Virtual Civilization

Posted on June 9, 2011 by ehurst

Inherent in the Covenant of Noah is the requirement to build a civilization, but with a great deal of flexibility.

To be civilized is to embrace the rules necessary to live peacefully in close quarters with other humans. A civilization is the collection of rules by which people are civilized, able to live in a city. I would contend the Spirit Realm is congruent to a civilization, but that’s because we are forced to use parabolic language to describe that realm in the first place. More than once I’ve compared it to the virtual world, but the virtual world has multiple civilizations already. One is more highly developed than the rest.

You may be familiar with the Open Source community, which constitutes a virtual civilization. It has its own ethics and culture, its own rules of co-existence. It makes us all a little schizophrenic because what we find in our virtual civilization is pretty hard to match in meat space. The reason I use Open Source software (particularly Linux) is because, of things human, it comes closest to the Spirit Realm in my experience. Yes, you could allege my personal Christian Mysticism is partly shaped by my experience with the Open Source civilization, but it’s the very nature of spiritual truth we recognize it when we come across it, regardless whether we can talk about it. Some part of my spiritual awareness recognizes something true and good in Open Source, mostly in the nature of the civilization.

There are limits, because in the Spirit, you are either dead or alive, and anyone is welcome to rise in wealth and power, as it were. In the Open Source world, the core talent is not so universal. Being able to contribute is simply not something everyone involved can do. Also, the Spirit Realm may wax and wane in human awareness, but it will outlast humanity itself. Open Source is a derived system which will pass when the Internet goes away — and it will. What endures and outlives Open Source and the Internet is something more fundamental, something which reflects the Spirit Realm.

So we who participate in Open Source are fully aware of its limits when we bother to consider it. It’s an expression of something humans have always wanted, and will always surface regardless of what our world looks like and what shape it takes. The coin of the realm is reputation based on talent and accomplishment. The kernel itself makes Linus Torvalds a demi-god, and he gets his way on most things. Not because he has some power of coercion, some ownership and control, but he has reputation, and people honor it. His authority is virtual and voluntarily rendered to him by the community. It becomes a civilization because the participants embrace the underlying ethics, the rules. It could easily fall apart, and most of us know the situation is changing. We don’t know whether this thing we all share will stay alive in the new virtual world.

When people who know something about economics say they don’t trust Bitcoin, for example, we can discern, whatever else they may know, they don’t understand Open Source. Bitcoin is really nothing more than basic modern economics applied within the Open Source civilization. Yes, it can be used to exchange for meat space goods, and that is happening right now. As with all economic systems, it had a birth, a wobbly start, was embraced and grew. It has a future golden age when it will seem dominant within its own sphere. Then, this too shall pass, and some folks will be left holding the bag. As with any market, Bitcoin is an investment with some risk. While it lives, good things will happen and people’s lives will be improved in some measure, and the good will almost certainly outweigh the bad, all things considered. So it is with any economic system, whether barter, precious metals, electronic fund transfers in the fiat currency of your choice, or anything else. Bitcoin is just another store of value and means of exchange, and it works, so we can call it “money.”

So long as any of this is anchored to fallen humanity, it will be vulnerable to predatory behavior. We know for certain governments would like to control Bitcoin, but so far cannot, and may never succeed. They’d like to control the Internet, and will surely succeed on a limited scale, but it will take time. They most certainly do have back doors in Windows. Such doors have been used more than anyone cares to admit. They’d like to have them in Linux and BSD, and may have some finger holes here and there. There is little evidence they’ve done much with them, if so. They believe they control the various fiat currencies, but the underlying assumption of debt is already owned by some other kind of government. None of them can control any part of genuine spiritual activity.

I use Open Source, and it uses me. Same with the Internet. I may eventually use Bitcoin. All of them will pass away sooner or later. This business of the Spirit Realm stood before time, and will be after it ends. I don’t make a religion of anything on this earth.

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Americans Going Down Without a Fight

Posted on June 8, 2011 by ehurst

Government is not the only lying propaganda machine.

Anthony Weiner? Says he’s Jewish, so there’s no excuse for mispronouncing his last name. Properly it’s “wine-er” so he only has himself to blame for making it sound like “wee-ner” — which is correctly spelled “wiener”. The latter comes from the original “Vienna Sausage”. In Vienna they speak German, and the German spelling is “Wien” — pronounced “vee-in”. So a sausage in the style of that famous old city is a “vee-in-er”. In our Anglicizing reflex, we turned that into “wee-ner”. Does anybody care? No, it’s more fun and entertaining to get it wrong, and I suspect half of this is Mr. Weiner is taking one for the team. Either way, the whole thing simply proves nobody is paying attention to anything that matters, because frankly, this little story doesn’t matter. It’s worth a short paragraph on the back pages, not days of front page headlines.

What really matters is how much of the silent and impalpable killer of radiation is being covered up in Fukushima, Japan. This thing is a huge mess, and it will destroy vast swathes of life on the planet. But while you don’t see it, hear it or feel it, the result is unspeakably painful and horrifying to watch. I’ve encountered a few nuclear victims, military veterans who were abused for testing purposes. It still turns my stomach many years later. That’s coming to your door in the next year. Not only is that crap drifting in the sky, but it’s filling the Pacific Ocean. Pretty soon, the residue will be detectable in so many places, no one will be able to track it. Remember: There is no safe dosage level. It’s always damaging.

