Random Observations on Current Events

Posted on June 16, 2011 by ehurst

Too many things which are too big to ignore, but none worthy of a full article, so I’m offering a list of my opinionated rantings.

They say the situation with that nuclear generator on the Missouri River in Nebraska is under control after an electrical fire. They said something like that about Fukushima, too. The batch of liars is most of the same people in both cases, people who knew for a fact what they said wasn’t true. Why should we believe them now? Besides, the river is not under control, as folks upstream in Council Bluffs, Iowa prepare to evacuate. In the Nebraska case, the spent fuel rods are contained at ground level. The official phrases include something like “flooded the containment building.” With what? Filthy river water? I’ll bet no official agency is willing to announce whether they have tested water flowing away from that building for radiation. Add that to the petroleum pollution in the Gulf of Mexico.

Greece is rioting. It is fully justified. Granted, Greece is half-lawless from top to bottom. The politicians are hopelessly corrupt, but so is the majority of the population. However, everyone wants to forget that the politicians are an order of magnitude more corrupt than is commonly tolerated among the people; it’s how they got their positions. They want to forget the people have long surrendered a very big chunk of their income to a government plan for social welfare. They have already paid into the system. What they seek is for the government to simply pay back out what was supposed to have been saved. But it was invested in high-risk mortgage securities, mostly from the US. The politicians and bankers were playing fast and loose with someone else’s money, hoping to scrape off the profit, not trying to build up the value of the holdings. Those mortgage securities turned out to be worthless. But the politicians and bankers refuse to take the hit; they want the people to take it, while they continue amassing more wealth for themselves. If the people take up arms and slaughter the politicians and bankers, it would be justified. Their peaceful restraint is noteworthy.

The same thing is happening here in the US, more or less. The bankers gambled on the same mortgage investments, even creating those investment packages, and lost. But it’s tax dollars which are bailing them out. That is, the politicians are borrowing against future tax receipts, mortgaging the future labor of citizens, to compensate the bankers for bad bets. Meanwhile, the same citizens are still on the hook for bad mortgages which were utterly fraudulent in the first place. The fiction that We, the People, are responsible for the banker’s debts simply because the government says so — they claim to work for us — is still the unspoken assumption behind all this, but they openly rejected our clearly stated wishes not to bail out the gambling bankers. We aren’t restrained; we’re stupid.

I’m not bullish on China, either. You aren’t likely to find an honest report of their economic condition in the MSM, but you may have seen reports of the extravagant building projects which now sit idle and empty. They have over-invested in really nice stuff no-one can afford to rent, and for which they have zero cultural background in maintaining. Fast rail system? The majority of likely riders can’t afford the tickets. What happens in five years without maintenance on the tracks? Their cultural habit so far is to tear it down and build new stuff in its place, because there is entirely too much liquidity in their lending pool, and no sane controls. Because there is no real profit being put back into that pool, it will be gone soon enough. Their advantage is they now have most of our factories, so they can recover. We have nothing but talk and aging cheap toys we bought from China.

That LulzSec pulled a DDoS on the CIA’s front website means nothing; it still looks and smells like a false flag. It did no real harm. No servers were cracked and no information copied. If they don’t release a bunch of data at least as damaging as the harmless stuff Wikileaks puts out, then it means nothing — clouds and thunder, but no lightening, and certainly no rain.

I’m still praying God Almighty will rip the cover off all the lies. Having committed myself to transparency, still willing to face all my own evil buried in lost memories, I have nothing to lose. Expose me, too, Lord! In the morals of the Spirit Realm, we who are willing to turn the Sword of Truth on ourselves are in a position to wield it on others. This is a prayer which is tied to Laws, and does not require spiritual birth to be valid. Yes, for some centuries Western Protestants have deceived themselves and others saying God does not hear prayers under the Laws. They lie. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and all other pagans can pray and be heard by Jehovah when their prayers are consistent with the Laws, and in the measure their prayers are consistent with the Laws. If your conscience in clean, and you aren’t trying to avoid an honest self-examination, then ask for whatever He promised under the Law Covenants, and it will be done. Yes, sincerity counts for something with God. The idea He has no interest in justice on a human level, and that only those born-again can deal with Him, is blasphemy.

