Trail: Axing for It

Posted on March 21, 2011 by ehurst

So I’m racing against the season as the deer ticks and chiggers proliferate. The first section nearest my home has a new trail, and it crosses the first cut and reconnects with what’s left of the old trail.

Today was lots of ax work. There were several trees pushed down by the bulldozer across the old trail. The first one was a monster oak which simply could not be moved. So I had to slice and dice the limbs, until I could expose the heavier trunk limbs and chop at them until the path was clear. The last cut was through a section about ten inches (25cm) in diameter. I had to change positions and angles several times to get through it. Marvelous work out.

The next pile was a bunch of small stuff, but the far end was bigger stuff. It’s at a point where the path suddenly cuts back into the area plowed by the bulldozer, so I’ll have to cut a new path for a bit to reconnect with what’s left farther down the slope. After that, there is as much shovel work as ax work in two spots. Then there is only one tree on the far side of the loop and we’re done.

Should take me another two weeks, provided my insect repellent holds out and it doesn’t get too hot. Above 80°F (27C) the insect repellent is just about useless after a half hour.

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Forget Theory; Simply Observe

Posted on March 19, 2011 by ehurst

The most important thing you can ever do is learn the very tight limits of theory in human behavior, and learn observation instead.

It’s a tough call. You get an awful big boatload of material on human behavior claiming a basis in observation, but it’s always observation with a particular pair of lenses. Most theories are okay within the narrow confines of what they cover, but not a one can even approach universality in scope. The more you know about the people behind the theory, the less likely you are to be chasing nonsense. You need to understand their bias worked for them, and will probably have only limited application for you.

As a Christian Mystic, the whole point for me is to understand why the world is so crazy, so I know what kind of craziness to expect. I know my bias; it works for me. A valid bias is the one you discover, not one you construct. Just as our lives overlap, so our discovered realities will tend to do the same. There are no universals in the sense of what you and I might agree upon, and thus work together. That there are no universals is a strong slap in the face of ambition and arrogance, which is what we all need from time to time when we are driven to act. Only those driven to act will have any reason for persuading others, and our persuasion has to be wholly voluntary to be of any use. I am driven to act, driven to reach out and lift up others who suffer, driven to help guide them as far out of sorrow as they will come.

I’ve been relentless in pushing the necessity of escape from this plane of existence into another; that’s the whole point of mysticism. The farther you can withdraw from this plane, the easier it is to understand it. Withdrawal allows you some measure of objectivity not at all possible while wallowing in it. It is neither possible nor desirable to pretend I can fully withdraw. Being of two natures simultaneously, the sense of being torn between two realms is simply the way it is, and is the background against which all things are understood. We can always be aware of things within us over which we have no power, nor should we necessarily want that power. There are no shortcuts, and assuming we can simply remake ourselves and our world is utter folly. We don’t remake; we escape. We do so bit by bit, and never completely so long as any part of us lies anchored here. So let’s understand here.

A major element in this study is the very different way men and women handle things. Human biology is hard-wired. It touches every part of how people interact. Never mind what some grand theory says ought to be; we need to understand what is. Toward this end, I highly recommend Alpha Game. The first three posts you encounter (at the time I write this) will put you miles ahead of the vast sea of humanity.

You could easily turn this into a pursuit of prurient interests. It will work. Want to be an alpha male who can score? You can do that. But the same accurate portrayal of human nature also serves to understand what’s wrong with all of that. It’s not enough to condemn immoral actions if you want to help adult minds. You to understand why we want all those harmful things, things which kill us and those around us, trapping us more deeply in this broken and destroyed existence. You need to understand what are the deep and aching needs, and why they cannot be filled by what seems the obvious path. You also need to understand what constitutes valid fulfillment, both in kind and degree. You need to know how to answer the questions: How good can it be? What must I fight; what will keep me from that?

For each of us, we are our own worst enemy. Know your enemy.

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The Principle of Divine Trust

Posted on March 17, 2011 by ehurst

The shape of our world is not what God had in mind. We were made to be managers of Creation, with full authority over all things in this universe. We gave it away; we traded it for something which did not come in the package. The break was irreparable in one sense. Creation is no longer under our authority. On this plane of existence, we are fallen, we are broken and the entire universe around is affected by that. Whereas we once had an instinctive union with Creation, now it is opaque and hostile to us, and rightly so. We long to escape, but until our individually appointed departures arrive, we are bound under a situation which cannot ever be optimal.