What also matters is the hateful control the Army Corp of Engineers exercises over private land in the US, particularly the Mississippi Valley. Every action they’ve taken over the years only looks like a good idea. Because of moderate weather swings, it seems to have worked, so far. This year, it all fell apart. No, their engineering actually made things worse. The losses will be greater, and the level of destruction will wipe away every bit of apparent good they claimed to have done. Meanwhile, the very predictable results of pollutants and other nastiness washing into the valley from the flooding, the horrific consequences only adding to the destruction from the petroleum disaster in the Gulf, and the coming matching horror as the Rockies thaw and flood the Western States this month — it just blows the mind. We can’t imagine how vast is the mess, and the government is lying about it.

On the other hand, an awful lot of folks won’t live long enough to face it. We do have natural disasters rising in frequency, significance, and in more places in the US. You can’t do much about them, but we do next to nothing after them. State and federal governments were warned this was coming, but instead of laying on plans to deal with it properly and humanely, they used it as an excuse to prepare more hateful measures of repression. If disaster strikes in your area, flee government help. When FEMA and friends show up, the only result from their services is more misery than you had from the disaster itself. Time and time again, these emergency response folks have shown a singular talent for doing everything as wrong as possible. It would be hard for them to do worse. If they came firing machine guns, you would have a better chance of escaping unscathed. It’s not mere incompetence; these folks are doing exactly as their training and planning require. What’s required is so hateful, I can’t imagine no one notices. They lie about being helpful. Again, if you face any disaster, be very wary of help from anyone who receives a government paycheck, because the government gives with one hand and confiscates a truck load in exchange.

So when the US governing class finally pull off an agreement with the global governing class to disarm Americans, it will garner a lot of noise, but I am betting the vast majority will hand ’em over. Even the darkest muttering from the Patriot Underground is just noise. They are too decent, which is why they support gun ownership for self-defense in the first place. They are lying to themselves when they threaten armed resistance to gun grabbing, and that lie will hurt a lot of people, because the people who should be shot will get away with it. But that basic decency is what the psychopaths count on, and all but a tiny few of the most fanatical, the equally psychopathic, will comply. There won’t be too many violent outbursts, because we as a nation are too stupid to fight back.

And on top of all this, our national moral failures are going to ripple out across the globe, and few humans on this planet will escape the added sorrows from our gross sin. Don’t visit America, unless you are coming to help family evacuate ASAP. We have raised enough Hell with everyone else, it is finally coming home to roost, and America is quickly becoming Hell on Earth. Leave if you can; stay away if you aren’t here already.

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Baloney Economics and Trade

Posted on June 7, 2011 by ehurst

The myth of global free trade is what is killing us.

It doesn’t take an advanced to degree to understand certain basics of economics, nor does it take such a degree to see the big holes in common economic theories. Global free trade is not the panacea we have been led to believe. Neither is protectionism. It’s a false dichotomy.

Let’s kill one lie right now: Are you willing to allow labor to move as easily as goods? No? Then you do not have free trade by definition. When people can freely move to the work they prefer to do, wherever it may be, then we have full free trade. Competitive good swapping while keeping your labor barriers up is not free trade.

That’s the reason the US economy is dying. It doesn’t help we’ve convinced ourselves we are entitled to the cheapest goods in the world. It’s flaw enough to believe mere consumption on credit is somehow justified on the same terms as investment in better products (R&D) and better production efficiencies. Having a better house in the suburbs does not make you more productive; it makes you more arrogant. We give only lip service to investment in better personnel, but blatantly exploit and dumb down the consumers. We understand all too well how advertising, with all it’s manipulative tricks and mind games, is an investment in consumer desire, but we engage it while cutting our own throats. It’s not something which can be sustained.

Creating a false sense of entitlement is what the advertisers do best. It’s also an attack on the economic foundations of the nation. People who buy wisely keep buying generation after generation, just not as much. They also keep working making stuff other people need. When some schemer wants to get rich off the system, he begins herding the consumer into frantic demands for things he can’t normally afford. No one denies certain specialized appliances do make life easier, and do tend to free up more leisure time, but no one wants to discuss how the whole pursuit is morally wrong.

This is not about stern self-denial, but intelligent appraisal of reality. People who are willing to hock their futures for a few extra toys are destroying that future. The system which rewards that willingness, encourages it, is the system which destroys the very foundation of what keeps a country’s economy going. We are stuck here while our jobs are moved overseas to places with more competitive labor costs because we want more, want it now, and we can’t afford it if we make it ourselves.

I’m not sure how we got the place we value leisure time so much, since we then only have to find ways to fill it with more garbage. I suppose it comes with the intense hustle and bustle of wage-slavery versus the leisurely pace of self-employment. Centralized efficiencies of scale are a mirage. (It’s the same lie used to justify bigger and more intrusive government.) Commoditizing stuff makes it cheaper in every sense of the word. The point is, this is an appeal to the worst part of human nature. And when you debase the morality of a nation, you destroy it.

So now we have an economy where very few people know how to make or produce anything at all, but do know how to consume more than our fair share of the earth’s resources. Thus, we don’t produce anything anyone wants, we just consume. We have commoditized bologna so it’s dirt cheap and unfit to eat, but are all unemployed, so now it looks like steak. Welcome to baloney economics.