Obviously Western Christendom has a lot to answer for, and I’m praying her shame be exposed, too. The Harlot Church is everywhere. A religious organization holding title to any significant accumulation of material wealth doesn’t get it. Just how hard is it to understand, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth”? A wealth of stuff and a poverty of Spirit, stop claiming to speak for Heaven.

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Not Impressed with FBI

Posted on June 15, 2011 by ehurst

The FBI has been in the news a lot lately, but the lack of competence in Law Enforcement agencies is frightening.

During my time in the military, I was for most of that time an ordinary Military Policeman. Like most, I took an advanced qualifier course; I was a Traffic Accident Investigator. The training was decent, until we got to role playing and rules of evidence. The rules we got, but the role playing was utterly amateurish — something I learned from more experienced MPs. I didn’t do a whole lot of investigating, but what little I did carried a frightening amount of weight in the system. When I saw that, I tried to avoid doing any more traffic investigations, but was very careful when I did them.

They told us, “Have confidence in yourself.” What they meant was to consider yourself bullet-proof the way some Marines are trained, only applied to the use of authority. My issue was not a lack of confidence, but a very real assessment of my own skills. I could ruin a soldier’s career through carelessness or out of casual spite, and was expected to enjoy that role. The other MPs did just that, and were held up as role models.

I couldn’t wait to get out of that job, and out of the military. With very badly messed up knees, they wanted me to stay in for the next promotion. It was insane. How were they going to use a middling sergeant MP who walked with a cane at best and permanently so? In military terminology, I had a “P-4 Profile” on my legs. They literally offered me a bonus to stay and take the next assignment in rotation. Insane. Were they so desparate for warm bodies, anyone who had not gotten into trouble?

But with all my poor level of experience, I recognized even worse training and intelligence in FBI investigations. I’ve had a chance to look through some leaked or published reports where some supposedly senior field agent made incredibly insipid conclusions from traffic collision evidence which was part of some larger case. He could not have passed the silly course I took.

Now I’m doing part-time computer service. I would not qualify for the Geek Squad; I’ve not had any of the official courses offered. And frankly, I don’t know what some of them know. But I’ve already fixed a couple of systems they messed up — silly stuff. I’ve also been willing to salvage something when they would have wiped and re-installed, and I took less time. But I’m the first to tell you I’m no great technician. I’m just a short distance ahead of your average power user. Your average power user knows more than the vast majority of FBI field agents.

Truly talented agents are so rare, they either get promoted out of the field, or they get a real job somewhere else. What’s left? The stories aren’t that hard to find on the Net. Their best computer forensic folks in the field use a software package they barely understand. Most of them can’t tell you where Internet Explorer saves cookies, or where to find the various compressed data files which index them. They have no idea how to run Regedit and scan for keywords. A tiny minority may be aware you can hit F8 on boot to get into Safe Mode. Grandmas learn some of this at the local library free community classes.

Instead, they take a one- or two-day course with their new forensics CDs and consider themselves Computer Forensics Technicians. It’s the same system used by civilian policemen all over the US.

Extrapolate this. Most state and local police departments host expensive seminars run by “terrorist experts” who have never spent a single hour studying case histories of terror attacks. They’ve never worn even a private security badge, but they train police chiefs. They come up with these brilliant plans where a role-playing “terrorist” invades a public school, and not even the teachers know it’s just a drill. How many kids know the difference between blanks and bullets? And how many of them will have nightmares and very real trauma because the system trains them to be emotionally vulnerable?

But watch the fellows picked to play the responding officers. It’s all about protecting themselves. That’s the mantra they keep repeating under their breath: “officer safety!” Terrorizing the victims further is taken for granted. Just the regular school patrol officers show up fully armed, with body armor and everything except specific SWAT gear. Protect the public? No, protect government prerogatives, which includes protecting their own butts first. Compare that to the guy who was piloting the Goodyear blimp which burned and crashed Sunday in Germany. These cops are not heroes.