However, it can be optimized. God has not left us in the dark, but has offered a covenant which permits us to make our way in this fallen world. It applies to all humanity as humans in this world. If we embrace it as it is offered, not blindly through the lens of our Western materialism, but through the somewhat mystical approach of the culture in which it was revealed, then we can expect to have a decent life, an optimal existence here in the Shadow Lands.

A critical element in that covenant is recognizing there are limits to what we can do. This is not something we can simply implement once like a wind-up toy and let it go. The nature of covenant is a living and developing relationship between persons. It is utterly personal in nature; it cannot be objectified. There is no shred of stasis, but a moving target, as in a living thing. The objective is not simply to stay alive, but to bring you closer to the light, to improve upon your current moral understanding and fellowship with the Creator. It requires a certain dependence, a dependence which is necessary, justified, and exclusive.

Attempts to break that dependence will hinder, sicken and deaden that living covenant. It will lead to a plethora of deadening in our understanding and in our conduct, building hostility between us and Creation. Only in our hubris can we imagine regaining control over Creation, because that pathway is closed on this side of death. Since the very beginning, fallen men have sought ways to escape this prison, ways of reclaiming our lost mastery. The desire itself is proof we are unworthy, that we are in violation of the moral order revealed in the covenant.

Nothing hinders us from examining our world, of making the most of our knowledge of concrete reality. However, if our approach assumes there is nothing else we need to know beyond the knowledge our human talents can extract without revelation from God, then all the answers are inherently false. It won’t matter how successful we seem to be in manipulating our material reality; without that moral grasp, it will always be wrong, coming up short. If we compound things by rejecting the notion we can’t get it by ourselves, we are begging for destruction in ways we dare not imagine.

There is no fine point of balance, no boundaries or markers. There is no thin line of departure, because God’s moral laws don’t work that way. There are degrees of departure from the moral commitment to do it His way, and some things are more horrific than others, with matching results. Our hubris in Western Civilization is rejecting the revelatory input from the start. We assume a man-centered approach, that mankind is the measure of all reality. If man cannot fathom it by mere human talent and intellect, then it does not matter, not worth examining. The path to turning away from this unspeakable hubris is a long, long way back, so searching for safe limits is simply not a valid question.

This is the context in which I condemn the likes of genetic research and GMO. We cannot grasp what we are messing with here. The attempt to make nature into a manipulable factory for our convenience is inherently hostile to God’s revealed covenant. Examine the actual results of where this has been going all along. The motive of such research has ever been a matter of profit for the producer, not the welfare of the consumer. Time and time again, when we discover some harm from GMOs, the corporations have fought tooth and nail, even to the point of committing murder, to avoid anyone even hearing about it. Those of us who adhere to the ancient natural ways of nutrition and health know instinctively there is a right and wrong approach, that there are limits we dare not attempt to transgress. Even if it comes from a paganized reverence for nature as a god, it is still closer to the ultimate truth revealed by God versus the utter rejection of Western Aristotelian epistemology.

Our flagrant violation of the necessity of dependence on factors we cannot ever hope to understand does violence to Creation. It reignites the fires of condemnation when God drove us out of the Garden. When we presume to remove too far the constraints of obligatory dependence for the basic necessities of life, we beg God to destroy us. That He has been patient this long shows His gentle nature. That we presume this patience crossing many generations means He doesn’t care is poking Him in the eye, daring Him to act. He lets us go with great sorrow, knowing He must eventually allow us to harvest the wrath for which we have been begging.

It’s here now.

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Remarkable: Open Source Project That Cares

Posted on March 16, 2011 by ehurst

Let’s consider the Trinity Desktop Environment.

Okay, I admit it’s people who actually care. That’s the point: Open Source people usually don’t care about people, though they claim otherwise. As noted here ad nauseum, most Open Source developers don’t understand people. They may have it all worked out in the details of human usability and all the latest information on optimizing for human factors of all sorts, but they don’t understand people.

