Complexity of Reality

Posted on October 9, 2011 by ehurst

We shall have a staged revolution.
While I confess to a preference for natural gardening, that doesn’t mean there’s no place for effective shortcuts. To avoid having to use pesticides, I try to grow stuff which has few natural enemies here in Central Oklahoma, crops which actually belong here. But if the ants get bad enough, I’ll consider spraying their hills to limit damage. And I’ll typically use something like Miracle Grow during part of the growing season. There are small risks to such choices, simply taking advantage of natural tendencies in natural processes, without wholesale manipulation.
I’m not all that intelligent. When I can see certain patterns in natural processes, surely there are far smarter people who see them, too. It applies to human behavior, as well. The revolt in Egypt was staged by the CIA. It’s not as if the CIA simply created it wholesale, but took advantage of the venality of her previous ruling class to make them push too far. As that point was approaching, the CIA held training camps for young Egyptians, among others, to promote the kind of thinking and particular methods in revolution which looks just like a reasonable complaint. It was a calculated risk, because it spilled over into a few countries in which the CIA was hoping to maintain the current ruling regime. I see these things simply because I’ve had an education in Social Sciences (history, geography, political science and economics), and I’ve worked in federal government services where you could see what sort of secret policies are executed. I don’t think it requires a brilliant mind to see these things.
The pattern is pretty obvious. Where the military already rules or is useful to the CIA’s policy plans, the revolts are put down. In Egypt, the military was painted as a positive force to protect the people. In places like Afghanistan and Iraq, our government is trying to build a military force more amenable to those policies, finding it necessary to destroy the military power holding sway before. In a few places, it’s enough to simply create and maintain a level of chaos to prevent interference with the CIA’s appointed mission. The CIA isn’t the only player, just the preferred conduit for conducting such broader policy objectives worldwide for TPTB. Here at home, the CIA still acts, but is needed less because other agencies can accomplish much of the plan.
I reiterate here my belief the pattern is (a) using debt to control the whole population so that (b) the military-industrial complex remains firmly in the driver’s seat. But the eventual destination is the choice of the secretive plutocrats, perhaps the Illuminati themselves. Here in the US, I feel certain now there have been repeated attempts to get us under martial law from the 1990s, at least. TPTB are pretty patient, having offered any number of provocations to the federal government — Waco, the Murrah Building bombing, 9/11, Patriot Acts, TSA, etc. Each event justifies greater oppression; event pushes us farther toward the inevitable revolt. The Tea Party was too dangerous, and had to be compromised early.  We may be seeing it now in the OWS protests at last.
It takes only a little fertilizer here and there before a revolt surely sprouts. Every revolt is subject to hijacking, as was the one in Egypt. We currently have a high degree of public favor toward our military, and few understand it is not our friend. Fools have already called for a military coup. But it doesn’t have to be called “martial law” to offer the same degree of control to the chosen instrument. Regardless how this thing progresses, the result will be the same. If it seems the momentum of the OWS protest takes off too quickly, it will be hijacked. If not, it will simply garner the reaction for a more direct assertion of power. I tend to think the latter is more likely, but only if we add in the even greater provocation of an economic collapse. We should expect the controlled opposition to alternate between facetiously picking on it, while also making it seem utterly magical and beautiful. So the contributions and direct food support, for example, should last until the crash. Longevity would contribute to the credibility of the thing.
My thoughts on this are hardly original. Just today I spotted similar thinking in a comment to an article at Activist Post. The article itself gets caught up in supporting the OWS protests. I offered a moral argument in favor of them myself, but only as an opportunity to point out the more fundamental Laws of God on such matters. That they are morally more correct is the nature of things, and whether the actors are aware of those cosmic morals or operate from some wholly different motives makes no difference to me. To the degree their actions reflect God’s justice, they will prosper. That has nothing to do with whether God plans to protect them or allow them to be hijacked. His logic is far more complex than that. These things criss-cross on multiple levels, and the human mind is simply not equipped to handle all of it.
The part which we can understand is the part conceived by the human actors. That’s already complex enough.

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Less Than a Month?