Yet you will find yourself facing an insufferable arrogance and even outright hatred from FBI agents, if you ever meet any. Victim of a crime? You are the first suspect. Want to help out with special expertise? They don’t need you. This is so common it’s a standard joke in every speciality of human endeavor after one attempt to help the FBI or any other police agency. The biggest braggart and idiot on any forum or mailing list is probably FBI or some other “Law Enforcement Officer” (LEO).

“I’m with the government, and I’m hear to FUBAR your life.”

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Just a Half Smile

Posted on June 14, 2011 by ehurst

He sat, as he had every day after eating lunch. He unlocked the rocker hinge on his office chair, placed his hands behind his head, leaned back and sat with his eyes closed. He seldom so much as twitched. The others were yakking about the game last night, which was of no interest to her.

She said to him, “How come you never talk about yourself? Everyone else does; it’s how we get to know each other. Why are you so mysterious?”

His eyes opened and turned toward her. “Have I been rude?” His question was genuine, but utterly devoid of emotion.

“No. I don’t mean that. You just never show any feelings. I mean, you smile at some things, and you ask some of the most interesting questions, but you seldom give a direct answer to anything when people ask you.” The low level of exasperation was plain in her voice.

Having moved his hands from behind his head, he sat with his elbows resting on the arms of the chair. Raising his hands to face each other, he lightly pressed opposing fingertips, digits splayed apart, and tilted the joined index fingers against his lips. While it was only a few seconds, the pause seemed eternal to her.

“It’s not about me,” he said finally.

She stared in surprise. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He still had has fingertips together, but held them just above his lap. “Do you notice I never ask for personal information? Only clarification to make sure I understand what someone has said. You are free to reveal whatever you wish, or nothing at all. It’s not that I don’t care, obviously, or I would not be working here. It’s that I care about something else far, far more.”

She tilted her head to one side, puzzled. “I know you don’t take this job seriously. You’ve said that much. And you don’t sit in the lotus position on the floor through lunch like that guy from India, so can I at least ask what does matter to you?”

With a half-smile, he turned and made eye contact with her. “The guy from India would understand better than anyone born here in the US. I am most certainly otherworldly, just not from the same culture as he. I don’t need the lotus position to meditate.”

“So you’re some kind of mystic, too? You ain’t sleeping, but meditating when you close your eyes and sit still?”

“Maybe some of both,” he said with that enigmatic faint smile. “Dreams can reveal much to you about your own subconscious.”

“But why ain’t you trying to talk us all into it? Rajee was more evangelistic about Krishna than most Baptists are about Jesus.”

The faint smile faded completely from his lips. “Would you be any more likely to listen? The real truth won’t fit into any neat packages. If I talk about Jesus, you’ll assume you already understand and fill in the blanks with your own background on the subject. You know the words, but you don’t use them the same way I do, so speaking would only confuse the issue.”

“Oh, you mean like the Mormons? They use the same words as the other churches do, but trick you because they mean something different.” Her disgust was painfully obvious.

Again the half-smile. “Truth cannot hitch a ride with deception.” He sat up fully and locked his chair upright. “I’m not important; truth is. The government has a silly cheap imitation in the phrase, ‘need to know.’ If you are open to the truth, you don’t need words. All you need from me is an expression of that truth. If that truth calls to you, then your response will put you in the place to know more about me. Otherwise, you can’t know much about me at all.”

She paused, her face blank as her mind chewed on this. “So … if I get it — this truth — what would we talk about?”

“The purpose in fellowship is learning how to bring that truth to life, to compare notes. Once truth comes to life in your soul, you spend the rest of your days making conscious the vast ocean of things most humans take for granted, things of which they are seldom conscious. You can’t live truth if you buy into every assumption this world has, because the fundamental truth about this world is that it’s a lie.” Part of her noticed he was totally earnest without much emotion.

Several long minutes passed. Tilting her head on one side again, “So you do that on purpose? You self-consciously keep from getting involved to provoke that sense of mystery?”

This time he actually smiled fully. Turning to gaze directly in her eyes, “Now you know me.”

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Net Win

Posted on June 14, 2011 by ehurst

The Internet will win the coming battle.

Have you read Bill Clinton’s drivel about regulating the Net? He proposes some office to keep a check on whether someone is posting lies on their blogs, an office which will enforce some sort of balance and fairness. Who decides what is a lie?

