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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A Disturbance in the Force

Posted on October 2, 2011 by ehurst

There is a disturbance in the Force, millions of souls crying out.
I wish it was that simple, because the reality of such things is more complex. Mostly it’s nearly impossible to explain. All day long there’s been this apprehension, something on the verge of making me weep. It started yesterday. There was a time when I would have known this was just another wave of chronic depression, and simply stayed away from sharp objects. I don’t have an urge to do myself harm any more, but there’s an awful lot of sorrow still coursing through me.
So this is your chance to dismiss me as some kind of kook. Meanwhile, whether the threat to humanity is near or far, today is my day of sorrow for what will be lost. In that sense, I have to wonder how long such a “day” will last. It’s just that in my current understanding of how God speaks to me, it feels like it’s really close, really huge, and the tail stretches over the horizon. I wish I could relate it to something we would all understand, but I cannot.
Here’s what I can put into words: Bad as things have been, and now are, we haven’t seen anything, yet. The cruelty of immense evil is about to expose itself from behind the veil of what heretofore has been mostly incompetence, short-sighted greed and powerlust. We can’t imagine how many folks who honestly believe in what they are doing are simply pawns of something which began before any of us were born. Most of the people involved, here in the US at least, are living in some massive Truman Show experience. Born, raised in it, and almost everything they experience has been rather carefully staged. They believe it’s reality.
I can live with the self-doubt of wondering whether I’m the one living in a Wonderland. Some part of me died a while back, and I don’t think I miss it. What’s left is a lot more peaceful, so if this is crazy, I’d gladly keep it in exchange for whatever I had before. I can keep going and believe there is something right with it.
Yet I’m filled with a really big sorrow over something which probably won’t matter that much personally, in the sense of touching my odd little world. Rather, it hits me in some other place. Throughout my whole life, I’ve never been able to tolerate cruelty. Sure, like all kids, there were brief moments when I found myself overtaken by the urge, but I always regretted it. When we let such wickedness use us, it won’t matter whether we know the greater damage is to ourselves. I’m still wearing those tender scars on my soul to this day. Right now, every one of them is inflamed, because some part of me knows I’m about to see more of it than I’ve ever seen my whole life put together.
I’m going to quit rambling and simply close with this: Prepare for a shock. No amount of cynicism will prepare you for what’s coming. Count yourself lucky if you can’t get an accurate report. It drives me nuts I can’t get a sense of the timing, but it’s closer now than ever before. God help us.

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Poverty, Predation and Protest: Confluence

Posted on October 1, 2011 by ehurst

A confluence of events is looking nasty. This is merely my own human thinking.
Does anyone question rising poverty in the US? Consider: The size of the economy is shrinking, because fewer and fewer players are involved in it. Many of those still involved engage a let less of it. Jobs have been shipped overseas and what’s left is far less substantial in terms of the proportional value. In other terms, more people are taking lower and lower wage jobs, when they can get them. The percentage of residents employed overall is lower.
Meanwhile, those at the top of the economic food chain are not only avoiding their share of the loss, but are actually capturing an even greater share of all economic productivity. In other terms, the rich are getting richer at the expense of everyone else. It’s not enough that vast quantities of future productivity are now held in plutocrat hands, but they are finding creative ways to scrape up more of past productivity. The distance between the top and bottom increases exponentially, in terms of absolute currency units, proportional share of the shrinking economy, and in terms of life support itself.
First the MSM ignored the protest on Wall Street, and the alternative press hyped it, and participants really hyped it. Actual unbiased reporting simply did not exist. At some point, the protest began to cause actual pain in the system, because the badged thugs were sent to cause pain to the protesters. Naturally, this caused yet another backlash, as cops themselves refused to work the protest. The communists (under whatever label they prefer) are typically the first to latch onto something like this when it proves the real committed core have staying power. So unions are swelling the ranks. Big and noisy, it still won’t mean much until the mainstream gets involved.
There are sympathy and satellite protests in other major cities, now. Each of them must persist and grow for this to make any difference. We know it can change things; we saw it with the Vietnam War protests. We don’t know if it will. With each passing day, it seems more viable.
We will have a change in government policy. Whatever happens with the protests, the status quo is simply not possible. I seriously doubt it will be the change the protesters seek. More likely is something which could be called a military coup. I tend to think it won’t be that obvious, since many currently in positions of power are actually on board with this. They won’t all have to be pushed out of office for the coup to happen. We’ve already had bits and pieces of this coup in place for quite some time. Remember the plans to post thousands of troops back here in the US on mobilization footing for the sake of putting down insurrection? Remember the FEMA camps?
Fact: The Neo-Cons will not be stopped until they are dead, along with some portion of their supporters. Whatever drives them each individually, the thing which matters most is their unified drive to proceed at all costs to all humanity. This is the nature of psychopathy. Put enough of them together and even self-preservation takes a back seat. Yes, we know who they are, and this can be stopped. But that won’t happen; good guys aren’t ruthless enough. (Recall I have a prophetic statement we would be wrong to stop the Neo-Cons by typical human means, because God has decreed this as our national punishment.)
Peaceful protests don’t affect this cabal. Make enough noise and they’ll start arresting, beating, even killing the protesters. All without so much as batting an eye. Don’t think the leadership of the NYPD aren’t willing, nor that of every other major metropolitan police department. That willingness is a job requirement for everyone above a certain rank in the system. Below that, it’s a mixed bag. I believe they know that, and when the police won’t do the nasty work, the troops will be called in — you’ll be shocked how many of them will do it. We don’t have a military union.
And they were put on alert a few weeks back.
How close is it? I don’t believe there’s a schedule, but there are tripwires. We may never learn where they are, but when the enforcement escalates is when we can tell they’ve been triggered. This may not be the big It, but I rather think it is. This isn’t just “get the popcorn ready” time. This is more like nachos, hot wings, pizza and beer.
Addenda: It occurs to me TPTB may actually be promoting the protest, playing both sides against the middle. Protests escalate, as does NYPD misconduct, then the protests grow in backlash, etc., until it spirals out of control. If the Feds/military get involved the protests will harden, I am sure. At some point, it becomes the excuse for martial law, which I and many others have been expecting sooner or later.

