some standard cut-n-paste for her, I suppose. On the other hand, in the outside chance I’m actually arrested or harmed by authorities, I should expect they’ll grab a bunch more before me, and I’ll have a chance to announce something first.
Then again, I suspect the folks who bother reading my stuff with any regularity are pretty good candidates for such things in their own right. You’ll notice TallBloke is in the UK and his stuff was grabbed on a US warrant, so you judge for yourself what the risks are for associating with me.
I do plan on having at least one more big adventure in my life, but I rather expect I’ll get to post some about it here before it gets too complicated.
Update: Apparently this raid on TallBloke’s home and computers was the result of someone who posted a link in a comment on his blog. That link was to the copies of the second batch of emails which were being leaked by whomever got them. That’s the cache of emails the IPCC folks had tried to keep anyone from seeing, which emails are a “smoking gun” on the fraudulent “science” of Climate Warming. If you know anything at all about Climategate 1.0 and 2.0, you are probably aware of some of this. It also appears this whole incident with TallBloke is being picked up on a great many blogs. Perhaps if enough of us get involved with just a mention of this, it could help to counter-balance evil oppression.
Yeah, I called it that. More, it’s a solid violation of God’s Laws. So it’s all a very big moral failure.

Posted in personal | Tagged computers, government, humor, internet, oppression | 2 Comments

Welcome to Martial Law

Posted on December 15, 2011 by ehurst

I rather like the definition of Martial Law offered at Wikipedia.
Each of the two houses of Congress have passed their version of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012. For the House, it was HR 1540, and in the Senate it was S 1867. Since they are not identical, there will be a conference between committees from each house to negotiate until they agree to the letter. Then each house will be required to vote on the amended version. Then it goes to the President for signature into law.
The House has passed their committee version as of yesterday, and the Senate is expected to do the same today.
Despite all the rhetoric reported in the mainstream press, it is highly likely the president will sign it. What he claims was a hindrance was not the existence of the provision allowing the military to arrest any human on the planet; the White House wrote that provision. Rather, the President is in a huff because the current versions both require the military to arrest folks for certain things, rather than giving the President, as Commander in Chief of the US military forces, the discretion to decide if he wants to make that arrest.
But the point is the military having arrest powers regardless of location or any other limiting factors. This is the definition of Martial Law. I’m willing to bet this new power won’t be used right away, at least not on any large scale. It’s meant to be there, hanging over our heads as a threat. But at some point, it most certainly will be used.
Nobody who’s been paying attention is surprised, only that it took this long to become the law of the land. They’ve been conducting such arrests for quite some time one a small scale. All it takes is the declaration some person is an enemy, an illegal combatant. Seeing they actually rather enjoy torturing people, they’ve refrained from using the label “traitor,” which would virtually require quick execution. Now they have full authorization to use troops for any combative purpose, anytime, against even their fellow citizens.
It’s here.
Update: As expected, the Senate passed their version on the day this was posted. It remains yet for the President to sign. Please note there is no complaint about codifying military authority to arrest civilians and detain them indefinitely without charge, trial or counsel. What the House and Senate agreed to do was allow the President to waive the requirement for detaining US civilians, and allow him to choose. That was his only complaint.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged government, law, military, oppression | 1 Comment

Just a Few

Posted on December 14, 2011 by ehurst

People do change.
But very few of them change at any given time, and seldom do they change very much. Radical turn-arounds are quite rare. Human behavior remains subject to much manipulation, but human nature itself is burned in.
This is why we spend so much time rattling around in Social Studies with no useful results. Too much of the effort is aimed at “what should be.” Even when you get someone who is careful about their methodology, the delusion of what-should-be taints the research and results. That in itself tends to prove my point here.
When we content ourselves to observing what is, and what we who understand could gain from it, the whole game of studying human nature changes. We need not be predatory, but recognize the limits of what any single force can accomplish.
While I often poke at the Victorian Period for much of what’s wrong with the West today, it’s really not that simple. There were several leading influences which made it possible for Vicky to mess things up so grandly. Besides, she was only the figurehead we all blame, and not really that influential in the cultural shift which takes her name. But even more important is recognizing the evangelists of Victorianism were simply preying on a well established human trait. They provided a fully developed fantasy which precisely met the times, and took advantage of basic human stupidity. Try as we might, so very much of what we see in the West today is either Victorian or a highly selective reaction to it.
My obscure vision of what ought-to-be regarding the Laws of God is frankly not going to garner much interest, even with those who believe they are seeking the truth. I’m not willing to manipulate and take advantage of mass human idiocy. However, I’m quite eager to point out that idiocy. I find the Laws a very handy explanation for it, a fair and accurate characterization. So I’m not a reformer, not a prophet to the masses. My emphasis is offering truth, not implementing it as some benevolent dictator.
That’s because the mission is not fixing things, but making sure no one has any excuse when they come to stand for the Final Judgment, whatever you may imagine that to be. My whole assumption is fixing is simply not possible. I’m just offering a means to making it all tolerable until it’s over.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged culture, psychology, survival | 1 Comment