The last time such was tried on a massive scale, it succeeded. That was in the days before the Internet. It won’t this time. This is just my own intuition speaking here, but I am convinced the existence of the Internet has created a global sense of need which now regards such networking as a basic human necessity. TPTB despise it, but if they don’t learn how to embrace what it is, and try to change the nature of this beast, it will devour them.

I wasn’t just kidding when I suggested the next civilization will be Net-based. When the current civilization collapses, one of the things putting it in the grave will be this utterly senseless and hopeless fight against the Internet. Tear out the wires and something else will take their place. This genie isn’t going back into the bottle. For good or ill, a little experience with the Internet transforms the human consciousness on a mechanical level. Trying to remove it will be a serious threat to the working of the whole thing. If there is one thing people are likely to fight and die for, this is it.

At the same time, that fighting and dying itself has been transformed. The influence of the virtual world itself calls for a wholly different way of doing things, but they are nonetheless highly effective. So even while I believe Anonymous and LulzSec are not honest revolutions, they exemplify where the most significant battles will be in the future. In order to govern the people, you have speak their language and address their values. The existence of the Internet shapes those things, so any government that can’t adapt to it is a government which will become irrelevant.

The current ruling class of the US in particular simply do not have this. They seek to play the same old games as before, and it’s wearing thin. Any day now the ragged edge will catch and the whole thing come apart. I seriously doubt many of us will ever see that moment for what it is, until much later. Few turning points are so precise and clear as we are told in history class. But that moment is upon us, and while the battle will surely take unexpected turns, I am utterly convinced the current world order will fall in the end. That means if any of the current class are to hang on, they will have to adapt.

A significant portion of our current bureaucracy has already made that shift. The CIA and NSA are loaded with them, and it places them far ahead of less flexible organizations like the FBI. It probably won’t look like a coup, but we should soon see a whole lot of new faces in actual positions of power. Granted, if the New World Order are really cool about it, the hidebound Old Guard will maintain appearances as the real control is removed from their hands. Up to now, that only happens in a few places, rather than as a fundamental fact. If you ask me, at least a part of the recent big cyber attacks is the New Order within our own government putting fear into the Old Guard.

For example, I rather thought Obama might be one of the new guys, because his act sure had all the proper window dressing. But he has shown himself still too much owned by the Old Guard. It was fake. The Net Generation won’t forgive, won’t forget. That doesn’t mean he can’t win the election; it means it won’t matter if he does. The real means of exerting power will no longer be in his hands, despite appearances. Things will simply evaporate for him. In some ways, his failure may be what helped everyone decide they have to tear it all down, giving the Net radicals a stronger voice in the inevitable revolt.

Yeah, it’s all pretty murky, but it’s real even while it’s virtual.

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Cyberwar and False Flags

Posted on June 13, 2011 by ehurst

So LulzSec takes down the SPARC server for the US Senate website, and appears to have snagged, or is capable of snagging, all the emails. I’m suspicious.

I’ve already said I’m pretty sure Anonymous has been infiltrated, if it isn’t already a big PsyOp. I had serious doubts about LulzSec from the start. Now that they claim to have cracked a server which is definitely not a Windows server, I’m starting to lean even more in that direction. But it really doesn’t matter too awful much, because we all know what will come from their actions.

The US government now has a really big, and growing, excuse to try and regulate the Internet in new ways. Granted, the protocols themselves will limit their options. I figure it will involve some mandatory registration and licensing process via the ISPs. It doesn’t have to make sense, and it won’t. It’s pretty much like anything else: Only those who know next to nothing about the thing will be affected. The Net savvy will probably get around it ten minutes after it starts, if not sooner. Indeed, anything like this will be leaked all over the place and by-passing will be worked out quickly.

If TPTB want to get more countries on line with this, it’s going to require some big attacks in Europe and other places. If it only happens here in the US, it will tell us a great deal. It will mean the really nasty stuff will be limited to the US, at least at first, because crushing the Net is all about silencing the uncontrolled opposition, the voices demanding accountability and leaking news of the evil.