Posted on October 8, 2011 by ehurst

Even the MSM is now admitting the current banking system of the West is just two or three weeks from collapse.
The focus of attention is on Greece. Ever met any Greeks? I have. The national pastime is gaming the system. The government simply gets to play with bigger numbers, because they are in the upper class. It won’t matter what the Greek ruling class agrees to in the face of what the various national and international agencies decree, the Greek people won’t go along with it. They’ve been scalped and have nothing left to lose, so rioting is just the beginning of their resistance. Never mind right or wrong, good or bad; it will happen. The Greek government runs out of cash in two or three weeks, they say.
They could attempt to bypass the cash system, but it won’t last more than a few days, at best. Given the nature of modern Greek culture, the people will be revolting before it even gets there. They understand all this even better than we do. They know the plutocrats aren’t broke, having hidden their golden parachutes outside the country. Does anyone seriously expect them to give back all they’ve stolen?
Everything we’ve read about this whole economic crisis boils down to that very thing. A certain portion of the population have created a class conflict on the sly. They are the corporate officers and upper management, all serving on each others’ directorship boards, and holding big chunks of voting stock, etc. It’s a closed system, which only looks good on paper. They have spent the past few decades feverishly awarding themselves huge bonus payouts from failing business operations. Did they honestly believe this mortgage swap fraud would work? Did they honestly believe sucking up all those tax breaks to send jobs overseas would still leave a functional economic base? That huge fantasy about the Information Economy came out of those boardrooms.
You can’t keep an economy going simply by shuffling the dollars faster and faster amongst the plutocrats. Everyone working in the information industry were actually doing little more than that. Such esoteric electron chasing simply served to mask the legalized embezzling. So now we have our own ruling class with their fat off-shore bank accounts, and every bank and corporation is failing. Were you aware there is virtually no bank fully solvent in reality? Hasn’t been since the first bubble burst in 2008 (credit unions don’t have this problem). All that fraudulent mortgage foreclosure activity was a hurried attempt to fatten the bank balance sheets. Too little, too late.
I suppose the prognosticators are exaggerating, since in reality things take longer than that when everyone is desperately trying to keep the current system going. So let’s see if we can play this out. It’s only my best estimate plus a smidgen of intuition, so you can come up with your own, if you like.
Greece runs out of cash, and the other players simply can’t afford to front them any more. Everyone who has already loaned them money will take a major loss. It’s been my experience the Europeans are slightly more honest about such things than we are, so the Greek bond and debt holders will report the loss, and many will be insolvent that day. I’m sure the repercussions will vary, but a lot of businesses and banks will simply be dissolved, assets sold to settle with their creditors, folks sent home. People who know a lot more about this than me say it will spread like wildfire, because the whole system has been trying to stabilize by spreading it out. But when you depend on a line of credit and your bank closes, you may have to shut down operations. It gets harder when you consider most governments will declare a bank holiday.
So the electronic fund transfers halt, and only cash is exchanged. That would indicate you might want to consider having a store of cash, if possible. But then, for most of us, there’s too much risk in tying up our limited resources that way. That’s the way it is for a huge majority of small businesses, because for quite some time, folks have been forced by circumstances to operate on the edge of failure for the past few decades. Everything is “just in time” and only those who have resources on hand set aside can survive the shock.
It takes awhile for current stocks to be depleted, but as you surely know, consumables go first — food, tobacco, etc. The predators who just barely get by in the best of times will go berserk. A lot of folks who were willing to play by the rules in the past may forget those rules. Some people will be slow to catch on that it’s all over. Most of them will be victims at first.
What you’re actually made of shows up when all your stuff is stripped away. It helps if you’ve been pondering it for awhile already.
Because of the vast number of folks involved, the vast amount of stuff, and all the links in the chains which tie us all together, I seriously doubt it will all come apart overnight. Heroic efforts to keep things going for awhile can see parts of the system stumbling along for weeks. Local variations will be hard to guess.
But in general, every major disaster has gone somewhat like that so far. But instead of a microcosm, like Hurricane Katrina, this will be international in scope. It also gives a big clue how the various levels and agencies of government will react. Ugly.
But don’t take my word for it. Think for yourself.

