Jesus Favors the Poor

Posted on August 13, 2011 by ehurst

Mammon is the god of Western churches.
When your mind is closed a priori to something, you have no moral right to reject it. If you examine it and find it’s not for you, that’s great. At least you know. But refusing to consider something simply by virtue of dropping it into a neat category for exclusion from your mythology, you defy the real God of Creation.
It’s not as if there aren’t some things He prohibits, but He always leaves significant clues as to why they are prohibited. He does not prohibit examining these clues, but He does prohibit rejecting His revelation out of hand. Those of us who believe in this God of Creation are not the ones holding people accountable for rejecting His revelation, though. None of us are the Truth Police; we simply offer His gift of revelation. God still offers good things for people who reject His revelation, and we are foolish for not participating. That’s the reason I make so very much of fully understanding the difference between the Two Realms, between Laws and Grace, and knowing how they interact. We offer so much of revelation as people can grasp, at whatever level they wish to examine it. The burden is upon us to understand what matters to them, to speak their language, and meet them where they are.
If you read the Gospels and don’t see how Jesus favors the poor over the wealthy, you simply lack reading comprehension. You could try to bury that in the context of His time and place, but it’s no excuse for missing how it applies to us today. He was rough with the wealthy and powerful. Not uniformly so; He was pretty decent and gentle when any of them genuinely sought to understand. To Nicodemus of the Sanhedrin, He gently broke the news His teaching was incomprehensible to the intellect. It required a spiritual awareness, available only if the spirit was awakened or born from above. Nicodemus struggled with the literal meaning of the words, when Jesus pointedly used parabolic language. To be a ruler and teacher of a nation born in mysticism, Jesus found it hard to swallow such a man had no comprehension of Hebrew symbolic logic.
To the Rich Young Ruler, Jesus warned a clear conscience and peace with God required not making a god of his wealth. If the young man was unable to throw his material possessions aside in favor of the otherworldly life, he could not even comprehend peace with God, much less obtain it. It wasn’t the possession of wealth and power, but the fear of losing it which mattered. The Hebrew poor were much more likely to be otherworldly. When you consider what went into their condition and their thoughts about it all, they knew instinctively they had not gone out of their way to offend God, yet found themselves in misery. When Jesus explained misery was normal in this life, and that another life was available, they had no trouble deciding which was the better deal. The path to discarding this life in favor of the other was wide open to them. The wealthy and powerful had a huge barrier to cross.
This is not simply some cultural mythology; this is universal truth.
Modern Western Christianity has striven hard to turn this on its head. The bulk of Christian teaching, particularly in America, is all about getting ahead in this world. Like the Twelve at any time prior to the Cross, they simply have no place in their minds for the otherworld. Talk is cheap, and all the slick theology about Eternity (the Pharisees had plenty of it) means nothing when the bulk of religious education is about constructing a mainstream which amounts to little more than self-righteous materialism. The American evangelical experience is bathed in political agendas and cultural warfare, as if to ensure the crucifixion couldn’t happen again. Yet we are assured, when we read between the lines of Scripture, that politics was the whole motivation for prosecuting Jesus. It mattered not the particular agenda; all the parties agreed He had to go. Until we acknowledge the very real truth we are all carrying the hammer and nails for His crucifixion, we can’t drop them. Everything He taught challenged not only political power, but the desire for it in all cases; He literally fled from having it forced upon Him. The politics of man cannot accomplish the grace of God.
There is a godly political regime, only in the sense of Laws, not grace. It required a cultural and intellectual foundation the Judeans had long discarded. That foundation was Hebrew mysticism, the sense that things in this world aren’t to be taken too seriously. When I see a politics built on that, I’ll be first to sign up for the party rolls. Jesus would, too. Every argument He had with the political leaders of His nation can be reduced to telling them they were no longer Hebrew, no longer the nation God called “My People” because they had rejected the fundamental definitions. They had constructed a vast philosophical matrix which could not accommodate the ancient truth, and they were hostile to the explanations of the Law of Moses offered by the very Son of God, who personified all God sought to reveal through Moses.
Meanwhile, the poor were quick to embrace afresh the ancient ways. The middle class agreed with the wealthy and rejected that otherworldly approach. The middle class were the ones who choked on His teaching of the Bread of Life. Those who despaired of this world found in such teaching the one thing left making life worth living.
If the Western churches do not change their ways, they will be destroyed. Not merely the organizational structures, but the lives of every member who has been deceived by this vast lie. During my own lifetime I can recall when churches talked about how this world was not worthy of much attention, and before I reached adulthood, such talk was gone. I can recall professors teaching preacher boys to focus on this life and forget about Heaven, that it was a myth — the secularization of religion. Those professors will bear a mighty burden of guilt when the Day of Judgment comes. Look around you today and you see all the Christian outreach to the poor assumes there is something wrong with them because they don’t care to adopt the money-grubbing ways of this world’s wealthy. This is evil. Yes, there are greedy poor folks, but those not greedy are lumped in with the rest by policy. What will happen to such churches when the material prosperity and “success” to which they cling evaporates? It doesn’t take a religious mind to see it’s happening as you read this.
A church which cannot exist without vast holdings of property, cannot function without pouring resources into political campaigns, cannot organize their activities without their own worldly politicized internal structure which mimics the tools of the psychopaths who rule us today — these churches are not deserving of the label “church.” Thus saith the Lord.