Wikileaks is an excuse. Anonymous is an excuse. LulzSec is playing that part, regardless who it is. Their tactics aren’t very smart when matched against their claims.

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Fake Prosperity, Fake Peace

Posted on June 13, 2011 by ehurst

We are aware that America in particular, and the West in general, have been on a fast ride of faux prosperity based on profligate debt. You can go back and chart each wave of wasteful spending and consumer credit as new ways of getting into debt were created by lending institutions. We have bumped into a ceiling, finally. There is no longer sufficient credit to keep this going.

We have long known the best way to estimate someone’s character is to place them in stressful situations. Reduce someone to simply struggling to stay alive and you find out a great deal. So, for example, you should know never to build a romance without first seeing your intended at their worst. You will certainly see it again once the relationship is formed. Besides, it’s a wonderful form of therapy for troubled individuals, to put them in a context where all their energy goes to just staying alive. It works better than any mirror at helping them truly see themselves. The same goes for groups of people. Whatever conglomeration you want to identify can be truly understood when they go through tough times.

America is facing some very tough times. Perhaps the single most significant factor of that stress is economic, since Americans are singularly the most materialistic nation on earth. It’s the one thing for which we are best known to other nations; our other unpleasant features arise from that one thing. So while this statement is very scary, it’s also quite accurate:

The truth is that about the only thing keeping our society together has been the unprecedented affluence that we have been enjoying over the past few decades.

Once that affluence is gone, the true character of the American people will come out, and we may not like what we see.

It’s a good time to learn how to stay home and build community ties. It’s a good time to learn how to make do with what you can produce or find, and how to learn to make and find things you will need just to stay alive.

Welcome to the future.

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Prude Games

Posted on June 12, 2011 by ehurst

I’m a serious prude.

The Bible says God demands modesty. The basic principle is we are fallen, and when our eyes see certain things, our hormones kick in and can lead us astray. In general, men are weaker in this than women, but women are hardly immune to visual stimuli. We dare not trust the messages our hormones feed through the wiring of lust, as the results would find us doing things God condemns quite bluntly.

Indeed, it’s really not even that much a matter of sexual turn-on, but our fundamental flaws are apparent without a libido. In these modern days when the environment is flooded with all manner of chemical pollutants, it is not the least surprising when men lose their libido in their mid-40s. The testosterone still works, and the sexual functions still work, but they become disassociated. For such men, over-exposed female flesh still creates a very strong reaction, still in some ways pleasant, still a problem and distraction for those who would rather not. A prude with broken libido still doesn’t want to see it. The living spirit of a Christian Mystic cries out in sorrow at all sin.

It makes no difference what we theorize about nudity being natural. We are fallen, so a lot of natural things are now all messed up. Perhaps we can say nudity itself is not the issue, but the context. That’s why Scripture says show it in the marital chamber, but never out in public. You can’t simply condition sin away, because the broken nature from the Fall is irreparable on this side of Eternity. To have a flesh body and exist on this plane is to be broken, so all this talk of what’s natural means nothing. Nudity in most contexts is a sin. (TSA’s forced exposure by electronic imagery or by hands is utterly evil.)

The remaining question is: How much is too much? Or, if you will, how little is too little coverage? I can’t speak for you. You’ll have to be self-honest enough to know for yourself. I’m willing to bet I can guess what works for most Americans, and extrapolate it flexibly to all Western Civilization. I’ll toss this out for your consideration.

Imagine a generic human form. Draw a rectangle with vertices at the top of each shoulder, and down even with the knees. Naturally you have to account for variations in human shape, but generally everything inside the rectangle should be covered. Allow a cut out for neck to drop down an inch or two under the little hollow below a man’s Adam’s Apple, and about the same place on a female. Cleavage is way too far. Grant some exceptions for the way fabric moves when you sit down, so that a little thigh is exposed, but not much. I use the knees as a generous safety measure, but the fabric should fall across the center of the knee when standing. I should think it’s obvious we avoid something too form fitting, because some fabric does little more than change the color of the skin. And yes, in a single household you would naturally be more flexible around family. There are reasonable allowances all over the place; it’s not about hard rules but a general desire to be mature and responsible, not throwing down a stumbling block for your fellow believers.