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Paradoxical Choices Soon

Posted on October 7, 2011 by ehurst

The primary purpose of a mystic is to bridge between this plane of existence and some other. The inescapable imperative of a mystic is helping others find their own bridge. If nothing else, your actions declare the existence of that other world.
All my rantings about God’s Laws reflect that truth. We weren’t designed for this world as it now is, and there most emphatically is something better. You cannot possibly understand that something better without digging into God’s Laws, because He revealed them as the one proper path out of here. In religious language, that’s what it means to call for repentance.
It’s one thing to assert at length all the things God requires of us as humanity at large. It’s another to realize we cannot possibly engage every part of it for the obvious reason there are large chunks of our lives not under our control. More specifically, we will not be granted the authority to change everything we see wrong. The biggest mistake you’ll make is trying to fix things that aren’t yours to fix. You can’t even fix yourself, really. A fundamental element of the Laws and repentance is committing yourself to the Laws. What most modern Western people fail to understand is the ANE assumption this was all about your commitments, not your performance. There is an unspoken assumption to the Laws you must inevitably come up short.
That’s why the Laws offer symbolic ritual means for confirming your recognition of your imperfections. The brokenness of this domain includes the brokenness of everything which belongs to it. Some part of us belongs to it. Mysticism is about recognizing there’s another part of us which does not belong here. That part which does not belong has to make amends for the part that does, until the time the lower part can be shed.
It’s really not possible to explain it with words, but there is an element in that shedding of this mortal coil which is a reward for fighting it tooth and nail to make it behave. Not in the achievement of some success in beating down the broken humanity, but in the faithful commitment and desire for victory which endures for so long as whatever time we are stuck in this form. The only thing pragmatic about this is struggling to understand how the broken part works to capitalize on its inability to win.
So we carry the fire of Heaven in broken vessels. The light leaks out through the cracks, as it were. While the Western obsession over walking the talk is wrong, it’s wise to remember how we admit our limitations before we open our mouths, so that our words indicate a healthy dose of self doubt. Our peace with human failure is our glow.
The rest of the world around us is typically even more broken. It will fight with a massive overwhelming power to snuff that fire. It has its own inherent weaknesses, which is why so many mystics live so long to keep up the glow. But we remain the biggest threat to this broken world, in that we realize it’s one big lie.
So far as I can determine, there is not a single human on this plane who is actually free in any significant sense of the word. Those most free in the flesh are most enslaved in their spirits. Indeed, those spirits are dead. We who are most free are subjected to the worst forms of human slavery, though it tends to vary across the sweep of human history. Right now, anyone paying attention can see the trend is to more thorough and more degrading slavery of the flesh.
For all my blather about God’s Laws and holding the world accountable, a critical element in our personal accountability is seldom raising our hand in violence against the broken system. That belongs to a higher power. There is no blanket prohibition for all mystics, though some are sure there is for themselves. That’s another critical point: No two of us have precisely the same requirements in terms of how we shine the light of truth, because we all have cracks in different places. In theory, some of us may find it imperative at one time or another to act vigorously to protect something on the fleshly level. It is surely quite rare; otherwise, we are no different from the rest of broken humanity. The light goes out if we all become activists.
It is lawful to fight the system, in theory. It is seldom wise. I remain utterly certain in my spirit the system will demand yet one more service from me before this body expires. It will most likely be in pursuit of goals which broadly I must despise. At the same time, the service itself will be imperative for the sake of the higher truth. If left to our feeble human logic, what I suggest here is impossible, but in the logic of God’s Laws, I must submit to this slavery in order to be free in that other sense. Call it destiny if you will, but my mission as a mystic will be incomplete without bearing my bit of flame one more time in the den of the beast I despise. Nor will it be simply some subterfuge for sabotage. I will render faithful committed service within the limits of my conscience.
Granted, my conscience in terms of what I can describe is somewhat fluid. Truth is bigger than my poor addled consciousness. Just when I’m sure I’ve figured it out, some demand comes down from the Spirit Realm which doesn’t fit into my neat little understanding of things. I don’t doubt I’ll be confronted with more of that, countless times, before my time is up. It’s not the truth which is fluid, but my understanding of it which cannot ever be perfected. The highest virtue of a slave is flexibility and adaptability, to bear an indomitable spirit. If the God Whom I serve orders me to bear the yoke of government service again, it is His prerogative.
No one who shares this mortal coil with me has the authority to tell me I’m wrong on this. They may sense in their own limited abilities some discontinuity, and most certainly will be obliged to tell me so. But even as I denounce the service of this beast as something which will bring forth a crop of evil, I know it is my sense of calling to be ready to go when that day arrives. I have already been told.
In my feeble grasp of all this paradoxical truth, it seems to me that day is mighty close.
If you take the time to read between the lines of MSM news and alternative news sources, you’ll likely sense an accelerating pace of drift into a global police state. It’s not possible to estimate any kind of proportion, but of a certainty, some of you, my dear readers, will face some hard choices in the near future.

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Profits of Sin

Posted on October 6, 2011 by ehurst

The CEO of Bank of America says, regarding the new fees he’s charging debit card users, that his bank has the right to make a profit. So far, so good, but he’s trying to ignore one little problem:

[P]eople aren’t protesting Wall Street because of 9% unemployment and slow growth, they’re protesting because they know Wall Street gambled big, lost heavily, and then robbed them and went back into the casino.

This includes BoA. They have played at the casino and lost big. They have participated in the robbery of the taxpayers. They now demand even more via their own customers. What the CEO means is he is demanding the right to a huge bonus pay-out for himself and his lieutenants regardless of how poorly they have performed with their customers’ money.

