Other-Worldly Terrorist

Posted on May 4, 2011 by ehurst

I am the greatest threat to every government in the world, simply because I am totally disinterested in them.

This is the one thing in which I most sure of my understanding, and find the most difficult to write. Most of what I read every day is aimed in some way or another at getting folks riled up about all the evil men do when they get into power. If you really believe there is some hope of fixing the system, you don’t want to talk to me. I don’t support the system, by any means. I also don’t support the myth it can be fixed by human minds and hands, because it’s that very involvement of humanity which guarantees it will remain broken.

With the utmost confidence, I am certain I can write a prescription which will guarantee change, at least. One of my favorite myths, one which amuses me most, is “Rule of Law.” It’s a peculiarly Anglo Saxon notion, foreign to anyone whose cultural background is from any other part of the world. But it’s more honored in the breaking than in the implementation. We talk about it in revered tones, and then promptly make all manner of excuses why we can’t live it, why there must be a long list of exceptions. The only real debate is whose list of exceptions will be followed. But I feel certain I can tell you how we could come close to it, and have it work as well as it might, for as long as it might.

First, make absolutely certain there is no money in it. For example, to rein in Congress, simply destroy the profitability of being elected. Not by changing the laws; nobody will obey them anyway. Destroy the sources of profit in being a legislator. Start by executing a bunch of large corporate CEOs and senior management staffs. When there’s no profit in conglomeration, no profit in concentrating wealth and power, there’s no reason to tweak the laws. Of course, on the way to that, you’ll have to nuke — literally drop a nuclear device on — the offices of the NSA, CIA and the Pentagon. Make sure it’s a good work day. Those have become the single greatest concentrations of unaccountable power in the US. For example, not only does the CIA not serve the interests of the citizens of the US, but they hardly serve the US government, either. They constitute an independent government of themselves, with a separate foreign and domestic policy, a large degree of independent funding, and there is simply no leverage whatsoever to make them account for their actions, because they can lie and no one will ever know. It’s only be sheer human incompetence have independent observers ever caught them in the act, but you won’t read about it in any mainstream reporting. There’s too much money in covering it all up.

Of course, all that killing will of necessity scoop up a lot of folks who are innocent tools and fools. But of course, if we let them live, they will never accept the truth, because their whole world is within the system. They would be like the generation of Israel who had to die in the Wilderness, because physical freedom could not make them any less slaves than they were under Egyptian taskmasters. You see, you’d have to kill a whole bunch of Americans who honestly and earnestly believe in the mixed mass of lies about the utter necessity of material prosperity and comfort. If not kill them physically, you’d have to kill their illusions, which is much harder.

Okay, so maybe we could just secede by getting all the smart liberty-minded folks in one place. But then you’d have to push out the ones there now who don’t think like you. How about that Free State Project? Honestly, you can’t imagine how racist this will look when you start actually putting it into practice. That’s just one minor problem on the way to the dream of honest human government. Indeed, it’s the minimum for one which is merely tolerable. No matter how good it starts, you end up having to fight the whole world to keep what you gain. Every plan ever tried in history began with some pure vision, something frankly plausible, but always impossible because people are still people.

Or you could get a clue and realize none of it matters. When the angels sang to the shepherds about “peace on earth” they were addressing the social outcasts of a nation which had been given the single best opportunity God could grant any nation in the whole of human history before or since. The one batch of guys fit for God’s message that night were the ones least likely to be heard when they shared it. The song of angels played before a tiny audience, because it simply doesn’t get any better. You have to be a fringe element to even understand God’s notion of peace among humans. That’s because peace is not offered, not possible, for those fully involved in much of anything which requires heavy human interaction. It’s for individuals who happen to share the most tenuous bonds in the flesh, and care a great deal about something else.

The choice of the shepherds, of course, was symbolic. The greatest image of manhood, of the greatest king in human history, was a shepherd. It requires the instincts honed from years of protecting one of the stupidest creatures in all the world, and realizing that is much more doable than leading people. What I promote here on this blog is just about as solitary as sheep herding.

How am I a threat? Sure, I could get my hands on a firearm, but I don’t personally own any. I traded my last pistol for this laptop. Yes, I know tactics and martial arts, for what it’s worth. Try as I might to stay somewhat physically fit, my body is too badly broken — permanently — and too old for me to be a fighter of any account. I can’t imagine wanting to hurt another person in the first place. I can’t imagine wanting to be involved in something which contributes to hurting other people. I realize there is a lot of human misery which can’t be avoided, and that my continued living comes at the cost of someone somewhere not getting a square deal. I feel utterly powerless in that sense, and I can’t wait for God to tell me it’s time to come Home.

That’s the real threat. I care enough about people to sacrifice anything in this life, anything on this plane of existence, for the few good actions I understand. I have no interest in human greatness, and am actively hostile to all human government which isn’t at least harmless — which means all human government in existence today. Since I know my own government best, it is to that one I am most hostile. But it’s not a hostility they can track, quantify and prepare to defeat.