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No Magic Wand

Posted on August 12, 2011 by ehurst

Even non-Christian magicians understand it: If the power which calls you does not own you, you’ll never see it.
We expect children to be childish. We expect adults to nostalgically long for some of the reduced burden of responsibility children have, but we also expect those adults to recognize when it’s not safe to indulge in fantasy. A critical part of growing up is recognizing what parts of childhood aren’t supposed to die, because they arise from something universal in the human soul.
So a child will paint themselves and put on costumes because it allows them reduce the fears and discomforts, to retreat from the painful, boring reality to some place where they are actually in control. Or they’ll simply watch videos and cartoons which allow them to ignore reality for a while. An actor will paint himself and don a costume because something inside him calls out for expression, something bigger than himself and his fears. He doesn’t retreat into fantasy, but offers a taste of it to others. It’s not about the artist, but the art itself. He’s no longer the child, but plays to children and helps them build a sense of reference.
The magic wand is a fable, more of a parable than some long lost real power. Real supernatural events are seldom so exciting, seldom with spectacular displays and thrills. The greatest, most powerful miracles in the world are the ones eyes can’t see. Sparkles, tinkling bells and flashing lights as dirt turns into gold are childhood fantasies. The real thing isn’t some violation of natural law, but is reaching for a higher law of nature most people refuse to recognize.
The basic principle of human brokenness includes three fundamental weaknesses. One, we are driven to satisfy mere physical desires by raging hormones and body signals, cast like thunder and lightening into the conscious mind by our emotions. Two, we have a bottomless curiosity and appetite for spectacle, a tarnished sense of beauty we must to consume with our minds. Three, we are driven to control all things as if we were gods. By these things we approach our world as something to conquer so we can indulge our lower desires. By these things we seek magical control which never existed, except in fairy tales.
The real deal, the genuine exercise of divine authority, is nothing like that. First, it rejects human appetites as utterly untrustworthy. The self must be put in restraints. It’s not the world around us we control, but the world within. That gnawing appetite for control, for satisfaction of desires, must be fought, killed constantly, again and again. Nothing within the human frame can be trusted with any power. Second, it seeks to transcend that dead frame. There is something higher, something far, far better. The human self simply can’t go there on its own, so it has to die, in a sense. It has to be subdued, dragged along as an unwilling participant. Divine authority operates only on divine purpose, not on human driven need or desire.
Yes, know that human nature fully, because that’s necessary to know when it rears its ugly head, intruding once again on something too precious for human will to appreciate. Receive and absorb that otherworldly agenda, that higher purpose and understanding. Turn the Sword of Truth on the self or you’ll have no power to wield it. Once you have killed your lesser self with it, you realize it can only be used in that higher realm. Changes wrought by divine power in the higher realm always manifest in the lower realm, but seldom as human intelligence expects, and never as it desires.
Yes, sometimes it manifests as miracles the way Jesus healed thousands by the Sea of Galilee. For the most part, He simply reasserted His Father’s divine will over things denied by those who had the responsibility, but refuse to take it. We call them signs and wonders because they signify something we should have already understood. It was there, has been there since the world began, but people keep thinking they can sneak back into the Garden of Eden by some human talent or skill. They want the thrill and arrogance of control over the Garden Adam exercised in innocence. They don’t want the power and control exercised over the human self in that other garden, Gethsemane.  They forget — truculently deny — Adam was merely executing the Creator’s revealed will before the Fall. He lost it all when he surrendered to that insistence he could decide what was good and right, and didn’t need to keep a constant reference to revelation.
Signs and wonders are merely the restoration of what ought to have been, what could have been all along. If you have no idea what ought to have been, you’ll have a tough time seeing such power come through your hands. You won’t get there by reason, because the Fall was fundamentally a choice to rely on human reason and intellect. You must toss reason aside, put it back in its lower place as servant of the divine impulse, the mere implementor of things, not the executive.
There’s no magic wand. You don’t see signs and wonders because you reject their nature.

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Just Another Idiot Chattering about the London Riots