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Next Civilization: Virtual without Virtue

Posted on June 7, 2011 by ehurst

(This is nothing more than my personal guesswork, part analysis, part intuition, provided for your entertainment.)

People worry about the government doing something akin to taking down the Internet. It won’t happen — at least, not intentionally. Governments themselves rely entirely too much on it, as does corporate advertising with a massive investment in entertainment delivery. Nor is it likely we’ll see anything like the Great Firewall of China. Our hardware situation is entirely different from China’s. Besides, it’s much more effective to infiltrate the hacker community. Whatever Anonymous was, it’s now entirely fake. But some of what they pretended to be will have a lasting effect. It’s what we pretend is the heart and soul of the Internet, which can’t be regulated too much, or it will quit working for everyone, government included.

It’s quite possible the Internet as a physical artifact will disappear. The endless kilometers of wires, fiber, the routers and computers will eventually need replacing. The current protocols will simply not make it much longer. But the sheer necessity perceived will increase, and mankind will become ever more networked electronically. Something will replace what wears out.

Not just your toaster, refrigerator and bicycle, but people will be networked in ways we can’t picture. Devices will get smaller and more powerful, yet simpler and easier, and more mysterious to everyone but the few geeks. Geekery will dominate as fashion and style, but the actual understanding of how things work will become too complex for most people who now run the Internet. Something fundamental will shift. Devices will shrink, become universal, wearable, eventually embedded, but with a physical form we cannot yet imagine. Yet the dreaded self-aware computer network will never happen, though it may appear to exist.

There will be more paradox, as the virtual world becomes the dominant reality of everything mankind does. What alarms us today will be taken for granted tomorrow. While the struggle to preserve the freedom of choice rises, and the determination to protect your right to choose how you present yourself to the Network, it will become by far the most dehumanizing and impersonal civilization ever seen.

What we call “texting” will become the New World Language, only more abbreviated. Human interaction will likewise be abbreviated, more shallow, even as it becomes more honest in some ways (AKA, less civilized). In some places in the world, there are already societies where people honestly admit they have hundreds of acquaintances, and almost no friends. They have no one they can really trust, no one they really know, nor any who really knows them. Nobody sees enough of their daily life, the multiple contexts, paying attention to the cues about personality. Spouses are simply partners, and children are spun off before they even become people — if they actually do that. This will get worse. It will be the new isolation in a crowded urban world.

The next Facebook will be mandatory, literally, though government will become something hardly be recognizable to us today — it will be fragmented and global at the same time. The right to be deceptive will increase, but only for certain aspects of your existence. Your identity will be digital, and more complex than any mere number or hash. It will be multifaceted depending on what each demands to know, and they will know. You’ll have multiple identities for the various different authorities in your world, and only a simulacrum of management over it. The human soul will be compartmentalized, digitized, and people will hardly possess the mental capacity to know themselves, even while they know more about themselves.

Things will never be absolute, because neither hardware, software, nor the people who use them can ever be that perfect. There will always be those who can take advantage of the system even while it seems they are fully participating. There will always be those who somehow manage to opt out, not participate much at all.

Some people will cease to exist physically and many will never know it. Some will have never existed at all in the first place. Still, there won’t be artificial intelligence which rivals humans as they are now. Rather, human intelligence will devolve closer to the artificial. It will only seem we have accomplished AI.

Welcome to the future.

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Re: The E. Coli Scare in Europe

Posted on June 6, 2011 by ehurst

This is one of the best reviews of the facts I’ve seen so far: Forensic evidence emerges that European e.coli superbug was bioengineered to produce human fatalities. I have no trouble believing a government owned lab or Big Pharma — or both — conspired to bring this thing into the public. I have no trouble believing there are scientists who would hardly blink at killing and suffering in mass numbers. Stampeding the herd is a favorite tactic of predators.

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Modern Israel: Not What It Appears

Posted on June 6, 2011 by ehurst

In the New Testament, we catch a glimpse of how the Sadducees played the Pharisees like a cheap accordion. In a certain sense, this is still going on today.

Putting your hand into any discussion regarding Jews is like juggling chainsaws running at wide open throttle. You can be quite skillful and still get chewed up pretty badly. There is so much falsehood injected into every side of every debate regarding the term itself, you wonder if there are any facts in existence, if there is any truth to be found at all.

For the most part, I can present what seems pretty obvious from the Christian point of view found in the Bible. I’ve not had any harsh reaction, even from Jewish readers, to this analysis of the shift in Judaism toward Aristotle. For the most part, Jews defend the move, as do most Christian scholars. By taking the opposite tack that it was a bad thing, I’m safely way out on the margins, and don’t get enough attention to warrant an attack from any part of the propaganda machine.

This means I don’t have to fight the dishonest slander of being “anti-Semitic” simply because I suggest a certain identifiable ethnic group may be involved to some bad things. All humanity is fallen, so no identity group is holy in that sense. Besides, the argument over what the label “Jew” means has yet to be settled. You want the label? Wear it with pride; this really isn’t about Jews in the first place. It simply happens to involve some of them.