While I use the normal human channels of communication, my ultimate source for everything I know is really built into my soul. I am utterly certain it won’t matter what influences have worked in your life up to this point; if you received from God the same living spirit I have, it’s entirely likely you’ll agree with me, sooner or later, on most things we discuss. When I say God has revealed to me America is doomed for her sins, I know beyond all doubt your agreement or disagreement is not a matter of my ability to convince you by talented communications. It depends entirely upon God Himself living in you, same as me. If I share with you a prophetic message God won’t allow the US to successfully make war on Iran, it’s not up to me to make the case logically, nor even based on pure emotion. It rests on God to convince you. If that doesn’t work, I’d hate for you to pay any attention to me at all.

So on the same basis, I make no effort to organize any resistance movement. I don’t organize anything at all. If you agree with my message, there is no need to organize. You’ll automatically do what’s right, or wrong, or whatever it is you do, and God will make it all work out His way regardless. My measure of success, my sense of having done what I set out to do, is entirely a matter of something inside me. Sure, I like to see rising numbers of hits on this blog, but who’s to say anyone is actually reading this stuff? Yes, if you post a comment, I’ll have something more substantial to go on, but all I can know is what you tell me, never mind whether it represents your true feelings. What really matters is the results I can’t measure or quantify.

What matters is the peace I sense, which I see somehow connected to the unspeakable peace of those shepherds on that night long ago and far away, hearing music few hear and live. And yet, I believe I’m hearing that same song. Do you hear it? Then you are as much a terror to human government as I am. It’s not likely they are paying attention to either one of us right now, but that time will come. It always does. At some point, our commitment to something beyond this world becomes the greatest threat to those who see nothing beyond this world, simply because they can’t threaten us.

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Your Facebook Spyware Is from the Government

Posted on May 3, 2011 by ehurst

Forgotten in all the hubbub about OBL is something the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported a few days ago.

When fixing computers for people, most of what I do is remove spyware, followed numerically by a handful of viruses. The biggest single source of spyware is game downloads followed by social media. Facebook is a primary source of trouble, with several spyware infestations already famously coming from there.

But some of that Facebook spyware could have been planted by the US government. That makes it actual spy-ware.

I seriously doubt my work has interfered with any ongoing investigations. In the past, the anti-malware and anti-virus companies have tended toward not playing well with governments on this issue, but given what I know about my clients, I doubt any of them are much of a threat to anyone, except perhaps themselves. However, given the whole thing turns on the willingness of their investigative targets to do silly things like wasting time on Facebook, I’m confident they have no trouble re-infecting target machines someone accidentally sanitized. I’ve not convinced a single client to get rid of their Facebook account.

There are a couple of interesting things we can take from this, aside from the very plain thrust of the EFF article — that the FBI and others were willing to plant this spyware without proper accountability.

With this and the revelations from the HB Gary fiasco, it shows us there are still numerous security flaws in Windows and off-the-shelf commonly used software. There is a big industry in unreported vulnerabilities, and keeping them unpatched is critical to both government and crime (which is which?). We can’t be sure Microsoft isn’t playing along with this industry by pretending they don’t know about some of the vulnerabilities, and we have no reason to believe them when they deny they granted the NSA a backdoor in Windows 2000, at least, if not every version of Windows before or since then. Do you trust them? I don’t.

But even what is advertised as the most secure popular OS — OpenBSD — is alleged to have had for some time now a back door sponsored by the government. We may never get to the bottom of that one. And should we trust the NSA to be honest about their work in helping secure Linux via SELinux? Can we believe them when they say there is nothing hidden in anything the US government, or others government spook outfits, have not touched, even in the land of Open Source?

When it comes down to it, I don’t trust anything I didn’t create with my own hands, and I don’t trust my own hands that much. It doesn’t matter if you have nothing to hide. At the very least, the first time I raised my right hand and took the oath of enlistment in 1979, whatever privacy I may have once had was long gone. I am fully compromised, lacking only the next new invasion of privacy in the form of mandatory chipping of my body for easy tracking. I keep wondering when the VA medical system will announce they can no longer treat anyone without such a chip, so get it now.

I don’t pretend by running Linux on my laptop I have frustrated any snooping, except by the relatively minor threat from questionable marketing trackers. Even on Windows we can defeat most of that. As far as I am concerned, my privacy was compromised long ago. Whatever it is I hope to do in the future had better not depend on privacy and secrecy of that sort. We find Orwell’s nightmare visions credible because we know people will do some of the awfullest things to each other for the stupidest of reasons. The only limits on government immorality is a lack of creativity. Psychopaths are forced to rely on the pool of talent which gravitates to the suffocating inhumanity of government service. Government is riddled with incredible incompetence, but the real problem is simply how large it is, and how wide the net is cast for relatively silly things it tries to control.

What I was hoping to put before you today, dear reader, is the silliness of the whole thing. The government’s Keystone Cops level of incompetence works because too many people are silly enough to put their lives on Facebook. The two sides of this equation deserve each other. Never mind my mad chatter about Christian Mysticism and being a prophet of God; any secular intelligence can see this is silly on a purely human level. Are we reduced to the point the government efforts at law enforcement are going after the kind of people who suffer such a common grade of vanity? Think about that for a moment. Why do we still call this “civilization”?