As with all things, this is entirely voluntary, and depends on what you can obtain under the circumstances. If you are adept at making clothes and have time and materials, you have far fewer excuses. The point is, people of clean desire will tend to follow guidelines which have been properly explained.

Still, that imaginary rectangle is most likely to hit the majority of Americans where they live, so to speak. Cover that much and sinful desires, or simple annoyances, are minimized. On either side of me in my neighborhood are young females who probably can’t imagine such limits to self-exposure. Never mind whether they have anything worth flaunting, as it were; I don’t need to see it. I don’t pry into their business, don’t presume to lecture them, I just tend to avoid them when they flaunt it. More than once I’ve physically covered my eyes when I was not able to turn around or look away. I have no idea if they ever saw me do that. Everyone near our house knows I’m a religious fanatic of some sort, even if they don’t know the peculiarities. And I don’t doubt they would laugh at my proposed limits of exposure.

The divine principle of action here recognizes mere human words cannot do miracles. To create a sense of conviction about sin is in the hands of God alone. He chooses to use our words to awaken what He has already placed in the soul of another, but those words create nothing in themselves. People cannot simply decide within themselves to follow Christ, and most certainly can I not decide it for them. Lacking the leverage to honorably enforce such things as an elder on a human level in these times, I’m left with doing what I can to provoke only what already lives in others, whenever God makes it possible for them to be provoked. In the context in which I live, that means keeping a rather low profile, because much more than that simply drives them away. What I offer instead is the loving actions of a good neighbor, one who minds his own business until asked.

It’s not for me to impose my standards on others who haven’t agreed in advance to hear them. The whole business of the gospel is portraying an orientation on the Spirit Realm, and being pushy about my own weaknesses in this realm is not a part of that. But I have no doubt folks who know anything at all about me know I’m a prude.

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On My Own?

Posted on June 11, 2011 by ehurst

Watching the traffic stats on this blog is so amusing.

For a guy who writes so much about religion, most of my traffic is apparently not specifically Christian. In fact, most of it is folks who come looking for computer help, mostly Linux stuff. Even my criticisms of Linux get a lot of traffic. For my religious and moral stuff, some of my regular readers aren’t even Christians, or at least don’t profess it. Yet I insist my Christian faith is the whole driving force behind what I write here.

The other day I picked up a used book by a fantasy author I used to love. It’s been a decade since I had seen his stuff, and this was published since then. I hated it. It was dreary, utterly failing to reach the hunger I once had. Yet I can affirm it’s pretty much the same as what he had always written. I moved on, and no longer need what he offers.

The same with almost all the religious material I used to chase in books and on the Net. Not a single church I know of is doing what I am doing. Another way of saying that is not a one of them would tolerate me long if they knew what I was doing. If they read my stuff, they’d be pretty unhappy. I know. I’ve tried to share it.

Sometimes I’ll write something which seems to catch a lot of Christian attention. My page hits will go up and up. Then I’ll mention my distaste for Israel and my theology regarding that country, and suddenly at least half that traffic disappears. When I visit Christian websites where I used to spend a lot of time, they have little to offer me. A couple of forums feel really foreign now. There seem precious few common interests. When I stopped posting, it was because they didn’t want to talk about what mattered to me, and vice versa.

I speak to my Lord every day, several times. Yes, I’m referring to a mystical experience, a spiritual encounter. There’s precious little I could tell you about it, only that it’s more real to me than the world around me. You’ll notice I avoid implying it gives me special powers, that it makes me better than other Christians. Nor do I allege they don’t commune with Him simply because I don’t have much in common with them. It’s not total isolation; there are several who chat with me via email often enough. There are some I see in meat space rather regularly. But there aren’t very many of them.

By no means am I complaining, just stating the facts. Nor is there any attempt to be elitist. No one has to tell me the stuff I write is way out on the fringe of the mainstream. My only complaint is not how much attention I don’t get, but that no one else seems to have caught on to the same concepts, the same topics.