Posted on August 11, 2011 by ehurst

There are so many things wrong on so many levels, I struggle to get started.
I’m watching the senseless blather, looking at random photos and videos, along with reading from writers who live there. Since I don’t live in the UK, and don’t have friends living near the riots, I can’t really address things from a detailed level. I’ve checked several different viewpoints, because you learn a lot from what reliable biases have to say, or not say. Take it all with a grain of salt, especially my own ranting.
However, I do believe I know social history pretty well. For example, I know racism, in broader terms, is a much bigger problem in the US than in the UK, but it’s hardly a non-issue there. The real problem is how the ruling elite play the races against each other. If you really want to understand, you’ll have to back up several centuries. Of all the lands which passed through Western feudalism, Britain never really left it. Granted, the culture of the English and their immediate neighbors have accomplished some wonderful things. Oh, how I wish I could afford to visit the British Isles, to see all the historical treasures! It also represents the very quintessence of arrogance and hatred. No, nobody is pretending all the Brits are that way; just those who run things.
My experience with UK citizens during my time in Europe was quite pleasant. I prefer their company to that of Americans. But those I met in Europe were a narrow slice, mostly military and related bureaucracies. Actually dealing with the bureaucracies was uniformly ghastly, worse than American versions of the same. For all their revulsion against their own bureaucrats, the Brits seem to have this inexplicable habit of keeping them insufferable.
It helps to demystify their history. That business at Runnymede (Magna Carta) was simply one set of psychopathic thugs telling another to make room at the table. To suggest this somehow contributed to the rights of common folk is obscene. It gets worse if you want to pretend something in there reflects God’s sense of justice. English History is loaded with great and powerful actors, but precious few we can justly call “good.” Same for here in the US.
Consider a government run by servants of someone else who intends to use and abuse the population for money and power. The real government, the secret one hidden in the background, aren’t likely to take any heat from the abused population. They can afford to let their minions believe they are so very important and deserve some wealth and comfort. It’s the sense of entitlement that makes them bend to the will of those others hidden in the background. Despite all the fantasy of social and political reform, the stratified class system in the UK never softened. It did change hands to a new crew, but the system passed through merely cosmetic changes. Accountability is even less now than it was in the Middle Ages.
In short, it seems policemen and other government officials consider it their duty to oppress. All the more so when the people being oppressed express some disinterest in becoming culturally the same as their oppressors. It’s the kind of arrogance that would try to put God on hold. They live in their alternative reality, demanding all the universe adjust itself or bug off. How it is their military generally makes more sense than ours, when the entire civilian bureaucracy makes less, is still a mystery to me.
Still, we do share one strong affinity: Both our government and theirs do really love insufferable thugs as policemen. They are not the least different from foreign occupying troops, given the way things are handled in context. So whatever you see in the lying MSM reports on the riots in the UK, please keep in mind it surely includes a measure of racism, unspeakably oppressive police, the same knowingly destructive social policies as the US and worse, along with a dose of genuine underclass thuggery. Saying it’s merely the latter is typical British bureaucratic bold faced lying. “It is because We say so.”

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On the Fringe of Christian Unity

Posted on August 10, 2011 by ehurst

One of my favorite recordings includes these lyrics:

When will the world
See that we need Jesus?
When sister and brother
Love one another as one.
When will the world
See that we need Jesus?
Will we ever understand
Jesus is the Son of man?
We must live in the shadow of His love.

From “We Need Jesus”
John and Dino Elefante and Scott Springer
Petra Praise 2: We Need Jesus, Word, 1997
Good teaching. Over the decades of my Christian service, I’ve been haunted by the call to unity among Christians. Prior to discovering the Bible was inherently mystical, I struggled with the dire necessity of maintaining my theological identity against the call unity. Only in my earliest years did I suffer the truculence that “our way” was the only valid way. Eventually I outgrew that.
But for quite some time I was still pretty raspy to anyone who tried to say unity was a real possibility here on earth. I had no intention of giving up my position, and knew others wouldn’t give up theirs, either. All discussion of unity always seemed to start with a sweet song and dance, but ended up with one particular organization or tradition snuffing the rest. I got tired and cynical of such unity efforts. I was particularly wary, even defensive, when the efforts hinted at using any measures of force. As if humanity had not already seen enough of that.
Only in recent years did it finally dawn on me the whole problem was almost every call for unity presumes a human solution. It’s nice to hear pretty words about God’s solution, a spiritual solution, but those words always seemed to conceal the sword of human politics. The song noted above points out how it must be voluntary. They offer no particular vision of how to execute this unification, and no expectation of how it will turn out. Rather, it simply notes our message is hindered without a better unity than we now possess.
So here’s what the prophet says, one more time: When we can set aside our Western obsession with reason and human intellect, unity becomes possible. Yes, there are some things we have to share in terms of doctrine, but the Bible requires no analytical frame of reference to embrace and apply. The essentials are covered, and they don’t have to make any particular sense, they simply have to be. When we can all turn and embrace the Bible on its own terms, as an essentially Hebrew document requiring an ancient Hebrew frame of reference, the whole thing makes as much sense as needs be.
No organization or identifiable Christian tradition owns me. There is no expectation of subsuming all others under something I can claim as “mine.” I really don’t care what you believe, for the most part. When you walk in the Spirit of Christ, cooperation is unavoidable. Until we conquer our intellectual peculiarities, dismiss our Western obsession with rational and intellectual theology, and simply work together, there will be no unity. When you combine the teachings of the New Testament on the issue of Christ’s Return, there is one solemn warning: He expects to come back and find His Body unified. Not around doctrine, per se, but functionally unified, able to work together at random with just about any other follower of Christ.
Nobody says you have to surrender your personal experience with Christ. For example, I fully realize my favor for Calvinism is little more than a reflection of how I encountered Him. Your experience might well make you Arminian, or something else. I’m not worried about that. Show me your spiritual fruit; that’s all I have to see. That would include a sensitivity to Scriptural guidance and penitent heart. Everything else is negotiable. Most especially do I reject the necessity of any systematic theology; all of it is simply man-made ideas. All organizations are man-made, too.
Yes, I know this puts me out on the fringe of Christendom. I also believe it puts me in the center of His Kingdom. The boundaries of Christ’s Kingdom cannot be drawn by the hand of man.