That’s the whole point: Modern Israel is a nation ruled by a batch of folks who may or may not qualify for the label, and it really doesn’t matter. The whole question is a diversion. Modern Israel itself is a diversion. But explaining that means talking about the government of that country, and everybody knows they make the claim of being a Jewish nation. You can chase questions about the Ashkenazi versus Sephardi versus genuine Hebrew DNA, but the Bible itself says the real question is embracing the Law of Moses. Not the Talmud, but Moses — Jesus, the Son of God and His Messiah said the Talmud was a petty human perversion of Moses. To be a member of the Nation of Israel was never about DNA, despite all the proud declarations about being Children of Abraham. It was always about embracing the Law of Moses, because that is the biblical definition of “Israel” — to be a Child of the Law. Anyone from any ethnic background could choose to be under that Covenant. Since no significant part of Modern Israel embraces any significant part of the Law of Moses, it’s a moot question there.

Modern Israel may be Jewish, but it’s not biblical Israel. The Judean government of Jesus’ day was also Jewish, and also not Mosaic. This can be easily proven, but no one bothers to discuss it. Whatever it is, Modern Israel is just a diversion, something utterly beside the point in more ways than one. It is neither the center of biblical promises, nor the center of the New World Order. So the Protestant Zionists (AKA Dispensationalists) who support modern Israel are all wrong, as are their implacable enemies who rant and rave about Israel and the Rothschilds.

Yes, whatever the Rothschilds were up to in the past is still at work today. Their own published writings echo every element in the much reviled Protocols of the Elders of Zion. However, their mission and emphasis has changed, and the Protocols no longer reflect accurately what we can expect. Is anyone surprised by that? Every similar mission and emphasis in history, when passed off across multiple generations, always drifts from its roots. That’s human nature. It’s okay to study the history of the Rothschilds and the Protocols and to see how they connect to the modern global banking oligarchy. It’s the same bunch of people, for the most part, and they have the same basic drive to take over the whole world, but the details of their plans have shifted significantly.

There may have been a time when the Jewish Homeland was central to the plans of the global banking oligarchs. But even then, it was not about saving the Jews from future persecution. The leaders of the Zionist movement at the time of the Holocaust were offered a chance to save the victims, but they refused. The terms were not particularly onerous; it was all about political points. The Zionist leadership would rather see their own people massacred than sacrifice a simple fleeting propaganda victory. At another point, the Zionist party leaders in Palestine massacred a shipload of Jewish immigrants on the beach to avoid having the deal with their poverty. It was never really about the Jewish people in the first place; the Jews were pawns in the hands of someone who felt a distinct distance from them, even as they claimed to speak for them.

This is the same thing we saw with the Sanhedrin of Jesus’ day. The Pharisees had contempt for the general population. Their mantra stood: Material wealth was the mark of God’s favor. They implied poverty was the mark of God’s disfavor. The wealthy Pharisees — never mind how the system was rigged in their favor — were blessed of God. Of course, their political opponents, the Sadducees, were not blessed of God, despite being even wealthier. That’s because they had compromised with Rome, and were traitors. But because they were all of priestly families, which at that time was the de facto “royalty” of Judea, and the Pharisees were not, there was nothing they could do to usurp their opponents’ political power.

But if you read between the lines, you see the Sadducees were the real intelligentsia, with a valid and workable plan to stay in power. It was the radical arm of the Pharisees who ruined everything some decades later. For the most part, the Sadducees used the Pharisees, just as modern Zionist leadership uses the Orthodox Jews. There remains a layer of credibility, but as the Orthodox grow restless as junior partners in the arrangement, they bring out the worst of what Zionism can be. It’s not so much the Orthodox themselves, a tiny minority, but their influence, which is massive. Their influence among the less orthodox gives us the ugly face of Zionism, the savage treatment of Palestinians, of any other ethnic minority — the horrific racism everyone can’t avoid seeing. Their influence gives us the vast Mossad network of spies committing false flag atrocities to justify oppression and brutality, of blatantly escalating all conflict.

It goes beyond Orwell’s depiction of deception within deception, layers deep. There’s this psychotic demand the world approve everything Israel’s government dreams up, even the most preposterous wild claims of “persecution” when they are the aggressors every step of the way. Who else could, with a straight face, deny using White Phosphorus shells against children when unedited filming shows it? Who else raids ships in international waters, ships carrying coloring books and crayons and other humanitarian supplies headed to some other country, and call it “defense”?

But this is exactly what the modern day beneficiaries of the Rothschild Empire — what I call the Illuminati — want. On the one hand, the cheering section are eating this all up, making it an orthodox article of faith to accept the propaganda of Israel. On the other hand, everyone else is aghast at the perverse abuse of language to characterize unspeakable crimes as divine right. The polarization is just another Hegelian Dialectic, among other things. The Illuminati are not themselves Zionists, in reality, and apparently never were. They use Israel to keep everyone’s attention on something, anything, except what they are actually doing.

It’s quite likely in the next few years, if not sooner, things will go radically hard for Israel. It may even be destroyed, but the Illuminati won’t care a bit. Israel is expendable, as were all Jews all along. Follow the money and you’ll find virtually every bit of real anti-Semitism in the world is funded indirectly by the Illuminati. Every time we turn around, yet another rabid Jew-hater mouthpiece turns out to be a planted provocateur. The Jews are the favorite whipping boy of the Illuminati, essential to the process until at some point they are no longer needed.