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The Prophet’s Trilemma

Posted on May 2, 2011 by ehurst

The call it the Lord, Liar or Lunatic Trilemma.

It was made popular by Josh McDowell, but I understand it first came from C.S. Lewis. In summary, Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, among other things. You cannot simply say He was a good teacher. Either he was lying about being the Son of God, or He was a madman who really believed it, or He was the Son of God as He claimed.

Yes, one could pick it apart logically, but the impact is still sharp. The point here is, the same thing can be applied to anyone who claims to be a prophet of God.

I have made such a claim. Further, I put myself in a bind by claiming to have a predictive message from God: If America sends troops and/or vehicles against Iran, we will fail and fail miserably in battle. I can’t pretend to speak for other nations involved, or if they act alone. I know only my firm conviction what will happen to the US. I say without hesitation this is a word from God.

If we do go to war against Iran, and after a reasonable time frame, what I say does not happen, then I am wrong and it’s not a Word from God. The Bible says some pretty harsh things about people who claim to speak for God and it turns out false. For the time being, I rather doubt anyone will attempt to carry out the provisions of the Law of Moses, but it would be justified, in one sense.

You see, my pronouncement of this message as being from God arises from a certain set of beliefs. This is what I honestly believe, so the liar option is gone. If my message is wrong, so are all of my beliefs. But this is not something I can simply correct by changing my mind. These beliefs, so far as I can tell, arose from outside my intellectual control. These beliefs aren’t going away. That is, if I’m wrong, I’m going to question my grip on reality altogether.

It seems to me in my rational mind we are dangerously close to attacking Iran. I’m so deeply committed to honesty, I need to set this in stone, as it were, before we get there. If we attack Iran and subdue the government, and if after some reasonable interval, nothing happens to our troops and equipment, then I will find myself unable to continue writing. I won’t be able to trust my own mind, and I would hate for any of my readers to keep on trusting me, and be led astray by my madness.

It’s possible we won’t do it, in which case we’ll never know either way. The point is, I want to make clear I know what’s at stake. If this fails to come true, I’m pulling all my stuff from the Net. Not out of embarrassment, but out of a concern for everyone else, because if I can’t trust my own heart on this, you and I would be crazy to think anything else I say is worth the trouble.

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Manipulation Detector Working? (Updated)

Posted on May 2, 2011 by ehurst

It doesn’t require a weird conspiracy theory to see the lies and manipulation.

How is your manipulation detector working? Can you measure the high level of garbage coming out the mainstream media today? The current ruling regime of the US is setting us up for a fresh sucker punch. Here’s the obvious steps:

1. You and I know Osama bin Laden was dead a decade ago. The man had been in fragile health for some years, and the CIA spent quite a bit of money on his medical care, even sending agents to visit him in the hospital. It doesn’t matter what bin Laden knew; the CIA was using him.

2. Since that time, we have had piles of videos with fake bin Ladens. It didn’t take any serious expertise to see it was not him. So it should come as no surprise if you view photos of the guy they shot yesterday, it’s also not him (I saw the photo, but it fell victim to government censorship just a short time later). The facial features and hair color alone are different enough to give it away.

(Edit: The photo in question was a fake of a different sort. It was not censored, but removed because the original post I saw used an old hoax photo dredged up yet again, trying to fool us one more time. So now what we have is a body not seen by any third party, dumped into the ocean, taken from a compound burned to the ground. Net result is no change to my original thesis. BTW, how long does a DNA test take? Hint: Labs say their fastest turn-around is not possible in less than 48 hours.)

3. So every time they waved the dead guy at us, it was about the same time there was some outcry over a fresh attack on rights and liberties.

4. Today we see the news about expecting al Qaeda and other CIA black ops promising new forms of terrorist retribution for the death of some guy they know is not bin Laden. These threats will justify, at the very least, making sure no one pays any attention to the popular backlash against the likes of TSA. More likely, this heralds some fresh assault on our perceived rights and liberties.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking all this runs along any single thread of planning. This coup is bigger and smarter than that. There are an awful lot of brilliant folks involved in both major parties working every angle of this thing. They’ll estimate the popular response and take that as a cue what they can get away with. The public announcement of bin Laden’s death has been in the can for some years, and it was pulled out of a much wider collection of propaganda stunts all lined up and ready.

Even then, it’s all a distraction within a distraction. They already know some of us have this figured out in advance, and they have something for us, too. As long as there are folks selling information, there will always be information to be sold. The Controlled Opposition has many faces, too — there’s something for everyone.

That is, except for Christian Mystics like myself and a few others. Having opted out a long time ago, most of what we see now is just so much entertainment, and mighty poor entertainment, at that. The real story is Western Civilization is crumbling, hollow and rotten to the core. It’s just another case of “Babylon is fallen, is fallen…” Everything has a price and that’s all that matters, according to Babylon. Don’t be bought; don’t make your heart for sale. Opt out and let it all pass you by, while you give yourself to the really important stuff of showing the truth in how you live.