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Can't Take the Linux Desktops Seriously

Posted on August 9, 2011 by ehurst

As I’ve said before: There will never be a “Year of the Linux Desktop.”
I’ve been following the commentaries, both big names and nobodies, on the new GNOME 3 desktop, as well as more comments on KDE 4. If you are a fan of either of those, you will hate this, and it’s likely any comments you make will end up deleted. Proceed at your own risk.
As you might expect, most of those who bother discussing it at all are serious fans of Linux and the various desktops. These are the ardent computer lovers, for whom choices such as Linux distro and desktop approach a religious devotion akin to the ancient VI versus Emacs wars. Even those who can’t make up their minds tend to be quite religious about other aspects of the discussion. There is some overlap, but for the most part, it’s easy to pick out the folks for whom computer use is important, but choices of OS, desktop, etc., are just a matter of what suits the purpose. We could safely generalize it by saying, “Never the twain shall meet.”
Computer users don’t really understand all that religious devotion erupting from the fanboys, the serious hobbyists. The latter are almost hostile to regular users. At best, it’s like the monster church pastor whose only real interest in you is adding numbers to his prestige. Waxing rhapsodic about their own favorite, however joyful and friendly, masks a near rabid hatred for anyone who doesn’t buy their line. I used to be one of those rabid fanboys, so I know what I’m talking about.
Then I grew up and realized the world is full of real people, with real needs, and computers are simply one tiny aspect of what they do to meet those needs. Now I find myself back on the outside, looking back in at this insane show. The names and faces change here and there, but the plot never changes. They don’t seem to notice no one else is paying any attention.
There was a time the GUI was just a way to use the programs you run on your system. Messing with the system itself required a console terminal of some sort. Eventually we rose up from that to having some parts of the system integrated into the GUI. We are very nearly to the point where the GUI is the whole thing. That’s okay, because it’s really convenient and consistent with the way the mass of humanity prefer to use their computers. Right now, all the energy and development is going towards the cellphone/tablet interface. That’s partly justified, since it’s the fastest growing segment of the computer market. If not already, any day now those mobile devices will outnumber all other types of general purpose computers combined, except servers. The workstation is dead.
Except it’s not. There are still millions of them out there, still in use, and for businessmen and bureaucrats, they aren’t going anywhere. The dinosaurs aren’t all dead yet. Indeed, the most ignored market of all is the workstation users, both in business and home. Ignored, I say, by Linux desktop developers. You see, all this crap about GNOME 3 and KDE 4 is because they both cater to the cellphone user, and everyone else be damned. Yes, the latest Linux newbies, and a narrow slice of those who use computers in ways most of the world cannot even imagine, will continue with KDE 4 and GNOME 3, totally in love. Comments from this crowd range from dismissive to openly hostile at the suggestion either of the major desktops are somehow not quite perfect.
If you happen to be anyone else in this world, just ignore them. Let them continue down their happy virtual path. Further, let them take Linux with them. They will, anyway, if they can. Aside from the tiny few Linux distributions which understand the importance of the workstation — mostly Red Hat and clones, CentOS and Scientific Linux — Linux has moved away from it’s one chance to capture the computer desktop market. No, Ubuntu is no better, having gone down their own cellphone interface path. Of course, if you are a competent computer geek, you can make Linux do what you like, but most people who use computers don’t want that, and don’t need it. If you use a smartphone, you’ll encounter Linux a great deal. Otherwise, you can forget it.
For myself, I’ll keep using Scientific Linux and CentOS until I see whether they and Red Hat are going to join this madness. I hope not. We have the 6.x release and it’s good for at least seven years (in theory). I’m not a big fan of Red Hat; it’s just the only way I can get something sane for my laptop. FreeBSD just recently added support for hibernation, but they insist on rolling release, which makes it useless for anyone who needs the GUI. You’ll end up rebuilding it monthly. That’s okay for the underlying system; two hours or less on most workstations and you’re done for awhile. GNOME was never less than four hours for the most basic stuff, and KDE has never been less than twelve hours to build. I want my computer to work for me, not the other way around. From what I’ve been able to see, nobody in the BSD world comprehends in the least the value of stability in terms of patching, versus constant upgrading. But I like the way their stuff works, so if you don’t mind being chained to the server room, it’s okay.
Maybe Haiku OS will become usable some day. Yes, I still hate Windows. Mac has never been my forte; it’s not hard unless you switch between Mac and other OSes. Since Mac does so little of what I want to do without costing more than a new car, it’s just not worth the trouble for me. I gave up long ago on the idea someone might actually develop the console interface for Linux. For all the really large number of folks begging for it, all we get is a bunch of jerks who don’t understand why the likes of Screen is not a hit with ordinary users. The fans of Screen belong in the whacko fanboys group. I’ll type extra slowly for them: It does too little, and what it does is not friendly to ordinary users. Nothing can replace a good TUI, and nobody who knows how wants to make one.
Yes, there’s XFCE, which may eventually include the functionality of GNOME. Enlightenment is not a desktop, just an extended window manager. FVWM will never move away from the obscure textual configuration files, and God forbid it should ever link in system functions. There are others, but they are either mere window managers, or so arcane nobody will understand them. Businesses and governments will use workstations for awhile longer, but only one major distro cares about their needs. Unless Red Hat can come up with something which does what GNOME 2.x did, I wonder how much longer than can pretend to have a workstation offering. Servers they can do; most distros can do that decently. The days of Linux as a computer workstation OS are already passing.
But, of course, I belong to a passing generation. Aside from the captive Windows audience, people under forty can’t wait for us dinosaurs to die so our resources can be spent on something else. I was blessed to pass through life while Linux was a viable workstation alternative, and pretty good on laptops. By the time I die of natural causes, should I be so lucky, people will be using implanted computers and call them something else.