If you really want to understand the New World Order, the Illuminati, or whatever you would like to call the real global oligarchy intending to take over rule of the whole human race, don’t get caught up in the PsyOps. It’s not even about money, but control. The mechanism for control appears to be debt, notional wealth. As long as any part of this really matters to you, there will be no freedom for you. The freedom to choose does have natural moral constraints, mostly involving taking responsibility for not infringing the freedom of others.

Jesus Himself, the Son of God, said the human half of all the Law and Prophets was a matter of placing your fellow humans’ needs in the same basket with yours. You can do anything you like until it affects another; then you have to give them equal consideration when doling out the limited amount of pie possible here on this fallen earth. If that’s how you live, then you aren’t a sucker for the means to Satanic control. The quickest path to slavery is trying to enlarge the pie at the expense of tomorrow’s freedom. The moment you buy into the system of assumptions that go with that, you are a slave.

Enjoy watching how key players move the chess pieces around on the board in this multi-dimensional game structured by the global oligarchy. Be entertained and surprised at how certain moves play out, but don’t participate. Declare your freedom by insisting you can live with whatever a moral lifestyle places in your hands. You don’t even have to have born-again religion to do that; just try to understand the universal moral code expressed in the Laws of Noah. Just the mere act of desiring to get it right is as much success as you can have, and it’s all that’s required to win. If there is to be any spiritual enlightenment, this is the path for that, too.

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A Driving Vision

Posted on June 5, 2011 by ehurst

The vision which keeps me going day after day is what I call the Tribulation Church. On my static site (site closed) I use the term to offer a replacement for a denominational label. There’s no attempt at marketing here; this is more about a functional name, something descriptive and distinctive. I proclaim tribulation as the native atmosphere of a genuine body of Christ. Inasmuch as there will be any sort of organization for what I teach and hope to see, it’s something which will naturally arise as a response to tribulation. The idea is to describe what a church would look like when properly equipped to face really tough times, because that would pretty much have to be an ANE (Ancient Near Eastern) tribal, First Century church.

Had the Jews remained faithful to Moses, instead of chasing off down the path of the Hellenized Talmud, their little diaspora communities would look almost the same. Most people read Paul’s letters with a sort of modernist, Western rationalized lens, and don’t realize some of the ancient cultural habits of the Old Testament were carried forward into the Gentile New Testament churches. Paul mentions long hair for women, head coverings, men without long hair or head coverings, women keeping silent as in synagogues, and a long list of other things we tend to think don’t belong for us today. That notion is simply wrong. I’m not promoting some new brand of legalism; it’s rightly dividing the Word. Notice the departure from the Jewish custom of men wearing hats and prayer shawls. Whatever the issue, in each case Paul shows how the symbolic action represents something critical to our understanding of the spiritual truth. Some of it is carried over, some is altered, some is forgotten, but all of it refers back to the Old Testament, which was their Bible for quite some time.

But it’s not simply small incidentals like dress code, nor does it require any peculiar speech patterns. Compliance was and is mostly voluntary. To be a full member of the congregation, you had to understand what mattered and why. No one pecked at you about your eternal status, as if anyone could know with any useful certainty about another. The point was whether you were willing to embrace the package, because there wasn’t any other way of measuring whether you belonged. The package itself was an otherworldly focus, and a willingness to freely dismiss what the rest of humanity thought important. Your choices in clothing, the range of actions and speech you employed, all were aimed at dismissing this world, of using everything in this world to point to another world which mattered.

The biggest problem Paul had was keeping people focused on the Spirit Realm. The difficulty manifested variously in different places. In Corinth, for example, it was simply how utterly foreign the gospel was to the hedonism of the place. It was very much like dying for a lot of Corinthians to become followers of Christ. With folks in Asia Minor, it was the ancient civilizations and their pretense to human greatness. This area was all too ripe for the Judaizers, followed by the Gnostics who taught pretty much the same nonsense later. This pretense of deep scholarship was simply another brand of worldliness to be overcome by self-death. Rome, at least, was officially multi-cultural, and you could embrace something like the ANE Christian habits and be okay. What got you in trouble with Rome was a rejection of religious politics, or state religion. You weren’t allowed to exclude the state religion, which rejection was an obvious necessity of following Christ.

Everybody knew a pinch of aromatic dust tossed at a candle in front a stone carving didn’t damn your soul, but it was a lie to the state, and a lie before God. That simple act, along with the words, “Lord Caesar,” was a promise to obey on a level everyone knew you could not. And there’s nothing wrong with scholarship, so long as you didn’t let it displace revealed truth, but used it to serve that truth. But even the Corinthians knew they were naughty, so there as no excuse for immoral habits.

Today we are suffering from all three of those issues, plus more. We definitely have a state religion you aren’t permitted to ignore, and a pretense of deep scholarship and science, and a massive hedonist orientation. Our hedonism is so “normal” to us we would shock the Corinthians. But our single greatest sin is our 2000 year history of assuming whatever cannot be made rational is primitive nonsense, barbaric and dangerous. This bluntly rejects the fundamental assumptions of Scripture itself. Until people realize faith is inherently irrational, and so it must be, and that God Himself says so, we won’t have a viable Christian faith which prepares us for what’s coming.

Tribulation is just getting started. Serious persecution will come as the last dying gasp of a collapsing civilization. It’s not just a few political systems coming down, to be replaced with some new ones. A change in government is just the first wave of something far deeper, far more fundamental, and which will be far more destructive when it goes. Just about the time the New World Order takes control is when it will die.