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Self-Evident Failure

Posted on May 1, 2011 by ehurst

All compelling logic is contextual.

They wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” The only thing self-evident is the failure of the system which they set forth. All men are not equal on this earth; it was pure propaganda when they wrote that. They weren’t about to offer full equality to every human in the land, but they rationalized it by dismissing the humanity of some in their minds, particularly those who didn’t embrace their notions of civilization.

Even today we can hardly believe how China is about to bury us economically. We can’t imagine how our capitalism, pure or corrupted, can be clobbered by what truly is Confucian Mercantilism. Nor can we understand how the Chinese government can remain so successful under non-democratic assumptions. We are so deeply wedded to our Western epistemology, we are incapable of understanding that our nifty little philosophical assumptions don’t always work out. We simply dismiss the results saying pure republican government ideals and pure Austrian Economics haven’t been given a fair shake. That’s not the point. Those ideals are simply not possible; they are founded on assumptions about humans which are utterly false.

It’s the same thing I see in the field of Open Source computer software. Why would any rational person fail to embrace something so obviously superior? Maybe you, the developers and fan-boys, fail to understand you are seeing it all from a limited context. Maybe the computer user doesn’t want what you offer because they have no intention of doing what you take for granted everyone must do with a computer. That’s not a matter of their ignorance, but yours, which I have tried to tell you often enough. Linux will progress in acceptance, but only within a narrow field of where the software provided coincides with user habits. Only by accident do Open Source developers stumble across something people like; you have no understanding of the average computer user, and appear openly hostile to the idea you don’t get it.

So those who embrace republican government and free economics don’t get it, either. Their ideas will prevail only where people buy into the Western epistemology. The Chinese, for example, are not infected with such an epistemology. Ours is a particularly arrogant view which dismisses all others without a fair and honest examination. We cannot imagine our system failing, and are openly hostile to the notion we need to look into it.

This makes it all so very easy to keep us in the dark. The Illuminati take advantage of this natural tendency, and work to promote the arrogance. The problem for them is their own arrogance based in the same fundamental assumptions. So first the West will collapse. Then, if God waits long enough, so will the Illuminati. They aren’t gods. Should anyone be around with an open mind long enough, they’ll see it, and perhaps write about it. I know I would.

Meanwhile, China will not go along with the Illuminati, and Russia appears to be trying to pull away, too. The Muslim nations already have the philosophical foundation for it, but haven’t yet figured out how to simply ignore Israel and get on with the business of rebuilding their lost civilization. Yes, Islam as a cultural milieu has weaknesses, too, but that need not be fatal as it is with Western Civilization. These alternative cultures are all seeing the Illuminati plans, and recognizing who is working to promote that vision. They realize the key to escape is building their own alternate banking system, which will enable their own political system.

Meanwhile, our system is failing. It will not recover.

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Pragmatism and Opting Out of Apocalypse

Posted on April 30, 2011 by ehurst

Just because you are opting out of the Apocalypse, it doesn’t mean there are no practical measures you can take to prepare.

Continuing the theme of the last two posts, I wanted to tie up the loose ends hanging between them. On the one hand, I admit there can be a lot of silliness about thinking we can reasonably estimate this or that means of preparation. Too many things the Preppers are doing assumes too much, if you ask me. There are quite a few sites trying to help people obtain things which can help see you through most disasters, but I don’t think too many of them offer useful advice which could have prepared you for the likes of the tornadoes which ripped through the Southeast, nor the floods in the Northeast of the US. What happens when something sweeps away all your stuff, all your specially selected weapons, freeze dried food packs and so forth? And what’s to keep some heavily armed government or private raiders from simply confiscating your cache?

The whole point in ruminating about computers and operating systems was the sarcasm, marking how silly people can be about such things. Yesterday’s post was more directly honest about bigger things than computers, guns and food stocks. If you think your salvation is in your Prepper Cache, I hope you have everything ready now, because time is about gone. Most of those Prepper sites are trying to make a buck off your fears. Yes, I reaffirm it will be very tough the world over, because the bankers who run the global economy are not our friends. They’ve been working on this for a couple of centuries, and we are all way behind the curve. Their moment, whatever it amounts to, is upon us. Sure, do what you think you can, but don’t halt your life.

That is, unless something in what I’m writing serves to wake up the other part of you. Otherwise, this is nothing more than asking you once again to reevaluate over this weekend, with fresh destruction and disasters in our minds, just what it was you should have been doing all along. When that awful day arrives for you, whatever it means, I’m hoping it finds you in the big middle of doing what you really know is the most important thing you could ever do. In terms of the New Testament, “Let us be found faithful.”