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Radical Stability

Posted on October 6, 2011 by ehurst

radical (Latin: radix) The root, pertaining to the source or foundation of things; a political position which advocates removing everything and starting over. The word is typically used as an adjective suggesting dramatic and wholesale change in the current situation, replacing it with something presumably more fitting to the needs or purpose.
I’m a radical. While I fully understand the value of what has come before, I also understand the human tendency to depart from it without even bothering to notice, and invariably for bad reasons and certainly bad ends. The difference between a radical and reactionary is how far back they wish to go to find a better starting place. Both would willingly tear down and remove current systems as ill-considered and a threat to human existence and sanity. Radicals simply want to go farther back to the root of things, not simply some unrecoverable “golden age” which may or may have actually existed.
It’s not as if I actually expect any significant number of folks to agree with me. It would be a major accomplishment simply to be heard. The other edge of that sword blade is my utter certainty we shall reap the wrath of God. You are permitted to dismiss my claim to being a prophet as merely a manifestation of my inner frustration at not being taken seriously. Nothing I say will prove otherwise, and I won’t bother debating it. But if you find this at least entertaining, here are some radical statements indicating things I believe God will judge.
I want Christian religion to forget everything since the First Century, because I find no one who clings to any point of progress since that time can even pretend to think like the Apostles. What we have is not simply derived, but a corruption of what stood then. The whole of modern Western Christendom is a hodge podge of reactions to mere human events, not revelations from God. That’s why we have a jillion denominations; each of them reflects nothing more than some response to a perceived abuse by some religious authority during the 2000 years since Christ walked the earth. Each time some authority became abusive and ungodly, the reaction to it was yet another step away from Christ’s perspective on the world. Both were wrong, and we now have a crazy patchwork of religious institutions with mutually exclusive claims to the truth. All of them are wrong. These days “Christian” is a label applied to just about anything and everything except “following Christ”.
I want the all singing and dancing graphical social web to get off my Internet. Take it the cellphone network and leave us alone. The real Internet is a digital medium for communication between computers, and I would just as soon see the entire Internet nothing more than text with primitive formatting at the most. Transferring plain text documents or computer code is naturally permitted. If you have to do visual to communicate, put it on the smart phone network. The original purpose of HTML was nothing more than linking one document to another so you could access an entire library from one device without actually having to keep your personal copy in digital storage. Everyone could produce and maintain their own portion and we could all share freely. If I can’t get the gist of what you offer by viewing it in my plain text browser, it doesn’t belong on the Net. All that other crap is not communication, it is manipulation. That is the inherent effect of all non-text media. People who are adept at textual communication are exceptionally hard to manipulate. I suppose we can make exceptions for the likes of technical drawings, but even that is pushing it.
I don’t want anyone on this earth claiming an authority to govern any other person who isn’t blood kin or isn’t in covenant relations. If they ain’t family, stay out of their business. No one ever born on this earth was smart enough to rule except the few who refused to do it. Wanting to rule is a primary disqualification; thinking you are smart enough is proof you are dangerous. The best rulers in history were those actively seeking to do something else, and were drafted into ruling after struggling to save life and sanity for others. They remained good at it only so long as they didn’t get comfortable with the role. No one with good morals wants power.
I want all forms of education to be entirely voluntary. Barring medical problems, people will always be willing to learn what interests them. I can see the value of highly encouraging basic literacy and numeracy, but we have a very poor social concept of what people actually use on a daily basis, and a very poor society which skews what people need by seeking to make them dependent and ignorant in the first place. Education has become merely another experience of oppression. You are required by laws to attend school, dealing with people in an environment carefully structured to inhibit learning, and teaching by force particularly those things nobody uses. We are in no position to evaluate what minimal education looks like because we have such a completely broken society.
I want all businesses forbidden to make profits unless they are wholly owned by a single individual or household. People should do first what they must to survive, and when a society develops to take advantage of specialization and economies of scale, they should consider pursuing whatever actually interests them. If no one buys what they produce, let them starve or learn to do less of it. No one outside your family has a claim on your labor or person. Advertising should be wholly forbidden on pain of confiscation, with the singular exception of some simple sign announce what you offer. The notion of making a profit as the only worthwhile goal comes from Satan. We engage in economic activity to keep people alive and make life more pleasant, period. If that’s not motive enough for you, work for someone who is ruled by it. Everyone should be utterly free from all social pressure if they want to live in poverty, or prefer to make choices which put them there.
Humanity should not be permitted to unite for the purpose of bullying others. There should be no such concept as real estate and land ownership. That’s not to say you can’t control the turf on which you reside, but you can’t divide it up for personal ownership. Occupation is sufficient basis for excluding others from it. You can only own what you produce, and it’s yours to control within the social structure. Social structure should be confined to the extended family, whether by ties of blood or covenant. If you can’t handle your birth or covenant context, seek another elsewhere. If you can’t handle dealing with other people, there should be a place for those willing to risk solitude. But that solitude means no protection from anyone who doesn’t volunteer it. God help us if we don’t learn to value every human being as they are, created uniquely by His own hand, but we can’t always afford to extend protection to everyone. The household comes first, and no one or no group has any claim of superiority over any other.
Have I destroyed enough of your world with my crazy ideas? Good, because chances are, if what I suggest is too foreign, what you have now will pass soon enough.