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What Kind of Crash

Posted on August 9, 2011 by ehurst

Because I’m a nobody, I can afford to be blunt and say rash things. For example, I refuse to give any Keynesian economist the dignity of being at all sincere or honest believers, unless they are willing to admit they are complete morons. I’d be willing to say that on national television, in the faces of the biggest names associated with such economic foolishness, but no one is going to ask me.
There are several big names much smarter than me sharing the metaphor of the US economy being an airliner which has run out of fuel. They all agree it won’t simply fly into the side of a mountain or plummet from the sky and crater the ground. Rather, we will come down in a nice flat glide in a place which doesn’t happen to be a runway. We sold the landing gear for extra fuel (along with seats and our luggage), so we’ll be coming in, ripping and tearing everything near us, eventually destroying the aircraft, too. It’ll be a rough landing. By God’s mercy, perhaps we won’t burst into flames where it comes to rest.
It didn’t have to be this way, but the flight crew were listening to the wrong ground control station. We could have flown in a better direction, through far less storms, and come down on a proper runway. Why anyone ever believed it was possible to simply stay up in the air is beyond me, but that’s what Keynesian economists believe. That’s why I don’t take them seriously, and they return the favor. I’m sure I’m in good company on that, but if you keep probing what I believe about such things, I’ll end up way out in wilderness, nearly alone.
You don’t have to study economics and the other social sciences to realize instinctively flying around in the sky is not a place to build an economy. You won’t crash land if your feet are on the ground. Maybe it’s not so adventurous and exciting, but keeping a simple economy which aims to sustain a decent life for the largest possible number of folks limits the risk to those involved. And what have we gained by flying?
Will we be fondly remembered as some great nation? It takes a special delusion to imagine that. We are already hated by most of the world, and justly so. Maybe we have discovered a lot of amazing things, but most of them haven’t made life better, just more complicated. Tell me how many people you know really involved in this modern existence who actually have internal peace? That is, assuming they gave it much thought at all. We can do all kinds of wild and unimaginable things, but we can’t seem to improve on the technology of building a good family life and sending forth wise children into the world. Our nation has a few, but they hardly characterize us.
I can’t authoritatively say this is the crash landing I keep thinking is coming. I’m pretty sure I can’t explain exactly why I believe it won’t be all at once, even though I’ve read some good analysts who can say. I think each one is missing a thing or two, and I can’t buy their scenario completely. But I’m pretty sure the Dow Jones Industrial Index won’t drop all at once, nor will the dollar crash overnight. They’ll both lurch and scare everyone, repeatedly, but something inside me insists this is going to be one long, painful slog.
As a side note, honesty compels me to reveal I’m expecting a big surprise for my birthday. It’s part prophetic sense, part intuition, but for the past couple of months I’ve been sensing mid-September will bring some fireworks not entirely anticipated. Even I don’t have a big enough ego to think God is doing this for my benefit; it’s just a divine coincidence I’m expecting. We’ll see.

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Spilling the Kettle

Posted on August 8, 2011 by ehurst

They were so engrossed in their Quaker Prayer session, no one noticed the first wave of the flash mob passing by the open air cafe. In minutes the noise of crowded movements were overtaken by rhythmic chanting of protests.
The differences in appearance were stark. The protesters were much younger, dressed in their demonstration gear, while the prayer group was not less than 55 at the youngest, and wore seasonal lightweight shorts and t-shirts. Before they could register in their minds what was happening, they were surrounded. Worst of all, a significant number were the black-clad kids with light helmets and gloves, snatching up chairs and tables as they passed through. The men quickly withdrew to the far back corner, as the cafe owners had already dropped the metal grating over the only opening.
As they huddled, a blank brick wall on one side, and a high steel bar fence on the other, their hearts raced even faster as they realized those closest to them stopped and set up what functioned as a flash command post: a handful of people with multiple smartphones and tablet computers. While the activists ignored them mostly, they scanned about for the likelihood they might slip out against the flow of traffic. After a brief discussion they had almost decided to go try it when the ad hoc command post began chattering animatedly. Their hearts sank when they heard the word “kettle” repeated, pretty much at the same time they noticed the crowd was no longer moving past, but was packing tightly.
Police tactics had changed in the past few months as social unrest had increased. Kettling was no longer for mere containment. It allowed the police forces to reduce the portion of the crowd they faced until they had localized superiority of numbers. Using heavy tracked vehicles, extreme sound and other crowd driving measures, they would press from one end of the kettle and beat their way through the protesters on the other. Somehow in the midst of this, the police would sort through the crowd, picking out whom they thought were deserving of extra attention. Usually this meant anyone with anything in their hands or strapped to their backs, folks they found wearing skirmish gear, etc. These were tortured with tasers and beaten even more badly, then arrested. Anyone with caught with an actual weapon was likely to be shot on sight.
Building owners in this city had learned long ago to install steel roll-top doors or other means to seal off their buildings, because more than once a structure which had allowed some protesters to escape had been burned down. Official statements blamed the protesters, but no one believed that.
The dozen older men in the prayer group had no sympathies with either side. Dying was hardly something they feared, but they had seen enough violence and began praying again as best they could against the noise of the crowd. Then they discussed things for a moment, and made a decision. Overhearing the command post chatter, they realized the police skirmish line was just a block away. Backed by mounted officers and some vehicles, it was already moving their way. Time was short.
One of the older men approached the command post and asked if there was a tactical leader interested in making an escape. Having overheard one of the narrow side streets was blocked by a heavy cluster of officers and shields, and only one vehicle, they had a plan. They felt this might offer the weakest defense and allow at least some folks to escape the violence. After a few words, the activist began to grin, shaking his head up and down.
It took only a few minutes to find the right people — large people — and some makeshift straps and ropes. Just a few more minutes with the guidance of the older men in the prayer group, and they were ready. The command post began folding up operations and moved behind the lead element. Despite the tension and anger, the sight of this lead element still brought a few laughs from the crowd, as they shifted and parted to allow passage. The older men simply huddled in their corner, praying and watching as the activist leadership moved in tight knot, some as part of their new weapon.
They paused at the corner of the side street they had chosen, as word went up the chain of people toward the front edge where the police line held behind movable barriers. In minutes two more groups formed more versions of this weapon, and the formation moved quickly toward the police line.
At the skirmish line, a handful of masked protestors suddenly attacked the barriers and lifted them aside. As policemen moved forward in a tight formation to restore them, a space opened briefly as the crowd melted apart. Through the opening came barreling a huge battering ram, borne on either side by burly men running in tight cadence. Directly behind them came another, then another. The policemen suddenly found their shields a liability. This tight knot of bodies with their rams mowed down the ranks. In seconds a gap was open, as officers who had been knocked down began crawling out of the way to avoid being stomped further. Once the path was opened, the crowd surged behind the battering rams and the police ended up having to flee for their own safety.
The kettle had spilled.
Only later did the police realize how it was done. Because there was nothing loose which could have been used for this, the protesters had taken two large people with helmets and light body armor to make their ram. Facing head to foot, the two men clung tightly to each other, wrapped in strips of cloth or straps, and turned into a heavy ram. A crew of six, three on each side, then tied the straps over their outside shoulders and waists. Two more at the rear would help push the rest through resistance, so that they were a single, flexible weapon, weighing no less than a full ton. Someone at the rear called cadence while the rest moved carefully in unison, grinding over whatever fell under their feet.
The older men in their prayer group simply huddled in their corner, watching the chaos as the operation fell apart. Their prayer meeting lasted a little longer than they had planned, but they all made it home eventually, unscathed.