It means everything in this whole universe, this plane of existence, is just a tool, a means to things that really matter. If you can see it, touch it, and/or give it a name, it’s not really all that important. Honestly, if you have young children at home still, the most important thing you can do for them is not fearfully guard their bodies and their futures, as if there was really that much you could do. Rather, the one thing you can do to secure what future they may have is to demonstrate to them what really matters most is how we draw the hearts and minds of our fellow humans away from this awful plane of existence.

Let’s put it bluntly: This life as we know it does not matter. Yes, what you do matters, but only in the sense of what it says about things beyond this. If you have opted out of this broken and doomed world, then opting out of the Apocalypse is just one more expression of that.

Should the state under whose jurisdiction you reside decide to take your kids, only death can prevent that. So far as I know, not a single Western nation does not already operate under the assumption you, as the natural parent of those kids, are merely the “custodial parent.” You may well be able to flee, or even stand off some armed assault meant to enforce a confiscation, but the legalities don’t change. I still believe and teach it is proper, that it is within the justice of God Almighty as revealed by Christ, if you decided to use violent force to defend your parental rights — but I don’t think it will do much more than create a brief delay.

The same could be said of your own life, and all the things you own and can do. Until you truly grasp just how fleeting is everything most people think really matters in this world, you can’t get your head into the right place for thinking beyond either minor nor major changes in your world. Your Facebook page, nor my blogs, are anything more than a passing means to an end.

Yes, I have my computers ready for what I can guess is coming down the road at me. For the record, I am happy for now with the way Scientific Linux works on my laptop, and the way Ubuntu 10.04 works on my desktop, and how Windows 7 works on my wife’s computer. I have some hand tools because I figure power tools will be hard to operate sometime in the near future as electricity prices continue to rise. I’m not relying too awfully much on my cellphone because I figure I’ll be lucky to afford a landline.

I don’t expect my VA pension to be there that much longer. I still don’t know how I would replace what it buys for me, nor how we might survive if the local government can’t afford to pay my wife to work in the local high school cafeteria. And on and on… There is only so much I can do before it’s just running against the wind. What really matters is I know what I have to be ready to do in general terms, because I know I am committed to something much, much bigger than my pitiful existence. If my choices, the really big, long-term commitments, mean dying tomorrow in some senseless gesture as most people judge things, I am not about to change course simply to avoid that.

I’ve already opted out. How about you?

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Apocalypse Soon; Opt Out Now

Posted on April 29, 2011 by ehurst

We can’t prevent the coming troubles, but we can prevent ourselves from panicking.

Yesterday’s post was partially in jest. Frankly, my mind from day to day might drift on the subject of which operating system I would prefer and why. It’s entirely contextual, and the factors are more numerous than even I would like to admit. My personal perspective is in flux, and I am only guessing why I even bother with computers in the first place, and what seems important today may change before the lunch time. The reason I chose that as the ostensible topic was to show how it really doesn’t matter that much. What matters is we really are in trouble, and it won’t be fun.

That is, it won’t be fun unless we are prepared for it. A part of me realizes this will be one of the most entertaining moments in human history, but only for those capable of stepping outside the moment. We know we won’t be able to disassociate ourselves totally from the empty stomach and cold bodies resulting from exposure to the elements, if it comes to that. And it very well could. But knowing we face that as some probability for our future days need not cause panic. We know a vast majority of those we encounter daily will panic, indeed, and it will surely flavor our existence, and we need to understand some of what causes all this misery and sudden disruption. If it is possible to grasp some of the markers which indicate the flavor of our future suffering, we are responsible for trying to grasp them.

This assumes you share somewhat my underlying vision; why else would you bother reading this stuff? I get a lot of hits on this blog which point to people seeking practical answers to computer annoyances. But I’ve said repeatedly my self-image is not wrapped up in a high blogging profile, but in making life better for others in this awful world. Something about this expression of caring for your suffering, of trying to clarify things which puzzle, is meant to point to something far more difficult to say in human language, but far more important than all the piddly stuff I’m trying to clarify. I can’t give you Truth, but I honestly believe that Truth demands I write certain things which might serve to indicate something about the Truth. If you manage to get closer to that Truth, my job is done, my purpose is served.

All I have to go on is the paltry few comments and the statistical feedback WordPress offers here. But without that, I still have this burning desire to express myself. Welcome to my private bubble of insanity. I’m going to babble along with or without your eyes. Today’s babble is aiming to clarify, to point out some connections you might not have noticed.

The primary means of our current malaise is economic in nature. That’s because the bad guys who are mashing us into the dirt are primarily interested in their own economic advantage. They want control of their environment, and the current understanding of that control means mostly economic control. Whether they are wise enough to understand the symbiosis of economics — that we have to receive our share or they won’t have anything — is not the problem. It’s more the problem of how much they believe our share ought to be. Right now, it appears they estimate we should have far less than we have been enjoying in recent history. So they are working to take from us a significant portion of what we have had.