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Enclave: Sanity Asylum

Posted on October 5, 2011 by ehurst

When the world is insane, you build a safe place to remain sane.
For all the world it looks like a cult in a compound. Yet, when the world is crazy, it’s opinion cannot be taken seriously. Threats, yes, we worry a bit about them. But mere thoughts are the thinkers’ problem. When “outside” means abnormal norms, it’s time to consider how you can escape, even if only for brief moments to remind you what sanity is. It will depend on your own character and context, but to the extent possible for you, creating a sanity enclave is worth consideration.
If you are coming late to this discussion, or if this post is your first introduction to my weird rantings here on this blog, you’ll be forgiven for not coming back. If something in this appeals to you, scan through some of the previous posts to gain a better grasp of my madness. The title of the blog reflects my desire and efforts to think through the requirements of God’s Laws. Having come to the place where I am comfortable with what I have gained so far in this endeavor, and would be willing to accept that final fate of mankind whenever it comes, what’s left for me is to continue poking at what brought me here, in a public facing dialog with myself and anyone else who bothers to comment. Maybe I can do someone else some good.
In my own little world here, I strive to embrace and observe what I have come to understand about God’s Laws. A critical element in this is refusing any notions of pushing it upon anyone who isn’t under my just authority. My children are grown, and there will be no more of them, so they’ll have to decide if, and to what degree, I am still the elder who guides them. Most of my other kin are both unaware and uninterested in what I think for the most part. I bear them no ill will for this; everyone has to choose. What’s left is the vague future possibility someone will be moved to take my rantings seriously and agree to form a covenant bond. Right now I don’t have any significant number of folks in my geographical proximity interested in what I’m doing. My wife is on board, and a few others to varying degrees, but the whole thing is too tenuous to do much with it. We talk and agree and pray together, but as a group, we don’t feel called to build a tighter community just now.
Yet, in that we few together hold a similar outlook based on God’s Laws, we have a shared community of faith and action. The world around is not yet such a great threat as to make this unworkable. That will surely change, but until it does, we have only some idea how we might adjust, in terms of goals and outcomes.
If all the world was more compliant with God’s Laws, we’d never give it much thought. No human planning we could imagine would work to change things very much, so the burden is upon whatever limited response lies in our hands to press our own lives into the mold, as it were. Yes, it will always bring conflict, and in each case we have to decide whether the conflict is justified or not. Sometimes the conflict is the mission, is the message, but we try to avoid conflict which serves no such purpose. At some point you end up creating a pretty firm separation from the rest of the world, at whatever cost. That’s because if it kills us, or does something short of that, such is the price for breaking with this fallen world. The line was drawn in Eternity before this particular patch of human history came along.
In my own mind, contrary to many of my youthful dreams and plans, I am forced for the sake of my own sanity to recognize God has called me as elder. In this context, it means I’m to prepare myself to provide fatherly administrative and organizational guidance for so many of those as are interested in getting involved in my vision of sanity. The details of what that means aren’t important in this discussion, but I do possess one of the primary qualifications: I know beyond all doubt I’d rather not tell other people what to do. If you hung out with me, you’d sense that very quickly. I’m willing to organize things only to the degree necessary to provide maximum freedom of individual choice and still preserve whatever it is makes life worth living.
It’s necessary to include in that some recognition of the vast range of human desire and intention in asserting their own claim on life. If you can’t live with others, you will live in conflict, and not very long, at that. We are social creatures.
Concrete plans would be almost meaningless. The whole point here the idea itself: When any number of people can come together in one location, with sufficient agreement to work alongside each other and build a community, it has to be done right. Doing it right means having some grasp of what God’s Laws mean, and what they seek to declare about human nature, and what remedy they offer to compensate for how badly broken we all are. Right now, this implies a trend to enclaving. There are a thousand ways this will create trouble with those who can’t agree to come inside, and who are hostile to almost every element of the community, down to the very epistemological questions of what constitutes reality itself. But it’s that epistemology which is the primary issue of separation in this case. When you embrace the epistemology God revealed, an awful lot of other stuff is eliminated before you start. One thing eliminated is the feasibility of concrete recommendations from where I sit behind this keyboard.
If you buy much of what I suggest here on this blog, you will soon find yourself needing an enclave, even if it’s just yourself versus the rest of your world. There has to be someplace where God’s justice rules as much as it is going to on this earth, or you will lose your way, your very sense of self.

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"Occupy Wall Street" and Morality