I can’t pretend I know what’s on the other side, nor how long it will take us to cross. That’s the sort of things historians can claim to figure out centuries later, and typically get wrong. In other words, it won’t really matter. We have our hands full just getting through this. So long as the Internet exists, the speed of change will be pretty fast, because the single greatest factor in change is communication between people, and the greater the distance you can communicate immediately, the faster the pace of change. So if some portion of instant global communication continues to exist for another decade, some of us today will see the birth of whatever comes next. You’ll get to see the new civilization, as it grows up in the ruins of the West, whatever that may be.

Meanwhile, I figure it’s a monumental accomplishment to keep the gospel alive for the next few years. Indeed, just rescuing the ancient truth from under multiple layers of putrid nonsense is pretty big. By no means do I claim to have done that, at least not by myself. I came very late to the game, late in my own life. The clues and cues were there all along, and my only part is reading the work of real scholars and accepting their story because it was so compelling. I can’t walk away from it. While I’ve not seen many folks address the sort of stuff I’ve written, that may simply indicate how few there are, and how thoroughly the mainstream have hidden them. Lord knows, they managed to kick me out pretty quickly once I got started on this path. I doubt I’m alone, just relatively isolated for now.

But having seen what those mainstream churches refuse to see, particularly regarding what’s in store for them, I’m actually not glad to stand back and watch while their whole system comes apart. What keeps them alive is almost gone, down to the last shreds now. I doubt many of those inside the system are prepared to do without it. For them, the system is the gospel. The transition will be exceedingly painful, and plenty will lose their faith. Some will scramble for a new anchor point, and I hope I can point out the one they should have had all along. Perhaps I’m just a madman, completely deluded, but I am utterly certain what I’ve built up here is everything they are missing.

The way I see it, if I’m wrong, God will allow me to be crushed, buried and I’ll be forgotten. I’m fine with that. If any part of what I’m doing is right, I won’t have to keep it alive; it’ll run off down the future dragging me behind.

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Economic Faith

Posted on June 4, 2011 by ehurst

Suffering from paranoia doesn’t make you inherently wrong about threats; it simply immobilizes your good actions.

Basic distrust is just good sense. The best and most effective systems are those which limit trust by default. The myth of complete openness and full intimacy on the human plane is a dangerous cancer. It infects all sorts of things, and results in massive breakage and human misery. Even in religion it’s a huge mistake. Being open is not something we can require by holy demands. Thinking we can and should force openness is a fundamental heresy which afflicts Western Civilization, a major element in why Western Christianity is such a complete failure. The failure shows up in a lot of other places, too. Systems which seek to grab whole sectors of humanity and force them to open up, force them to participate involuntarily in a single system, are an abomination to God.

A Christian Mystic doesn’t trust himself, nor any other human, in the sense he lets his heart rest on what is said, promised, intended or even done. Only what you find in Spirit Realm itself is real, and everything else is junk, lies, and bondage. It requires specialized perception to operate in, and cooperate with, the Spirit Realm.

Perhaps you understand this to some degree if you also understand how the Internet works. The parallels are very amusing, with the virtual world taking on a significant match with the Spirit Realm. Both are intangible, accessible only with certain equipment, and require a minimal level of esoteric knowledge to make much use of them. Churches have tried to develop a system requiring you use their connections, just as ISPs monopolize your uplink to the Net, but there are ways around such things. The one difference is the Spirit Realm comes to you and gives you a permanent computer and your own connection, and no one on this level can take any part of it away from you.

So it is with a lot of other things on this earth where persons communicate. Economics itself is a form of communion between persons who exchange things which require a certain parity of value. But the value is entirely a matter of internal reckoning between the persons involved. I can decide to sell you my laptop for something far less than market value if, in that situation, the value of what you give me is greater in my mind than that of the laptop. The larger market value of things is merely a point of reference, one that fluctuates and depends entirely on the general agreement of those who participate.

Not so long ago, I traded something for this laptop I use. I used the Internet to search the common price of both items: How cheaply could I get either item from vendors willing to show a price online? The prices were close enough, and I surely wanted the laptop more than the other item. The other fellow wanted the item more than the laptop. No money changed hands; it was a direct barter. Not very efficient in the wider community over the long run, but it worked that day. It still works for me, as I am using that laptop several months later.

Lots of folks who do understand economics don’t understand the Internet. Corporations and governments, who do have a certain type of economic wisdom, do understand the money they can obtain and the efficiency of labor by taking advantage of certain features of the Internet, but they don’t really understand the thing itself. To really get a handle on it requires a certain geek/hacker frame of mind. It requires understanding on some level how computers and software get things done. Then it requires knowing how they communicate with each other, and immediately we encounter a host of protocols which serve to accept or deny such communication, and it quickly gets complicated. Some folks do have a fair amount of understanding across both economics and the Internet. They try to explain one to the those who know the other. Lots of serious business and economics students don’t get the Internet. They stumble over such concepts as bitcoin.

You should see the comments to the article linked there. Some not only don’t get it, but are rather militant in their rejection. Their loss. Making a profit in the collapsing global market is not impossible, but it does require a nimble mind, a willingness and ability to grasp things quickly so as to take advantage of a fluid situation. They have a certain faith in the human connections for economics, but don’t grasp the human connections of software and the Net. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunities of bitcoin, they’ll miss out on a growing market sector. No one should compel them to use it; that would be missing the point entirely, not to mention being immoral. It would be immoral in the cosmic sense as well as the Internet sense. The Internet is entirely voluntary (see World of Ends). They don’t get the Net; those cranky comments reflect a distrust of the unknown.