Fraudulent Use of My Personal Info

Posted on December 13, 2011 by ehurst

I’m trying to imagine why, but someone seems to have lifted my personal contact details and posted a bogus resume on several job websites, such as Monster. First, I got a bunch of notices from the websites. I’ve complained to them, and asked the accounts be removed. Second, I’ve gotten several emails offering jobs for which I am not at all qualified or interested: Electrical Engineer, banking management, sales, etc.
Let’s get one thing straight: I’d sooner become a crack whore before I would work in sales. Yes, I’ve already done sales, and I feel like beating senseless anyone who dares suggest I do it again. This, while being a complete pacifist.
As I said, I really can’t imagine what sort of prank this was supposed to be. It’s an annoyance, and perhaps a minor embarrassment, but otherwise it seems utterly senseless.

Posted in personal | Tagged computers, humor, internet | Comments Off

Sheep, Sheep Dogs and Shepherds

Posted on December 13, 2011 by ehurst

Human excellence is self-selecting.
Sheep don’t think of themselves as sheep. They consider themselves people, all different, all special. Sheep dogs think in terms of what they do, which is face down the threats. They aren’t likely to intervene much if the sheep kill each other, though a particularly bright dog will stop one from harming others. Each incident has its own goal; they don’t think in terms of security as a whole. The shepherd thinks in terms of the greater welfare of the flock and the reason he bothers even having sheep. We can argue whether this or that one isn’t exactly a member of the flock, who qualifies as sheep dogs and shepherds, but the basic principle is well understood.
Sometimes the only difference is context.
A distinction I implied in yesterday’s post was the excellence of realizing we need not see human aspirations in terms of goals and objectives, but in terms of the excellence of being committed to human welfare. Most of the world might think they understand that, but their lives prove otherwise.
When it comes to a lot of human activities and concerns, I’m content to wear the woolly cowl. Sure, I understand security, but I’m not quite that instinctive about responding to individual threats in most contexts. I’m too slow; I want to think about it. It made me hate being a Military Policeman, because I was always thinking like a Provost Marshal or commander. I wasn’t qualified, largely because the military doesn’t want real commanders, but I really didn’t want that responsibility in the first place.
I wanted to be everyone’s favorite uncle, for lack of a better symbol. I wanted to be there at some distance, but always ready and available to carry people through those times when they needed some distance from the daily grind. I am not all that useful until folks are conscious of that need for some distance. Now that I’m older, it’s more like grandpa, literally and figuratively.
Even when I want to be among the flock, I can’t do it. I’m not interested in eating grass, not interested in rutting and bumping heads with the dominant rams, and not frightened by everything that moves. I can’t fake it.
But whether I like it or not, I’m stuck as a shepherd in many ways. It’s pretty lonely. Most of the time the sheep have no clue what I’m going on about, nor could they be made to care. The sheep dogs keep looking for someone to tell them what to do, or they get restless. I’m not always sure I want to tell them what to do. Sometimes I feel like even the other shepherds don’t get what I’m saying. So I’ve been out hiking away from it all, letting someone else herd the sheep.
The sense of not having to worry about anything is refreshing, but I keep running into the odd sheep here and there, lost, abandoned, forgotten. The instincts just won’t die. But the other shepherds won’t let me work with them, let me share in the labor because they don’t trust me with their flocks. Feels like I’m in the wrong country, but it’s that way wherever I’ve traveled, as it were. I didn’t mean for it to turn out like this, but I still have my own staff, and something of a rod. I have my own kind of sling and stones, which I can’t keep myself from drawing out when I see a predator.
Maybe I’m simply on the wrong planet.