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A Little More Speculation on US Collapse (Updated)

Posted on August 6, 2011 by ehurst

I’d like to speculate further on my doomsday scenarios.
In previous posts I have speculated that there is some global elite steering events on a certain level. Not in the sense of direct involvement, but shaping things from a distance, for the most part. This shaping has not been really efficient, but that’s part of what makes it more effective. While I believe there are some rather ordinary, but exceptionally intelligent, humans involved in this global steering business, I’ve never left any doubt I always believed the real sponsor had to be Satan. It matters not whether these elite folks are something not quite human, or humans who willingly and knowingly serve Satan, because the net result would be about the same either way. So I toss around the term “Illuminati” as a popular label most likely to be understood by any passing reader.
Naturally my primary source is what I gain from Scripture. Some of my predictions are what I consider prophecy, such as the business of losing a war with Iran. Some is related speculation. Some, including what follows, is just me and my personal guessing, taking into account things previously written here.
So far, I’ve said I believe the current plans are to enslave the US population in service to the Neocon war machine. It seemed to me debt was a primary instrument for destroying the economy, and serving as the legal excuse for demanding our service. Recent events have added a bit to the picture.
Consider all the millions of humans addicted to various prescription drugs. Not just the mood shapers like Prozac, but all sorts of drugs carefully designed to treat, but not solve, a long list of medical conditions. Solutions have been contrary to Big Pharma policy for quite some time. I am certain some real cures have remained hidden in their labs, because there’s far less profit from curing than from building a dependency. I’m know for a fact a large number of natural cures have been suppressed or buried by the FDA. Imagine suddenly all those drugs no longer available. How would the dependent consumers react? What’s a mass withdrawal of ten million psychotropic medication addicts look like?
Consider the vast number of things we consume every day delivered “just in time.” Imagine large metropolitan areas when truck traffic can’t move any more, due to skyrocketing fuel costs. How long would food be on the urban grocery shelves? How will people in these urban centers react when they can’t find a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread anywhere?
Think of the recent race riots. Just this summer we’ve seen reports of at least a half-dozen of them, particularly in northern urban areas. People of one ethnic group ganging up on folks of another race at some public venue where the victims are entirely unlikely to be armed. Think about how often the news sources simply don’t report the whole story because their editors and local government agree it’s not socially acceptable to state the facts. What happens when there is much more than just hot weather stirring suppressed human passions and hatreds?
I’m not all that sure the Illuminati care if the US federal government survives. I don’t doubt the people in various official capacities will ride this out just fine, but the actual ability to assert their authority could evaporate overnight. And not come back. I’m guessing the key will be the collapse of the US dollar. A critical element in what I believe are Illuminati plans for us is to create an atmosphere wherein we would beg someone or something to take over and clean up the mess, or just supply the basics for survival. Consider a Hurricane Katrina covering the whole US, or a 9-11 type disaster in most large cities of the US. So long as what passes for “law enforcement” can mass their numbers in trouble spots and overwhelm those who get too creative for government tastes, you’ll get the humanitarian disaster we saw in New Orleans, with victims caged by a wicked and hateful government refusing to do anything except put the lid on the cooker and turn up the heat. People won’t forget that when the disaster is everywhere at once, and a great many police departments being shut down right now. I think the Illuminati are hoping it’s even worse than riots and armed looters.
No, I don’t believe their plans are all that precise and specific. All it takes is for some significant minority of the population to panic and call for whomever is offering to help solve the immediate needs. I believe the Illuminati are ready to make such an offer. That’s when we’ll find out who they are, or we’ll find out I missed it completely. Then we’ll just have chaos until local and regional governments form on their own. Who’s to say that’s not part of the plan, too? Then again, I’m not too sure any presumed Illuminati group is quite up to handling disasters they create.
What matters is we are almost surely headed for a dollar collapse. I tend to think it will be this calendar year, but I just don’t really know enough for more than a weak guess. It will most assuredly have at least some of the effects I described above. Further, it will affect quite a few other countries around the world. This is not a good time to be living anywhere your very life support depends on things available only at retail outlets or warehouses, and particularly where the US dollar is a significant factor in your financial system.
Just my opinion, you see.
Update: I was sniffing around some of my favorite alternative economic news sites and caught wind of some serious trouble for the Euro. It was partly intuition when I first wrote this blog post, but now it’s full blown logic and fact deserving an update: If the Euro goes bad, the US dollar gets that brief boost followed by a crash. That’s because there is actually less behind the dollar than behind the Euro. It would actually speed the death of the dollar. I tend to think this is an accurate assessment: “Europe On The Brink”. Might be worth reading. Don’t forget all those trillions worth of bogus mortgage investment papers still held in Europe. The banks here can’t foreclose fast enough to fix that mess.