A major element in transferring all that wealth was deceiving us. Would we just voluntarily go along with it? No, they had to make us believe we still had our growing wealth, even as they were slipping more and more of it into their own stash. Propaganda is an ancient game, going back to the Fall itself. My fingers tickle the keys on a laptop which came into my possession fundamentally because we all believed sufficiently in the Information Age and the economic value of handling digital data. With the power of such belief, we were ready to allow our government to give tax breaks to major corporations for moving all the real jobs they could pry loose from our hands to other countries where folks would do those jobs for a lesser share of the income stream generated by what they produced. So nowadays we shuffle lots of electrons, but don’t produce more than a tiny slender minority of what we actually consume in material goods. And we all somehow believed we were richer. Meanwhile, the stuff we actually have in our hands, which our own laws secretly insist we don’t really own, is mostly junk, but we still have this lingering impression we are wealthy compared to other nations.

In fact, the laws of our nation actually consider each of as human beings the property of someone else. There are people near you today who have the full legal authority to dispose of your very flesh as they see fit, and are wholly unaccountable to you on the matter. The only limits are those which prevent them acting accordingly at any given moment — whether they can find you, can touch your person, or exert some means of compelling you to present yourself to their choices for you. A major element in all this is whether you feel constrained to accept all the underlying assumptions by going along with the system.

A great deal of this depends on your understanding of the system. That you go along with it at any given moment is not the point, but how you understand it. And if you aren’t American and aren’t presently under American jurisdiction only means you have your own complications, and they probably aren’t all the different at some fundamental level. The whole mess is so tightly strung together across legal jurisdictions, and just about everybody will probably be suffering to some degree in the near future.

At some point, conditions will permit The Powers That Be (TPTB) to stop pretending. Along the way, they’ll pretend less and less. Personally, I think things will be dramatically and painfully different before my next birthday — 18 September. I pray I’m wrong. On the other hand, I am utterly certain it is coming, and it is God’s own plan in action, and nobody on this earth really knows what it will be like. Part of my estimation is a matter of economic numbers I’m not quite sure I really grasp. What I do grasp is things like the Dow Jones Industrial Index is running off false liquidity. That fancy jargon means a bunch of debt is being used as money by people who won’t have to pay when the debt comes due. But they get to use it as their own because that’s how the system works. That debt is a numerical representation of our future freedom to choose, which is being sold cheaply — AKA slavery.

I’ll do my best to avoid popular jargon because it might cause someone to miss the real point here. This whole thing assumes you and I, and most other humans on the planet, will accept certain assumptions about the necessity of participating in the system. Had Eve not swallowed the unspoken assumptions of Satan’s lies, we’d still be in the Garden. Whatever you want to make of the Flaming Sword at the entrance to the Garden, the way back means we stop swallowing those lies. At some point, some level of your personal awareness, you need to see the disconnect between what-seems-to-be and what-really-is for yourself. You may well go on participating simply because that’s the best answer to certain fundamental questions of your existence, but by no means should you simply keep believing it’s the whole story.

Almost everyone has the capacity to see through the lies; almost no one will bother. The first lie they buy is the necessity of this human plane of existence, as if there is nothing else. I can’t fix that for them, nor for you. I can only assert it’s not so. Based on that firm conviction, I find myself much more comfortable questioning a lot of assumptions common to the human condition.

A great many governments today are serving a much higher ruling regime. I call them the Illuminati because most folks have a useful idea that means a governing class of people we seldom see in public positions. These Illuminati may not show their faces any more than in the past, but their policies will become more directly enforced, including to the point of more forcefully keeping their servants in government positions in line. An awful lot of people who really think they are in charge are in for a rude awakening. Too bad you can’t ask Saddam Hussein what that feels like, but his associate Moamar Gaddafi is too busy for interviews right now.

Because of the vagaries of human decision making, and the vast numbers involved, and a raft of other factors hard to list without writing a book, we should expect this whole shift to continue being as sloppy as it is right now. Regime change in the Middle East is not a precise operation, and the Illuminati didn’t expect any better. If we get wrapped up in all the details, or in silly things like Obama’s birth certificate, we’ll let slip the really important details of where this is all headed. I don’t harbor any particular animosity towards Prince William and his new bride, but that’s just a side show. While I applaud personally his choice to wear the red tunic of his highest military rank, and the announced reason for this choice, I doubt his more critical choices as Heir Apparent will make that much difference in the long run. He’s a pawn, too, and the game is too big and complicated for me to care much when and how he’ll be played.

The game itself is about control exercised via our cooperation. If you believe in any part of the system as it now exists, you are a prisoner, a slave. Whatever bad stuff is coming will hurt you more than is necessary, more than is actually inherent in the event itself. I’ve written plenty about what it means to opt out of the system, but the point here is you would have to choose to remain shackled each step of the way. Question the whole thing and you’ll be half-way there; you’ll be in a better position to bear whatever misery is coming.

Your choices are limited enough by the mere fact of living on a fallen plane of existence. Don’t make it any worse by accepting the lies which lead you to believe there is no other plane. We are facing some seriously painful days very soon, but you need not surrender to the pain. Apocalypse is your opportunity to learn the boundaries of this plane, and to explore freedom beyond those boundaries.