FYI, this blog averages between 100 and 150 hits daily; it was less than 50 until after I wrote that series on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6. Weekends are a little lighter. Most of it is older Linux articles, HOWTO stuff. That’s pretty consistent. The main page varies wildly, 10-50, but who knows whether that represents any significant reading? I get very few comments, so I really don’t know what my visitors are thinking. I suppose it’s not too bad for a guy who basically mutters to himself a lot. There was never any intent to draw a lot of traffic, just put this stuff where a handful of friends could find it.

Thanks for stopping by!

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Can’t Keep Up

Posted on June 10, 2011 by ehurst

My head is spinning. Excuse me while I vent.

I often avoid linking because of all the suit happy jerks. So when I mention crazy stuff, I’m going to assume my readers can find it easily or have already read it. Try What Really Happened and Activist Post for wild news aggregation. You aren’t supposed to believe everything they post or link to, just get a feel for what’s going on out there. Be aware some of it attempts at controlled opposition.

Now, just how many more false flag cyber attacks will it take before the US government seizes control of the backbone servers for the Internet? Anybody claiming to support Wikileaks, if not a black ops from some alphabet soup agency from one country or another, is run by some group which is at least heavily infiltrated by government agents. Anonymous may have started out rather independent, but attacking Iran is picking on the wrong people. And LulzSec is no better. If they don’t know Wikileaks is controlled opposition, they aren’t smart enough to own computers. Anything to keep you from noticing the real news, right?

So they are planning to use the radioactive sludge from Fukushima as an ingredient in cement. Time to investigate lead underwear. Stay off the sidewalks, and don’t spend time in new buildings with concrete in the walls or foundation, because that stuff will be shipped worldwide. Can you imagine the radiation diseases this will spread? God help the poor Japanese citizens; between TEPCO and their own government, more will die, and horribly so, from this disaster than from the two nukes we dropped on them.

While the medical forensics still blame the German organic sprouts farm, what you may not have heard is the E. Coli was altered in a lab. Nowhere in nature does E. Coli encounter some eight different antibiotics commonly used as “last resort” medicines when more common ones fail. Nowhere in nature does E. Coli come with DNA segments taken from Black Plague. Yep, you can’t grow that stuff outside a very large and expensive lab. This was random mass murder. Where else will they use this or something similar?

The best way to clobber free markets is to take down the bigger free market players. Gold price high enough to embarrass the bankers? Take down Kitco on bogus tax charges in Canada, one of the biggest precious metals marketers in the world. Who’s next?

Unless you have a live upload feed, don’t you dare try to film any police activity, or they’ll arrest you and destroy your equipment. At the very least they’ll try to erase any incriminating footage. Then, when it’s all too late for anyone to do anything, they’ll drop whatever bogus charges they filed against you. Sure, file a lawsuit. You’ll get money in a few years, but no justice. Meanwhile, the cops get more uniformly rabid about being caught on tape, and just about everything else. Their crimes will get worse. What we need is universal surveillance run by private individuals, not by governments. Government is the one committing the crimes.

Granted, this was all prophesied, in a sense, centuries ago. I’m not expecting, and hardly am I advising, folks rise up and march in the streets or whatever. I will note the Laws of God see nothing wrong with properly targeted assassination of evil government officials, but Christian Mystics aren’t likely to be interested in such things. What makes my head spin is the sudden rush of these things coming together in such a short time. I’ve been expecting it, but I had no way to prepare for the number and variety of ways they planned to reduce global populations — such as where, by what means. The overwhelming bitterness against accountability and exposure, the incredible sudden crush on whistleblowers, even to the point of routinely planting evidence on high profile targets … it’s mind boggling.

Bilderberg today and tomorrow. Each time, really sinister stuff appears shortly afterward. How are they going to top these acts? I’m afraid to ask.

God help us; we are in for a rough ride already.

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Spiritual Economics

Posted on June 10, 2011 by ehurst

What price a sane life?

You can be sure the current massive debt burden taken on by students seeking degrees is not justified in most cases. The price is excessive and the education is a joke. Most degrees these days don’t even signify so much as simple literacy. Precious few will get you a job worth having. The debt burden, which few ever manage to service, much less repay, justifies federal SWAT raids, now. It’s not worth it.