While I have little reason to trade in bitcoin, I have no trouble with the concept. It’s a matter of trust on the same level as economic trust which makes “money” as a concept work. Two people exchange things of value. If neither of them have goods matching exactly the needs of the other, we have to come up with something we both can accept as a mediation, something which transmits a value stored in a bearable form. Precious metals have worked well for that — gold, silver, etc. It’s funny how these guys are so sharp about currencies and floating values, and they understand all too well the idiocy of fiat currency under control of capricious governments, but they don’t trust a small amount of value exchanged via a means which is actually more trustworthy. Of course, it can only be exchanged electronically, but how is that different from using any banking account? The vast majority of all US currency is merely ones and zeros on some banker’s computers. How is that any less secure than a physical object someone else can take by force?

Bitcoin will live and die by the same means as any fiat currency. Any day now the US dollar will become just about worthless among nations of men. It will be painful for a lot of folks. It already is, because the dollar is sliding in value even as I type this. But to make things worse, lots of folks are getting access to a lot fewer of those dollars in the first place. There is a hideous inequity in the economic system which empowers a certain narrow group taking too great a share of dollars while offering nothing in return. It’s not about communism versus capitalism, but the cosmic morality of rigging the system to oppress those who are less powerful. It is these folks who tell the lie about all boats rising after they run around punching holes in everyone else’s boats. It’s not enough they get rich, but it has to be at the expense of others. That’s “doing God’s work” they say. So far as my experience shows, the Internet is immensely more fair and honest than any human political system.

That’s particularly true in the Open Source sector. Yes, my laptop would work better with Windows 7, but I prefer Scientific Linux. Among the hundreds of Linux distributions, it’s the one which offers the shortest path to drivers matching the hardware, while offering a stable work environment which is not subject to the whims of geek fashion. Geeks are notoriously hostile to the needs of others. As long as you understand that, and accept it as the common ground — all Open Source software is nothing more than developers making stuff to suit themselves — you are in a position to navigate your way to some level of freedom. By the time GNOME 3 is well established and aging, I’ll still be using a well supported GNOME 2. The former actively hinders my work flow, while the latter is moderately useful to me. I don’t trust the developers for GNOME, but the self-interest of those who package it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and those who repackage them for Scientific Linux, are probably the closest to how I think and operate. I know whom I can trust and for how much, and for the rest, I have taken the time to learn my way around the system so I can build what I like. It’s not a great system, but it’s a darn sight more fair and open and trustworthy than using Windows 7, where my choices recede to near zero.

Why would I want to pirate something so expensive when it’s useless to me? Pirating includes extra risk of getting something with a rootkit, backdoors, getting caught, and still having to run all that protective software which requires constant updates. And I can never get for Windows the same level of expertise I get for Linux and BSD, because you have to pay big bucks for that sort of information for Windows. It’s all closely guarded secret stuff; Open Source is open. In exchange, I get something which doesn’t work quite as well, and never will, but at least I can trust it as much as any OS can be trusted. (Mac? Put it in my price range, let me choose the hardware, and protect me from the fanbois; then we’ll talk. It’s not bad using it like BSD.)

It’s all just an extension of my religion. At some fundamental level, I have to be free to take my own risks, and I have to be free to demand the same choices for you. Want my pitiful small amount of money? Offer what I need and want at a price I can meet. Want to run your software on my computer? Make a reasonable effort to meet my needs, and don’t tell me what I have to like. You want to fellowship spiritually with me? Come find me in the Spirit Realm.

The system which works best is the one which presumes a lack of trust. That’s the foundation of bitcoin, of Open Source software, of barter and real money economics — they all presume you and I should not trust each other because we cannot. They presume we should not pretend and build a fake trust. It’s also the foundation of my religion — a system of human behavior which aims to satisfy higher demands. Each of the individual participants gets to decide how wide the door should be opened, if at all. It’s 100% voluntary, and remains so throughout the exchange.

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Your Next False Flag

Posted on June 3, 2011 by ehurst

Expect our lying US government to pull out all the stops for the next false flag attack.

A few years ago I removed myself from the traditional church scene, which had, up to that time, been my primary career choice. Part of what drove me out was the false accusation of a good friend. He was on staff of a church being hijacked, and was an impediment to the process. To get rid of him, they concocted a scheme involving really nasty emails he was supposed to have sent. Except, he didn’t even know how to use email. He barely knew how to read it on the computer the church provided. When I saw the supposed evidence they used to fire him, I knew I could have produced that in a matter of seconds, and done a better job. They didn’t even have the right IP addresses in the header. But it was a railroad job to impress a bunch of church members who didn’t know any better.

They should have known better. Not because of technology understanding, but because they knew the man. Some did, and when he left, and went on to pastor another church, quite a few followed him by moving their membership and their money. But the lack of computer expertise among the church members was a contributing problem, and I was aware of it from having organized a couple of computer repair clinics at that church before that hijack got rolling.