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Personal Computing in the Apocalypse

Posted on April 28, 2011 by ehurst

As if having a computer would matter when all Hell is breaking loose…

So I claim to be a prophet of God, but that does not guarantee I can answer your questions about tomorrow. God only tells me what He wants to me to say, and most of that has to do with notifying folks of things they should already know about His requirements. You want a predictive prophecy? Here goes: If we go to war in the lands of Ancient Persia (currently “Iran”), the Lord Himself will scatter the dead bodies of our troops across the landscape. So numerous and dense will they be, the Iranians will beg us to send folks to gather, or at least bury in place, their remains. Now, keep in mind: Hebrew Scripture was more about impressions than clinical descriptions. The intent was to make you aware of God’s wishes regarding a particular choice, so I counsel you to understand the point here is we got no business sending US troops to war in Iran. Naturally, that goes for just about all the other places we got troops, but I think God would say Iran is the last straw, so to speak.

So it’s not a matter of prophetic insight when I suggest we are heading for something which will taste like the Apocalypse. If you didn’t already know our economy is headed for a major crash, you wouldn’t be the kind of person who would read my blog. So when it comes to timing and specifics, or even broad hyperbole, about the fall of the United States, all I can do is affirm we deserve it because the Bible says so. Okay, one minor qualification: It is a word from God when I tell you political resistance to the current drift of US government into naked tyranny is pointless. That is, we are getting the government we deserve, and it is frankly a coup d’état from what we once had. The take-over is God’s wrath at work on our national sins. You should resist in the sense of doing what’s right regardless of what any government demands, but preparing to fight via political resistance of any sort — whether armed revolt, pacifist marches, or monkey-wrenching and sabotage — is not favored by God. So we are headed for tough times, and the saints of God will tribulate.

Given I spend so much time with computers, mine and other folks’ computers, what am I going to do? God hasn’t told me anything specific about that. I should think that indicates it’s really not important in His plans for me. But I do have some general expectations and plans which are derived from the things I know God does require of me.

Linux for me is a failure when it comes to the graphical interface. Over the past few years, the drivers have gotten steadily worse for the particular set of things I do with a computer. Given I read so very much about Linux in particular, and computer technology in general, and the vast number of different operating systems I have tested on a very wide array of hardware, I find I am in a position to decide it’s utterly pointless. Whatever it is the developers are planning, it’s not going to help me at all. I realized long ago there was nothing I could to make it better, and the developers could care less what I want. So for as long as I have use for a graphical interface, on my current hardware that means Windows.

It may come to the point graphical computing is pointless itself. For example, there may be some sort of doomsday virus, or some other general vulnerability which makes it entirely too risky to use Windows. Right now, I’m not aware of such an issue. But I would hardly be surprised if it reared its ugly head any day now.

When it happens, that will signal a radical change in my computing needs. From that moment, for as long as computers are still useful to me, I won’t be using Windows. But I won’t be using the Linux GUI, either. When things get that ugly, I’ll be needing the very most basic computer functions, and a GUI won’t matter. So I’ll most likely go back to something like Squeeze on the console. Yes, you can still watch your videos by using something like Mplayer compiled without the X dependencies. I have used it to watch Youtube videos, after downloading them with Cclive. Of course, should such a dramatic change come to the computing landscape, I have to wonder if there will be a Youtube when things get that crazy. I suspect the window of opportunity for using a computer for much of anything will be short, and the Internet as we know it will be long gone at that point.

So it’s not as if I hate Linux, just the X server and all that goes with it. Whatever good it may offer, it amounts to nothing for me, and it’s only getting worse. Nor do I love Windows, and certainly not Mac. I regard Apple as even more anti-consumer than Microsoft. There are literally hundreds of other fine projects out there, and I still think highly of Haiku-OS (formerly, BeOS) and Syllable. There’s always ReactOS, doing Windows right. But I doubt any of them will be really ready for general computer use before the Computer Apocalypse arrives. No, not a prophetic insight, just my current guess.

Come on; you needed something stupid to make you laugh today, right?

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On Human Insignificance

Posted on April 27, 2011 by ehurst

The only reason I bother having my say is because my sense of God’s calling requires it of me.

Indeed, I would not have bothered starting this blog if I didn’t believe God required it of me. My own amusement is not sufficient grounds for a brain spew in public. In the sense I put my thoughts in a digital format alone makes them public, never mind posting those digits in an unlocked blog. Among bloggers I regard myself a nobody. Don’t read this stuff because I wrote it; read it because it calls to you in some way. I will surely fail you, as I daily fail myself. But when God speaks in my soul, I cannot be silent, regardless of any actual ability to let that voice out in any coherent fashion.

People much more intelligent and talented than I, with a much larger and more ardent following, even to the point of making money with their writing, would naturally provoke nobodies like me. They sell books and are invited to participate in the on-going public forum of opinion where they get even more attention to their ideas, and perhaps their person. If they didn’t provoke others, it would be hard to sell those books. The manipulation of advertising works only so well. I am provoked, and something in me will not let it rest. Since those who have offered the provocation would never take me seriously (as best I can gauge from having tried to get their attention in the past), I won’t clutter their blog with my dissent. No, I’m not trying to insult him, but the man himself admits to arrogance. Whether it’s justified is at least one thread of what constitutes his Internet persona, but I freely admit there is no reason he and his Dread Ilk ought to pay attention to me.