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American Dependence

Posted on August 6, 2011 by ehurst

In the long run, it really doesn’t matter whether all this is planned, or in how much detail, because it’s all going to hurt just the same. And we went along with it.
An economy grows when a lot of people at the same time, in the same geographical area, make and sell things people want and need. That breaks down between things which are consumed and need replacing and redoing, or things people do not have and really want.
First, we created a high consumption market by sheer marketer’s brainwashing, convincing people they just had to have all these modern conveniences. Then we sucked them into buying all the more, designing in rapid wear out rates, the throw-away consumer culture. Then we built a huge overhead on our manufacturing with tons of savvy managers and huge cities of offices with people almost interested in what they were doing. But it wasn’t efficient enough. So we had government offering big tax relief to actually send all our manufacturing jobs oversees, then the management jobs, where it was imagined things might be more efficient. This was economic treason, but we bought the lie we could all get new jobs in processing information. Except the market discovered quickly there wasn’t much profit in that, so it died, after we off-shored the useful parts of it. Only government and predatory corporations do that now. And the predatory tracking of human response to advertising and such is about worthless when no one has jobs, so that, too, will crash soon. An honest accounting shows over one-quarter of Americans wanting jobs are unemployed. Almost half are under-employed.
The only real growth industry is government. Savor that for a moment. The fast growing sector of the economy produces nothing and consumes more, and more inefficiently, than any other economic entity in the world. How long can that be sustained?
We don’t have a land where people are used to making do with what they can get. We don’t see people trading older appliances like valued farm land, and we just barely comprehend the notion of keeping your aging autos because it’s cheaper to keep ‘er. We can’t seem to apply that frugal necessity to all the things in highest demand. People will steal and kill for more cell phone minutes.
Like our cheap junk “durable goods,” which are anything but durable, we have created a national culture and economy designed to fall apart. It was unsustainable more than a century ago, but there was room to run before the forward momentum ran out. It’s a race to see which currency dies first, and just now it seems the Euro might win that race. It’s just barely possible the dollar will get one last kick in the seat of the pants simply because investors will flee the Euro. It won’t really change anything except to delay the inevitable for the dollar, though.
It will make things only more brutal here in the land of the dollar. We simply do not have what it takes to make it through this. The vast wasteland of non-culture which is the American way of life offers no place to hide when things get rough. All we have are quick shelters of cheap plastic tarps strung across sun-rotted fiberglass whips, guyed by over-stretched latex bungee cords. One stiff wind and there’s nothing.
You should see what a monumental task it is to turn soft American boys into something resembling the image of tough warriors we project to the world. Most of them are hardly that tough, though some units are lucky enough to grab a handful country boys or something like that. We expect soldiers to grumble, but American troops whine. They remain largely incompetent, and only the vast expense of our high-tech toys — instructions printed on the side — are what keeps us in the field. We outspend most of our enemies, and only by sheer bullying do we choose those even less competent. Real resistance and our boys are whipped by stones and arrows. Our best troopers are used in special operations, the last bastion of true military nobility. Part of the reason mainline commanders slot five support troops for each one on the front line is because out of six, only one might be reasonably useful. I’ve been there.
So it comes down to this, Americans: You aren’t ready for what’s coming. It won’t matter if it’s two or three years down the road; you won’t be ready. More likely it’s next month or so. For the few of us who have any clue, it’s going to be made far worse by the vast horde of those around us who don’t have a clue, and who will be whining and clinging to us, trying to take us for everything we have gathered. For every strong household, there will easily be ten or twenty begging for your help.
It’s not simply things are going to be hard economically, but socially, too. We have this massive herd of folks who simply don’t value anything beyond their personal comfort. They aren’t predators in the typical sense, but they are willing to slash and burn what they can’t take for a quick relief of their appetites. These are animals with a human intelligence, rather like Planet of the Apes with less hair and none of the planning. What our soldiers experience in Afghanistan, needing to carry their weapons to the shower or simply to go potty, will become a routine here in some parts. The sort of thinking this requires is simply not possible to most Americans without a direct experience in the military.
If you are one of the few competent folks, prepare to inherit a couple hundred new dependents.