By no means am I a serious technician; I’m just somewhere above the average user. I’ve spent some time reading up on such things, and hung out with real technicians when it was possible. I still chat with a few online when I can, trying to learn a little more. Most of the time I end up cleaning up after someone who thought they knew what they were doing. My one real area of expertise is not messing with something I don’t know about, because I know what I don’t know. I’ve actually avoided a few subjects because I knew I didn’t have the time and equipment to fool with it. This is what puts me way out ahead of most of the computer users in the world.

All of this makes me a useful computer service guy for private computer owners, but in a bureaucratic setting, this would never happen. As we all know, government technicians are permitted to do only a certain narrow range of activities, and any real talent for diagnosis will simply get you in trouble. What they want is someone who’s been through the proper schools, memorized the proper procedures, and can follow them without having a clue. Having had extensive experience with government training standards, I know all too well this lowest-common-denominator approach. It’s why our government computer systems are wide open to cracking, should anyone bother. The current cyber defenses are entirely reliant on contracted firewalls, AV and anti-malware from the lowest bidder.

Of course, most of it is not worth bothering. The really important stuff is protected by a somewhat better group of technicians, some of whom actually know a thing or two, and get paid accordingly. These are the ones in the best position to engineer a false flag attack, which is simply part of their job. It will surely come. However, I tend to think it will be part of a bigger deception, involving some serious loss of human life. Still, a ginned up cyber attack from the same people alleged to cause the destruction and death in meatspace would make for great theater. “Look out for them thar turrrrrists!”

If you read some of the better analyses from the fallout of the Anonymous attack on HBGary, you may know there is a lore of Windows vulnerabilities known to a select few technicians who keep track of such things for nefarious purposes. It permits them entry points for spying either for corporate or government clients. It’s rather like their own corporate knowledge assets, but you’ll notice it never occurs to anyone how simply nasty it is. If one smart guy can know about them, surely another does. Meanwhile, every Windows system remains vulnerable because it makes more money for the sake of just a few owned by whomever these guys plan to target. You have to wonder if Microsoft themselves aren’t involved in this game for the sake of profit. Does anyone else see a moral issue here?

It’s not as if these people trading in unannounced vulnerabilities don’t also have some tricks for Mac and Unix/Linux, but those are smaller targets. (Yes, I know Mac is actually Unix, but the GUI is far more vulnerable than, and deeply intertwined with, the underlying Unix core, which makes it a different beast.) They tend to be designed in part from a security model, whereas the majority OS is decidedly insecure by intention. But when the government or some big corporation needs real security, it’s always some type of Unix or Linux, usually without any GUI at all — pure command line stuff. If they need a conveniently timed attack, there’s always a way to make it vulnerable intentionally, or to simply lie about it, since the vast majority of folks don’t know anything about it.

So when this nasty business comes, look for all the mainstream sources to lie about it, simply because the few who actually understand are compromised. They know they are paid to lie, and they’ll do it without hesitation, which is why they have that job. A few honest technicians will poke holes in the story, but who reads geek blogs? Other geeks. I’ll be keeping track as best I know, and I’ll do what I can to share it here broken down as much as I reasonably can, but it may take until some time afterward for the facts to leak out, or be discerned from outside by someone to whom the whole thing is obvious.

Of course, this assumes we are all still able to use this Internet thing with some modicum of freedom as we do now. That’s the whole point, of course: to shut down this free sharing of knowledge about government lying. Look for it to happen, though.

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The God of Solitude

Posted on June 2, 2011 by ehurst

How do you contemplate madness?

In my closet hang a half-dozen t-shirts with variations on the message calling America to repent. I wear them from time to time. I even have a sign with the message, readable from quite a distance, which I’ve carried in the past, and may one day carry again.

By no means would I expect many to take the message seriously. Those who think they like it don’t know it’s aimed at them, too. In this modern day, you can only get so much across before their eyes drift off to the next item clamoring for their attention. Most people are either dismissive or openly hostile to any message of the sort. It’s a frustrating job.

It’s my job.

What I really want is for folks to read and hear all the stuff I’ve been writing here and elsewhere, and hearing all the things I say almost daily. I don’t want them pursuing a false Christ of war, some phony Savior nailed to a red-white-and-blue cross, attacking the bogey man of the day chosen by the state. I call for them to leave their flag-draped altars to the demon gods of war, and come out into the open, because He won’t go inside such places. I want them to get to know Him personally, meet Him face to face.

Failing that, I’d be really joyful beyond words if they would just pay attention to God’s Laws. No, not even by those words — let them simply embrace the idea other humans matter. Let them see that other folks out there in the world are humans, and stop killing them with words and thoughts before they send the bombs. If we could just stop mucking around in other people’s countries, we would be so just and great, God would keep us rich and happy beyond our wildest dreams until Time came to an end. No one could touch us.

But no, we simply have to treat everyone as children, in desperate need of our hypocritical tutelage. We make sure they get to vote for the same false choices we put before our own voters, after we slaughter thousands of children and women. We don’t simply have blood on our hands; we are wading in it up to our necks from all the death we hand out around the world. And if that’s not enough, we hurry to shed the blood of our own friends and neighbors, our own children. We send our children to mindlessly kill others.

God hasn’t told me much about when, but He has made it so clear to me even my mind can figure it out: His wrath is upon us. It’s just getting started. We lust for blood — blood we shall have.

I don’t know too many who see much of what I see. It’s pretty lonely. Yes, I stand beside the God of all creation, but He’s pretty lonely, too.

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