Of course, if we were to find an institution offering a real education, it would be different. Some things in life are worth the financial debt and threats. An education that opens your mind to genuine skepticism, intelligent cynicism and equips you in questioning assumptions is an education, indeed. A set of experiences which expose you to a world you could not find on your own is actually worth quite a bit. In those terms, some degrees are actually valuable, if not economically useful.

There is an apple tree behind our mobile home. We take care of it, but not with any great diligence. Once the flowers appear, I try to see it gets water when the rain doesn’t come. When fruit becomes visible I water it daily. I can’t tell you what variety the apples are, only that they are yellow when ripe, rather soft and pithy and no fun to eat. They aren’t too bad if you catch them just before they turn, but they tend to be small.

I pick the apples and cut away the ruined parts from insect and bird grazing, places where a limb rubbed it hard. Then I peel them, dice them and we later turn them into apple sauce. It’s time consuming, but I do only a few at a time when they seem ready to pick. We may get a half-bushel of them, and it makes a quart or three of apple sauce. If I were spending the same time working at manual labor, I could easily afford several cases of commercially produced apple sauce.

But then, the labor would aggravate my arthritis, and I frankly wouldn’t be able to offer good reliable work. Chances are I’d end up doing work I really didn’t like much, perhaps bumping into moral challenges, and having to face being a victim of the tax system. In other words, I’d be less myself and more of someone I didn’t want to be. I’m not lazy; I work a lot, but don’t get paid much for it. I take free-will donations, and frequently nothing at all, to fix computers for other people. I like that work, and can’t imagine charging fees for it. But there are plenty of days when no one calls.

What can replace for me the very rich blessing of those moments with a paring knife, peeling and cutting those apples I picked myself? Granted, what we make here at home is much better tasting than the store brands, notwithstanding the poor quality of the apples, but that’s only part of it. The act of doing for myself and my family, along with tending a garden, means far more than a lot other work I’ve done in life, never mind my college education. I poured many hard hours into tilling the soil, hauling mulch some distance, pulling weeds and grass, watering carefully and fertilizing. Because I work for myself, there is no economic accounting for that labor. The labor itself is a good I derive from the situation.

I’m free. I make my own schedule, negotiated with nature. I do what I can to salvage a product over which I really don’t have much control, but far more than if I bought the latest Monsanto GMO monstrosity at the grocery store, which isn’t allowed to tell me which items are GMO. Did you know the Bt protein in GMO food crops is found intact in the bloodstream of humans who eat those crops? We haven’t had time to see what pathology arises from that, but we will, and it won’t be good. Better by far is the thing I planted myself or which nature freely offered. The blackberries are good this year. The sand plums were rather thin and now are all but gone, but they were worth chasing. They were worth bathing in insect repellent and keeping an eye out for snakes, thrashing myself with the underbrush and plum tree thorns. Those threats simply don’t compare with what man cooks up in seeking to dehumanize others.

As a military policeman, when I was working the DARE Program in Europe, at places like the US Embassy school in Bonn, I knew the program itself did the kids not a bit of good. It was based on a badly broken school of psychology. I knew, for better or worse, the success of that opportunity rested entirely with me as person. Whatever good was done for those kids was limited to what I could create interacting directly with them. I gave them myself, and got back a whole lot more than I put into it. Indeed, the expensive trip to Los Angeles to take the DARE training did more for me as an opportunity to experience Hollywood at the street level than the classes could ever do.

I eventually went on to get my teacher’s certification based on my days in the DARE Program. The last time I worked in public education was as a substitute teacher. The subject that day was Flowers for Algernon. As part of the discussion, I told the kids education might happen at school, but it was really up to them, not the system. The system was actually slanted away from genuine education, and entirely devoted to herd management. Classes where kids might really be engaged were cut short by the bells, while dreary classes of material mastered in minutes required they sit bored. They learned in detail things no one ever uses and skipped lightly across stuff that could change their lives. It was all politics. The worst teachers ran the union and the most talented were run off. Talented or not, I was not called back after that day.

I noticed the kids weren’t in a hurry to leave when the bell rang.

Whatever they learned, I know for sure I learned something that day. I’d never go back for even the most extravagant pay. Money didn’t mean much then, and it means less now. Engaging something which pays spiritual dividends is worth starving and dying prematurely.

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