Posted on October 4, 2011 by ehurst

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest is morally superior to the system it protests.
That’s not to say it’s completely righteous, but God supports it over the system. I say this, despite my certainty the protest is partly the result of Shadow Government PsyOps. That the protesters are being used does not detract from the justice of their essential claims, any more than Satan quoting Scripture makes the Bible wrong. You can find a copy of the OWS official statement here. It’s a laundry list which will tend to weaken the more effective focus of what seemed the original purpose, but that may reflect the effort to garner wider support across the activist community at large. It’s risky politics, but may work out well enough. What matters here is the core reason: Calling attention to the criminal enterprise which government and Big Finance together have become, demanding an end to it. This is the part God will bless and prosper.
(Update: The list at the link may not be official, after all. Minor point here.)
It’s not as if God needs to take a class in economics and finance. His revelation condemns usury for a good reason. The logic is not all that hard to follow.
The underlying assertion is God created us for better things. We broke it, but He gave us that choice. Now that it’s broken, our options are limited. As the designer of this whole thing, and the One who keeps it working for the duration of its existence, whose hands are altogether actively and intimately engaged in things every moment, He has revealed the optimum route for getting the best of what’s possible. He still permits rejection of His revelation, but it comes at the cost of increasing human suffering, along with the fundamental cosmic moral culpability for causing it. While the particulars of the penalties are only partially explained, they are nonetheless certain.
God forbids usury. It’s okay to make loans to other folks, but it’s not okay to charge interest on that loan. The purpose of loans is not to make monetary profit directly, but to improve the general climate of human welfare. If you can’t quite grasp how that benefits you indirectly, you are trying very hard not to see it. It’s not ignorance; it’s hateful stupidity. In general, helping others helps you. God expects you to claim His promises of improving your welfare through improving the general welfare as sufficient motive. Charging interest on loans enslaves your fellow humans to you, and you cannot possibly have any good motives in that.
We all understand pretty quickly that improved material productivity improves the general welfare. More is better; what you don’t use yourself is potentially trade goods. The problem is when we are so focused on the stuff, we forget why stuff is good. God draws the line of “decreasing returns” a lot lower than mere spreadsheet calculations suggest. If getting more stuff means taking advantage of your economic dominance to compel folks to do nasty and depressing work, you have defied God’s intentions. Giving those folks the option to starve is not much of an option.
If you have relative wealth compared to your fellow humans, God says you need to acknowledge His assistance in getting it. Governments and communists make the claim to a share based on specious semantics and petty greed, but God doesn’t need your stuff, nor you. Human governments only pretend they are God. They also are subject to His whims. Of all interested parties in this discussion, His is the most valid claim: “If it weren’t for Me, you wouldn’t have been born. Everything which happens to you after that is by My permit.” So when He says He has an interest in your property, you need to negotiate His terms for letting you continue keeping it, along with your life.
God claims His purpose in letting you accumulate wealth is because you have been appointed to use it wisely for His broader agenda. You get to waste a lot of it on yourself in return. His terms are pretty lavish, to be honest. Your part is to then use some of it to benefit others. Not because you owe them, but because you owe Him. They are His appointed recipients of your excess. In making distribution, you are required to ennoble them as much as possible for that very reason. That is, without catering to whiny demands of entitlement, you reach out in such a way that expresses your recognition of their importance in the grand scheme of things. Their poverty does not make them beneath you, as if your economic position marks you as God’s favorite. Material wealth is only one of many forms of treasure. All humanity is commanded to share the richness of whatever it is given to them.
It’s the ultimate divine specialization of human labor. It isn’t justice for you to draw up contracts by which you leverage your particular kind of wealth to control the other kinds. Yes, you are to guard against the material greed of those who abuse their other forms of wealth to get yours. Justice is not to be had in some libertarian anarchist paradise, resting on human reason and concrete social codes of law. Justice rests on drawing together into communities of kinship based on shared DNA or on covenant commitments. Your neighbor down the road is presumed to be distant kin until he acts like an enemy. But folks in one big happy family typically don’t deal too sharply with one another. You are generous and willing to take some losses because instincts alone tell you that’s necessary, as you equally share in whatever it is the others contribute in the long term.
If nothing else, they put up with you. We rightly presume that means they can in some fashion appeal to God on your behalf, and you can be sure He does hear. He says so. It’s not legalistic trade in merit points, but a deeper and more fluid moral fabric.
So when you look at the current banking system, you realize it’s far cry from what God requires. Then you compare that with what the OWS folks say, and it’s easy to see they are much closer to His requirements.
You can have economic growth without debt at interest. It will be slower, but it will also be morally correct. The fallen world is rough enough when we embrace God’s Laws. There will always be people poor in material goods, so poverty itself is no indicator of injustice. Jesus, God’s own Son and the ultimate revelation, said poverty was inescapable as a fact of human existence. He also said trying to balance the scales by shifting material wealth directly is pointless. But debt-based economics aggravates the problem. It grants artificially increased buying power, economic leverage, to those who already have material wealth. In the process, it inflates whatever passes for money, and weakens they buying power of the poor. It robs them of what little they have by making it worth less. Indeed, it directly cheapens their labor, so they have to work harder to get what little is available to them. Any suggestion debt-based economic growth floats all boats is an outright lie, intellectual dishonesty.
If it means smashing the whole system and destroying Western Civilization itself, we are morally obliged to support destruction of the debt-based economy.
Addenda: Since writing this, the movement has devolved into another protest-for-the-sake-of-protest thing. It was a good idea hijacked quickly by professional activists.