Posted in personal | Tagged peace, psychology, religion | 1 Comment

News Used and Abused

Posted on December 12, 2011 by ehurst

All of us are abused in one way or another.
How would we classify it? There’s folks who don’t know they are being abused, but we can’t always pity them if they like it or just don’t care either way. There’s folks who know it, but we don’t usually pity them unless they seem genuinely powerless. Too many folks simply assume they are powerless when it’s not necessarily true, or at least not true in the way they assume it. Most of the time I can’t even begin to figure out what is actually going on, but if it seems to affect me, I do try to pay attention.
So we have this wild story of troops, probably American, who were redeployed from Iraq to Jordan, of all places. This would be somewhat obviously in preparation for military operations against, and perhaps inside, Syria.
You’d have to decide if Sibel Edmonds is likely reliable on the subject. Then you further have to decide if her sources are likely reliable. The idea itself is wholly plausible, given what we know of past military idiocy in that region, particularly given my own experience with military idiocy in general. Further, we should hardly be surprised if the MSM is quiet on this. Finally, we should expect a decreasing level of reaction from the general public, particularly in the US, once the story of such operations is officially announced, or leaked, having been so thoroughly pummeled by propaganda against the current Syrian government. The whole publicity campaign is highly reminiscent of my training in using a more literal artillery to soften up a target prior to assault.
But the whole thing calls to mind the wider question of propaganda itself. Back when I was attending East Anchorage High School (Alaska) in the early 1970s, I never would have imagined living through my own experience of Animal Farm when we read it in class, or 1984, which I read later on my own. Particularly the latter, as I’ve been watching the cases of folks like Susan Lindauer and Edgar Steele. Do we call it a conspiracy when agents of the government do what governments have always done, but lie about it in the most implausible ways? What sort of traffic runs through your mind when someone holds a gun to your head, literally or figuratively, and demands you must not say, “water is wet”?
It’s not as if there is much we could do to stop our government from invading Syria or any other country, for the simple reason we can’t stop them from invading our own homes, or even our very conscious thoughts. I’m not sitting anywhere near the border between Jordan and Syria, so I can’t even verify any of this. A part of me cares deeply about the needless suffering sure to come, just as our troops have afflicted so many others in that part of the world. On the other hand, ours is just the latest wave of several thousand years of such wanton bloodshed and general mayhem.
Yeah, I believe in prayer, but that’s another book I probably need to write some day.
Right now, the one thing I know for certain is if I don’t struggle with the information available, regardless of what I decide about it at any point on the timeline of my existence, I’m cannot rise above the liars, enablers, commanders and killers. I may not be any better however you evaluate such things, but if I don’t try, I’m not worth evaluating at all, not worth knowing, contributing nothing against the implacable demand upon my soul to fight evil.
We can’t afford to ignore even what we cannot affect.

Posted in sanity | Tagged government, peace, propaganda, war | Comments Off

Recommended Listening: Judith de los Santos

Posted on December 11, 2011 by ehurst

You cannot compare artists objectively. You can only say what it is you like most. That’s what art is about. I suppose for some of us, music does that. It touches something inside, and for each of us, there is some particular mix of music and musicians who touch us in the place deep inside which has no name.
Then comes along every once in awhile a performer who does that for so very many people, they justifiably gain fame. Or could, if the awful pit of Hell reserved for the music business didn’t destroy so many. But a few escape, at least for a time, that hideous murdering mass of exploitation and their songs are heard by those who never get enough of the beauty.
Perhaps you remember Karen Carpenter. We may never know the truth, but it seems she was destroyed by one manager who lied to her about her physical beauty, suggesting she wasn’t quite perfect enough. At any rate, she died from complications of anorexia in 1983. And we who loved her angelic singing are yet angry these many years later that so much was taken from us all too soon.
So while we do not sanely compare one with another, we know when that touch comes again. I’d like to suggest you, too, may be touched by the haunting beauty of a voice I’ve not heard of before. Judith de los Santos recorded a cover of something written, of all things, for a computer game by Jeremy Soule. I’m willing to bet she found something in that song even Mr. Soule didn’t know was there. Instead of having to wade through the music business moguls, she’s making good use of the Internet. Go ahead and visit YouTube and listen for yourself: here.
Update: Judith’s performances are also covered under the name “Malukah.”

Posted in personal | Tagged culture, internet, music | Comments Off