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The Tao of Spiritual Writing

Posted on October 1, 2011 by ehurst

All truth is God’s truth.
When some ancient pagan religion manifests a thread of understanding consistent with Scripture, I’m obliged to give credit for getting something right. Terms such as Zen and Tao have already passed into common English usage, and mainstream Christians who balk at them are silly enough. However, I specifically give credit to Taoism for getting right the basic understanding that some things we do have their own eternal path, and doing them best means finding that path which existed before you came along.
When writing on matters drawn from the Spirit Realm, I would be a fool to rely entirely on my own native intelligence. Frankly, that intelligence isn’t worth a whole lot. Every time I rely on it, I fail. Sure, some parts of the experience come out well enough, but something always misses. I always come away with the sense all I’ve done is drawn attention to my own brokenness. When I enslave my intellect to the bigger processes outside the range of mere intellect, I usually come away with something more than I brought to the moment.
This is particularly true in writing. Building on my previous explanation of suspending the ego, let me assert I cannot write well enough to even entertain my own self without seeking the Tao of any particular attempt. When I take those walks of prayer, I’m seeking most to eliminate distractions. While plenty of ideas do come rushing forward in my mind to be noticed, many of them really good in their own right, only a few actually belong to that particular moment of truth. But I can’t really know which until I commit the words to the digital memory and hit “Publish”.
So some things I can easily dismiss for another day. Yet more than once, the act of composing has seen a dramatic change in what I brought back from the hour of prayer. On a few occasions I’ve been seized with the compelling need to rewrite and correct something. In fairness to the medium and my readers, I typically mark significant changes by standard devices, labeling them “update” or “addenda”. More often, I simply dawdle over the posting itself until I have a sense of peace. The flesh slowly drags behind the spirit as the latter pursues the path more surely. The mind struggles to keep up.
Hopefully, what’s left glowing on the screen when you visit here helps you along your own Tao, so you reach your own Zen.

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Myth of Lothario

Posted on September 30, 2011 by ehurst

It’s not that there are no Lotharios out there, but they are rare.
When you begin to collect facts and use them to displace mythology, it’s amazing how it can change your understanding of things. Your reflexes and instincts shift to accommodate a more accurate view of reality.
In my eclectic surfing today I ran across one of the newer songs by Reba McEntire, “If I Were a Boy.” Context: I really like Reba’s singing. And who doesn’t like her looks? I hated her TV sitcom, but I understand why it sold from just the few bits of it I saw as I passed through some place where it was showing. It drew lots of laughs from promoting the social mythologies of our society, drawn particularly from the subculture which she represents. It was supposed to be poking fun at reality, but it was only funny if you accepted the perverted reality common on American TV.
The music video I sampled is one which has little or no direct or symbolic connection to the subject matter of the song, but such has been all too common since music videos first became a major element in our entertainment industry. Don’t pay any attention to the video portion, because it’s mostly focused on her pretty self and some long, green strapless gown which she drags around an empty mansion on a snowy cold day. The lyrics are the point.
The story is how, if she were a boy, she would act. In essence, she claims guys tend to be heartless and unfaithful. We are to believe, in her experience, every guy is a Lothario. In the language of the Game Theory of Socio-Sexual Behavior, that’s simply an Alpha Male. By definition, there are very few of them. The majority of any given sample of males will always be Deltas (see the hierarchy).
The error of the song is assuming every man she’s encountered tends to be a Lothario, which says more about her than it does men. She’s been riding the Alpha Male merry-go-round, and is disappointed at the lack of upholstery on the sculpted horses’ saddles. The majority of men are nothing like that. Her choices reflect how thoroughly she participates in modern American culture, and all that “Good ol’ American Country and Western” is still filthy debauchery, no closer to God than any other subcultural flavor.
The average Western male is turned on by pretty gals like Reba, but places them on a pedestal. In his mind, somewhere out there is the one perfect woman, and he has to win her heart, if necessary by extraordinary devotion and faithfulness. He’ll sometimes catch himself dreaming of a fling with some other cutie who passes by, but lacking any of the qualities to make such conquest likely, including the deep sense of guilt he feels before he even gets started, it won’t happen. Even if she’s a hooker and he’s got the cash, it is highly unlikely. Want a stable, faithful mate? Delta is the way to go. Beta if you are pretty enough, but keep an eye on him.
Boring, say most gals. Too bad, because in the real world what makes a fellow hot to you is the very package which makes him hot to every other gal, and him likely to take them up on it. All of them. I’m under the impression Reba’s personal life is far less tormented and heart wrenching than her songs. Her singing talent is considerable, but I can’t imagine her looks had nothing to do with her fame and fortune. I wonder if she believes what she sings? I think it’s likely she does at least partially, since her fame rests largely on sad songs of the woman wronged.
If only in her musical imagination, she needs to get off the Alpha Male merry-go-round, because there’s a lot of men who aren’t Lothario.

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