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Recapitulation of Intuition

Posted on October 4, 2011 by ehurst

So my timing was a little off, but not by much on the scale of things. Back in April I wrote I felt things would be significantly worse here in the US before my birthday, now two weeks past. I gave it thirty days either way in my own head, and here we are short of that. I believe what I was predicting has come about. This is not about tooting my own horn — “See how smart I am?” It’s tooting the horn of using intuition and learning to trust what it reports. I didn’t say it was a prophecy, just a calculation which permitted inputs from outside the conscious intellect. In particular, the timing was the result of intuition.
Here’s my justification:
1. Banks are jacking up fees. We all know why, but the point is they are sticking it to us without mercy. It began with the Wells Fargo and their 3% charge on debit cards; BoA just announced a 5% charge. Others banks will follow, and other fees. This makes life worse for ordinary people.
2. Our troops have invaded Pakistan repeatedly. There have been small incursions since 2008, to my knowledge. It’s mostly under the radar, in the sense it happens one individual incident at a time. However, the number and density of these engagements, and the severity of the action, is on the rise. Our commanders act increasingly as if there is no border. At this point, I feel justified saying it’s all planned, as it turns out most of what we claim to be shooting at are forces our CIA has funded and equipped.
3. Major conflict in big cities. I was wondering what would be the ostensible cause, but it seems a planned provocation called “Occupy Wall Street”. My initial analysis says this is from agents provocateur. If the whole thing simply dissolves and everyone goes home patting themselves on the back, I would have to question that assessment. If they stay and it continues gathering momentum, it will surely reach a breaking point, because that is the point. Whether it’s the protesters or the government agents rioting won’t make any difference. The constant claim this draws inspiration from the Arab Spring revolts, which themselves were CIA operations, convinces me this is serious business, and TPTB intend to use this to justify removing some current impediments to their activities. The participants don’t have to know that for it to be true.
4. The Euro is all but dead. As such, it represents the European Union, which will die when the banks begin to collapse. Only on paper are the governments and banks separate, if that. When those banks go, ours will not survive intact. I can’t yet picture what will follow that, but I’m wondering if the timing is connected to the protests on Wall Street.
As a separate issue of things which have not yet happened, I’m wondering when things between us and China will blow up. I can’t imagine the question any longer remains “if” but “when”. Not only have they promised to help Pakistan against us, and whatever grip we had on Taiwan is slipping away, but yesterday Congress poked the Chinese government in the eye again. The Chinese don’t have a fire a shot; we handed them our economy long ago.

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Welcoming the Mobile Era

Posted on October 3, 2011 by ehurst

James Kendrick at ZDNet says the PC is not necessarily dead, but the mobile device is definitely the central figure in consumer technology.
He notes the PC has regained its old image as that thing you use at work. Frankly I’m glad to see it. I’ve often prayed for the mass of consumers to get their own Internet and leave us computer geeks alone. This business of the cellphone as Internet device almost guarantees a divergence between the old Web and new one. It’s not just the difference between sites optimized for mobile devices; mobile devices are quickly getting large enough to display the Web as is. But the very means of linking the cellphone network to the Internet is drawing a lot of attention from the carriers. If we can keep them preoccupied with milking that linkage, they’ll pay less and less attention to the direct connection used by PCs.
Though this hardly characterizes the current state of the industry, it seems to be coming. The recent growth in uptake of tablet devices puts a great deal of focus on consumption-only of the Internet, as opposed to using a device which was primarily designed as much for producing as it is for consuming. People are simply less interested in blogging, but some are still willing to read blogs. They spill more and more of their communication output in highly curtailed Social Networking tidbits. Most of those who no longer read blogs because all their Net time is absorbed in the likes of Facebook are the same folks who wouldn’t read a serious blog in the first place.
It’s rather like the difference between the scholars who huddle in quiet classrooms while the majority of those who would much rather be somewhere else commiserate in massive noisy gaggles all over the campus, anywhere but the classroom. The latter is what populates the likes of Facebook. It’s the place where crowds hang out gossiping or chattering about their favorite TV shows. More power to them, but please let us few have a place to exercise our tastes in other interests.
I realize this will mean a loss of advertising revenue support for the more contemplative interaction with the Net. To some degree, corporate sponsors who gave us free blogging services are already closing things down. For now, many are simply making such services less free. For example, Google is getting pretty pushy about wanting your cellphone number as the price to keep your Blogger account active, or even your Gmail account. It puts more of the expense of operations back onto the user, via the sneaky absorption of your airtime for their convenience, not to mention a further loss of privacy. It’s why I stopped using my account with them.
This other, older Internet is worth what little I have to pay for it. For all the simplicity and convenience of WordPress, I could easily run a blog on my static website account — I did for awhile. If all else fails, I can create one out of simple HTML or even plain text. The real loss would be the extra traffic, the extra attention from other WordPress account holders. It makes me easier to find for folks who actually want such material as I produce.
However, I’m willing to bet the majority of us communicators are likely to develop whatever new habits are necessary to keep alive our intellectual pursuits in the global virtual community. We’ll have to donate a little more of our time to keeping the links amongst ourselves open.
For the most part, the Easy Net consumers will continue drifting off into the mobile device network. Their interaction will become more passive, more about consumption than genuine interaction. It will be little more than a mobile TV without the lock-in scheduling. They can have it.