Still, I am provoked, and what I take as the voice of my God is rattling my cage. That voice says God is not impressed with Vox’s logic on the matter. Not that I support Piper, either, but that’s because both he and Vox presume too much about understanding God. I can sum it up: God cannot be understood, nor explained, from the grounds of Aristotelian logic. As I assert virtually every day of my life, Aristotle rejected the most critical element in discussing God, that being a rejection of divine revelation — at least, revelation in the sense of what God’s Word offers. If you drag Aristotle to the Bible, you should not expect to get a reliable, or even useful, answer from him. Vox cannot deny giving Aristotelian epistemology supremacy in his analysis.

The question of God’s nature, and how evil is or isn’t under control in this world is wholly beyond the capabilities of Aristotle. We can make statements which appear propositional, but they cannot be handled as mere propositions. What we say of God and the current reality of our fallen world can only ever approximate what God Himself might say, and then only when we realize His statements are necessarily contextual. In one place, we can say God is always Master of all things, but in another place we must say evil rules the world. That the two are mutually exclusive is simply a reminder of our limits, and frankly has no bearing on the matter. God can know and control all things far in advance of our historical experience under the Arch of Time without necessarily suffering schizophrenia, since He remains beyond any analysis from our limited perspective. It’s not supposed to make sense to us if we limit ourselves to Aristotelian logic.

Yes, I disagree with Piper, too. That’s more a matter of his pretense of clinging to Aristotle, too. The whole debate between Calvinists broadly, and Westminster Accords specifically, versus the Arminians and other historically significant theological perspectives all boils down to the inherent failure of Aristotelian epistemology in the first place. Both camps are trying to satisfy the presumption of Classical Western respectability, which is inherently Aristotelian. Aristotle is, in that sense, the ultimate symbol of human arrogance and pride in believing the fallen human mind is capable of accurately assessing everything worth knowing, and assessing whether anything is worthy of knowing, or even constitutes knowing at all (which is the subject of that fancy word “epistemology”).

The Bible asserts both God’s mastery and the presence of evil in the world. The Bible asserts God’s perfect and complete foreknowledge, His perfect control in every detail in advance of its historical occurrence, and yet our culpability in making choices contrary to His stated desires, and a lot of other self-contradictory things. It doesn’t bother me that they are mutually exclusive because I don’t feel bound by Aristotelian logic. Thus, any discussion of “omniderigence” strikes me as missing the point before getting started.

The human intellect is fallen, too. The boundaries of our best sense of knowing will forever come up short of God’s truth. Our statements about God and other things supernatural (or whatever other term you choose in place of that) are always weak hands seeking to grapple with the universe. God’s truth cannot be reduced to words, much less human understanding. All we can ever really know is what God requires of each of us individually within a specific context, and at that we maintain a healthy self-doubt. Yes, you can easily become too wishy-washy, but even that is beyond our proper discernment. All I really need to know about myself in the context of other professing Christians is whether I am obliged to work with them on any particular project, and would by no means suggest anything I can say is a matter applicable to any other person.

Do you find my ramblings useful? Bless the Lord and pray for me. Do you have questions? Ask; I may be able offer a useful clarification. Did I leave you confused? Stop trying to understand God with your intellect; it can’t do it. All its good for is organizing your response to His Spirit, not deciding whether something is good, right or true. Such evaluation takes place in the spirit, which itself depends entirely on the hand of God Himself to awaken. The intellect is a separate faculty from the spirit. What I have to share cannot be taught to the mind, only caught by the spirit. I can’t even explain how it works. This whole business of communication between humans is dicey at best with universally fallen human intellect, but when we try to discuss God, we cannot make the mistake of taking ourselves too seriously.

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Profundity in Short Supply

Posted on April 26, 2011 by ehurst

I’m out of gas.

The spring allergy season has struck and stuck. Being ill makes me depressed, and depression makes me ill. So my ADD flares up and I can’t keep focused on much of anything that matters. At least I know what to do when I’m bored and depressed. Those two are close friends and confidants from way back. They were joined not so long ago by Arthur (last name is Itis).

Okay, sick humor. If I took myself seriously, you wouldn’t. As it is, the best you can get from me today is a late post about why I have nothing to post.

Are you still reading this? God bless you.

I haven’t lost sight of what really matters to me. Somewhere over the horizon from me is yet one last adventure. I have no idea what it is, only that it is. Days like this help me to reduce the baggage, to challenge and shake loose a lot of things which aren’t likely to survive the adventure. More than anything, I fear this all signals something rather challenging and trying for a lot of folks.

I’m pretty comfortable with my own suffering, but I really hate watching others go through it. Everything I write is aimed at reducing suffering for my readers and the lives they touch in turn.

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