So when you run across an Open Source project that shows an interest in what people want, a sort of compassion which makes the computer serve the person, not the other way around, it becomes remarkable — worthy of remark — and downright admirable. We have Timothy Pearson, who has been for some months now trying to keep alive KDE 3. He calls it The Trinity Desktop Environment.

The fan base for KDE 3 is huge. I know from the experience I have had in helping ordinary users migrate to Linux, the KDE 3 desktop as a whole has been the single best path for migration in the history of Linux so far. No, this does not say anything about technological superiority; it says a wealth of things about meeting people where they are. I assert this is the moral high ground in software development. It matters not where you want to take them, and whether it’s for their own good, if you refuse to meet them where they are. Something in the total combination of factors in what makes KDE 3 what it is/was constitutes meeting people where they are. I don’t pretend to understand all the details, only the consistent effectiveness.

This, as opposed to the standard frothing hobby purist, who is quite willing to be forced to adapt to something devised by developers who have no clue about humanity. That describes the vast majority of Open Source developers and their loudest fan base. These are the folks who get all the press in all things Linux, particularly. I read recently a review of KDE 4.6.1, where the hobby blogger discusses finally getting used to thing he first found annoying, as if it was his duty to follow the developers’ dictates. The whole thing stunk of this divine obligation to embrace the sacred orthodoxy of developer righteousness as handed down by the Open Source hierarchy. I don’t tolerate that in religion and I won’t tolerate it in technology. For a community supposedly so free and free-wheeling, I assure you a stolid commercial bureaucracy is no more oppressive and disgusting than the unaccountable godlings of software development, because both of them are openly hostile to user’s needs and wishes. At least the commercially driven operations know they can lose money unless they can sell their goods, so there is some measure of accountability, but the free software folks simply assume you’ll fall down at their feet in awe of their obvious genius.

I overstate things, of course. However, if you’ve encountered the open hostility of some developers to user comments, you realize it’s only a slight exaggeration. I’ve encountered it.

You’ll have your own set of wishes if you test Trinity Desktop. I understand the current goals, in broad terms are to fix stuff the KDE project never bothered to fix, and add only a few really critical improvements in the feature set. For myself, I would be willing to spill hours of time on the keyboard in support of the Trinity Desktop Project if things already in the KDE 3 feature set would simply work. If it happens to also integrate nicely with more modern backend advances, I’ll be ecstatic. I say all this without yet even testing it on my Debian Squeeze system. I’m going to try that out soon on my laptop (I found Scientific Linux 6 too cranky on my hardware, and reverted to Squeeze). I’m going to support Trinity as a writer simply on the grounds of the idea.

Timothy Pearson, all I really ask is that you just make it work for Debian Squeeze.

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Taking a New Path

Posted on March 15, 2011 by ehurst

Sometimes there is nothing you can do, so you put your hands to whatever is before you.

I recall a small bit of movie seen somewhere long ago, centered on a luxury automobile from the 1930s. In one scene some VIPs were smuggling a fellow over some national border in the trunk. When they had cleared the border, they pulled over to let him out. He was asleep. The occupants of the car were nervous wrecks and asked how he could sleep through such an ordeal. He responded there was nothing else he could do, so he might as well rest for the next leg of his journey.

There is nothing I can do to make myself safer and more prepared for possible nuclear fallout from Japan’s melting reactors. There is nothing I can do to aid either side in the many revolts in the Middle East. There is nothing I can do as the stock markets start to collapse, and food prices soar, and so forth. I’m too poor to take the lowest level of preparations for any of these things. So I’m doing what little is left for me.

The garden is ready, so I have started replacing my trail. Turns out the fire didn’t destroy as much as I had first thought. Three quarters of it still usable, so I have only to cut some 300 yards of new trail to replace what the bulldozer destroyed in putting out the fire. Today I marked some 50 yards of clear path on the new trail, blazed over the past two days.

I’ve learned a lot since starting this project three years ago. In those days it was all machete work, plus a bit of ax swinging. I no longer fight with the honeysuckle vines; I simply run a lawn mower over them when the path is clear of heavier underbrush. Because of the blistering cold temperatures (for Oklahoma) just a few weeks ago, a lot of smaller vegetation can be simply ripped from the ground, up to saplings about 1.5 inches (3.8cm). Anything larger is simply chopped below ground level. Using what the locals call limb loppers can take extra time, but do a much nicer job of breaking down densely spread limbs from all sizes of trees. It makes it easier to toss them aside without creating great unsightly piles of debris next to the trail. In the main, I’m moving much faster than when I first started the project.