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Successful Criminals

Posted on August 5, 2011 by ehurst

The first and most essential ingredient in committing crime is a moral commitment which denies your activity is a crime.
The term “crime” typically has an official definition in jurisprudence, but it amounts to anything the ruling regime doesn’t like, and is willing to exert serious effort to stop. It won’t matter what the real or supposed motives of such laws are, because there isn’t a single Western government which God likes, only those He tolerates for short periods. I love the people with whom I share a geographical association, but I love all people, and my calling as a prophet places my loyalty outside any human government. Somewhere in the near future, I suspect just publishing such a sentiment will be considered a criminal act, but that just proves my point. You need not take seriously anyone else’s definition of “crime” except as a point of discussion. Given the way our laws and enforcement are structured and used here in the US, every living resident is just one police encounter from being labeled a criminal regardless of written laws.
The first necessity for success as a criminal is to believe without any shred of a doubt what you are doing is in everyone’s best interest. Short of that, simply convince yourself it is not harmful beyond what life itself offers. Bonus points if what you do actually meets some human need, or even some human wish. If people will pay for what you do, that’s a leg up on moral arguments, though we have to understand every human wants at least some things they shouldn’t have. Still, if people act like you are meeting a real need and are willing to take risks to obtain your service and/or product, which service or product produces no real moral harm to others, you are probably in the clear. If you don’t believe in what you are doing, stop it, regardless whether it’s a “crime.”
As regular readers know, there is a huge difference between noting something is morally dangerous to the community versus the question of how to enforce it. I say prostitution is evil, but it would hardly be a viable business if families cared the least about what God says families should do. The real problem with prostitution is all the other crime which attaches to it, which itself often reflects merely the mistakes in enforcement. The prophet in me says: Mind your own business and do what’s right; God takes care of the rest. Prostitution shouldn’t be illegal in the current sense of the term “illegal,” but you can’t please God and engage in the business.
Violence and confiscation requires an extreme justification, and is not a business model. This is what governments do, and they hate competition. But crimes which respond to what seems a genuine human need, such as smuggling and dodging unjustified regulation, is pretty easy to justify before the Lord. People gotta eat, and government mandated poison is wrong all the way around. Tobacco may be harmful for most uses, but I can’t justify through Scripture making smoking and chewing a crime. Living on earth is harmful, too. If people will buy your smuggled cigarettes, I won’t condemn it. The moral watershed has more to do with your attitude as a smuggler than the act itself. Helping people is helpful, and hard to condemn.
Taxation itself is not evil. It’s what governments make of it that becomes evil. As noted in previous posts, we are already seeing a wave of scrapping thefts. This hardly compares to what amounts to theft by government, and look for that to get worse faster than the private criminal version. We already have a serious theft problem with government “forfeitures.” Other bureaucratic entities, such as banks and their predatory lending with blatantly illegal foreclosures, are also in on the game. The underlying principle is bureaucracies refuse to cut back. Their health depends on keeping the power and the wealth flowing, and the system resists going on a diet. The first thing they cut is what they give back to the public, which is their real justification for existing. As things continue sliding downhill, bureaucratic entities will take the lion’s share of what’s left, humanity be damned. There comes a point when crime from the top de-legitimizes the entity itself, so that nothing it says and wants is right. Search your own conscience, but dodging current taxation and regulation is not necessarily wrong morally.
To those who would suggest what I promote here contributes to social decline: Shut up and stop lying. There is not a thing you can do within current social orthodoxy which will help at all. We are past the tipping point. We were past it long, long ago, but only a few have been willing to recognize it. The West has never been legitimate, ever. No Western government has ever been legitimate in God’s eyes, but He has used them for His own private reasons. Even if we presume to adopt the moral standards of the Enlightenment whence modern democratic governments arose, we have failed utterly. Not a single society has taken the moral high road under even that standard and required governments to behave properly. What I promote is hardly nihilism. I don’t promote destruction, but purposed defiance in the human interest. There really is a good moral standard for this world in its fallen state, and we have done our best as nations to avoid that standard. Prissy middle-class Western society is inherently evil, and we need to get over it.
To be a good moral businessman today makes you a criminal. Once you grasp the underlying moral issues, you can understand the first order of business is believe in what you do. Never evince the least embarrassment just because you know the majority of those you encounter will call it evil. Stop following the herd. Instead, feed the herd. Find out what you can do and enjoy meeting human needs. Realize there are risks regardless what governments think about it, simply because the real world is risky at the best of times. Arrest, conviction and prison is morally the same as being kidnapped and held for ransom, or simply being taken as a slave. Some people probably deserve it, but any more I’m not convinced even half of our prison population belongs there. So plan your “criminal” activities with the assumption it’s likely you’ll have encounters with private and government crooks, both.
Think like a businessman and know how to cut your losses and scram. Provide honest goods and services at a price where you aren’t a predator, but accounting for the probability of loss. If you can improve methods to lower the risk, lower the price accordingly. Be more reliable and honest than crooks and people will love you and help protect your business. Never mind whether your business is otherwise morally right; get just that part right and you’ll be nearly impossible to stop. For example, precious few law enforcement agencies have yet to face a genuine businessman’s approach to dope dealing. Should a small time pusher actually provide an honest service, and take wise precautions based on real industrial intelligence for threats, police would likely never even get a mole inside. What destroys every criminal operation is excessive greed or other moral weaknesses. It’s going to be this which destroys most Western governments in the end.
God’s Laws favor those who are just, and treat designations such as “criminal” as merely a fact of business conditions.

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