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The Real Sustainable Life

Posted on October 3, 2011 by ehurst

Western Civilization is inherently unsustainable.
If the only sin of Greens was worshiping Mother Earth, I would hardly bother with them. Instead, they have hijacked words like “sustainable” as a cover for hating everyone outside their little elite in-group. Anyone with the most ordinary grasp of logic can see their goal is not only killing off billions of humans, but making them utterly miserable along the way.
This is hardly offering a pass to Western Civilization and its filthy acquisitive nature. The Greens are a misguided and hateful reaction to a misguided and hateful materialism. So while I admit to a certain libertarian instinct, I reject the political libertarianism common in the West, because it asserts an absolute property right (materialism), but only vaguely supports the divine command to share the bounty He allows us to accumulate here on earth. Libertarians worship Mammon; everybody else in the spectrum worships the state.
I reject the entire left-right schema because it excludes what God demands of us, and substitutes a false god in His place.
God has made clear the proper order of things. Civil and social matters are separate. The basic mission of civil government is security of the community against threats to the basic necessities of life. The harsh treatment is reserved for threats, not people who are just trying to stay alive. In the extended family community, messy though it may be, humans can always negotiate a balance of rights so that everyone can live and work, and nobody gets less than their share. Those who refuse to negotiate can find a place to live outside the community where they don’t do any damage. It never is about pure economics, but about people. The dependents receive due care because they are people, and only those who refuse to care get pushed out.
The primitive tribal nation is God’s ideal for human government. This is the strongest bastion preventing the modern nation-state, and abomination to God. It is also the darling of the Enlightenment,  upon which all modern nations are founded, and is presumed by the whole range of political opinion discussed in every office of power and human organization. The mere suggestion there might be something wrong with Enlightenment assumptions draws, at most, a blank stare. You might as well be talking to the air. Go ahead, try to suggest to someone at LewRockwell.com that God intended nations to have rights regardless of political land boundaries. There’s no place for that in libertarian economic thought. It’s all about property — i.e., land boundaries — not people.
It doesn’t matter what mixture of brilliant compelling logic, charismatic statesmanship, or industrial war-making you use to protect your nation-state. If you don’t adhere to God’s standard of justice, it will all come apart. If you do adhere to God’s justice, whatever else happens is His decision. Part of that justice is respecting national identity regardless of political boundaries. Even Rome understood that, which is partly why, for all her other evils, she lasted far, far longer than any modern nation-state currently in existence.
Yes, there are a jillion complications due to human ingenuity in seeking ways to bypass the proper tribal social structure for their own personal advantage. We are wired to be suckers for one thing or another; this is part of our norm, and we have to accept it. The community is almost always better at handling the vagaries of petty human evil than any civil government. Thus, social government is sacred against the intrusions of civil government. For all the inefficiencies of this system, it is what God demands and there is nothing better in the long run. The whole point is sustaining human life, in part by making sure everyone has something to do and the basic necessities. “Sustainable” is properly defined by this.
More than this is evil by definition when it interferes with the fundamentals. Nothing the human mind can imagine wanting justifies changing the basic structure and operation of society. If you can chase your grand dreams without afflicting the sustainable system, the go for it. The arts and most sciences will have to wait on having enough left over. By now we’ve suffered enough from brilliant sparkling death to know such obvious things as “natural is better” when it comes to food and such. The difference between getting more from nature and mucking with nature is the irreverence of arrogant minds thinking they can do God one better. We are on the threshold of discovering the vast destruction nature unleashes when pitiful human intelligence rejects safe limits on this question. Glyphosphate-resistant weeds, anyone? How about antibiotic-resistant diseases? These things are the direct result of whiny, irreverent people pushing genius in the wrong direction.
In the coming days, grandiose dreams of human achievement will founder on the simple failure to provide the basic necessities of life. It’s not just food, but water and air and simple sanity people can’t get. This business with Occupy Wall Street may seem like an argument between reckless corporate greed and ignorant socialist y-gens, but it resonates deeply with a much bigger threat of starvation and homelessness as the price for the dreams of an elite handful of folks determined to make all humanity over in their private image of perfection (AKA Neo-Cons, Zionists, etc.).
We’ve been living beyond our means for a very long time. Most of us believe it has something to do with pursuing national greatness, something we blindly believe is still ours. It never was, because we have yet to take up the most basic task of seeking justice. In the very act of colonization we openly mocked God’s revealed sense of justice in dealing with the natives. They weren’t angels, but we were outright devilish in our dishonest and dismissive treatment of them. Our sins have only grown, as we have painted ever more layers of false piety over the spilled innocent blood everywhere our feet have trod. Never mind all the other labels, we are the populist nation, demanding everyone we encounter fall into formation and march to our strict code of rules, forcing them to pretend they love our decadent hedonism. Now that we have consumed the past, present and future sustenance of most of our world, we don’t have anything to show for it. We don’t even have the merest comprehension of a decent social structure, much less the means to sustain basic life.
There’s a lot more involved than this, with other players on the stage and a script almost nobody knows, but fundamental to the picture is the failure to consider what God considers sustainable human existence on this planet. Global revolution? People aren’t just angry over imaginary slights against their rights; they’re hungry!

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