It won’t matter if something makes it all futile again. I had no sooner finished the whole thing and used it only a week before the fires started. It matters not. There really isn’t much else I can do right now.

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While You Were Distracted by Japan’s Quakes

Posted on March 14, 2011 by ehurst

Things are cooking on the Internet, regarding the Internet itself.

On the blogging front, we have a significant miscarriage of justice in Minnesota.

On Friday, a Minnesota jury found that a blogger must pay $60,000 in damages because of statements he published in his blog about a public figure who was subsequently fired from his job. Internet publishers and free speech advocates should pay close attention to this case if it is appealed because the blogger was found liable even though the jury did not find that the blogger’s statements were false.

We read the lawyers will appeal, and stand a good chance of winning based on higher court precedents. However, that such a decision could be reached at all seems to call for censuring the judge who promoted this result by deceiving the jury. I doubt that will happen, but if the defense has any sense at all, they will slam the other side for legal costs and the so-called victim of the non-defamation will end up with massive legal bills. Again, I’m skeptical. These days such poetic justice is becoming increasingly rare.

The elite are becoming increasingly bloodthirsty. So some of the little people are hitting back the only way they know how. I prefer the peaceful approach, and for now the Internet allows a lot of interesting options. For example, Anonymous has posted a cache of emails and interviews from a whistle-blower from Bank of America which tends to indicate more ways in which the mortgage fraud was conducted. In this case, it was collusion behind the scenes to get your loan insurance revoked so they could, without notice, stick you with a much more expensive insurance policy by force.

The whole cache is rather extensive, and it’s not all posted yet. There isn’t much interest from the MSM in analyzing the data yet. Given the pallid response from the majority of the victims of this whole mess, even when the nasty business is digested for us ordinary readers by whomever does analyze it, I rather doubt the news will be sufficient to stir the justified retribution. The folks doing these evil deeds are the evil oligarchs who actually run the governments of the world, the masters of the afore-mentioned coup no one seems to notice.

It will be interesting to see how Anonymous intends to attack the Fed and the financial oligarchs. Unless they have something really interesting up their collective sleeve, this one might be pretty hard to accomplish. I rather suspect simply DDoSing the servers won’t do much, and only get more of the Anonymous crew arrested. Cracking the servers at the Fed could be effective, but I tend to think that’s a tall order. I am under the impression much of their networks are Unix based, and highly competent people are taking care of the security arrangements. But we shall see.

Finally, I don’t pretend to know much about the risks from the reactors in Japan dumping radioactive particles on our heads here in the US. Those who paint scenarios of disaster aren’t likely to know that much about it, either. I am quite certain the real experts will lie about it. That’s their job. Even if something really nasty does happen to drift our way on the jet streams, I am certain they’ll lie about it.

What we are not deceived about, but of which many are simply ignorant, is how utterly precarious is the future of a huge chunk of Japan’s population right now. A reliable estimate says they import half of all they eat, and the piddling 15% of their arable land happens to be mostly in the disaster areas. Their entire food delivery system has been on the knife edge of just-in-time delivery, and that system is completely broken in the tsunami zones. As I understand, they do not have any significant stocks of emergency food, nor sufficient means for distribution. Nor are they doing very good at getting those folks out of there. So we have starvation and disease almost sure to aggravate whatever else is already a problem there.

We live in interesting times.

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Trail: Now with Wildfire

Posted on March 11, 2011 by ehurst

It’s the end of the trail.

Several wildfires struck in central and eastern Oklahoma today. I know for certain some of them were arson, having overheard some police band radio traffic. It seems they all started almost at once across the entire state. Aside from the loss of homes, including our mayor’s palatial digs, along with businesses, schools and a few other structures, so far the only loss of life was livestock and pets.

My personal loss is petty by comparison. The fire is still burning here as we approach midnight local time, and the wooded area in which I have labored these past three years to cut my fitness trail is partly aflame. One of the fires was about a half-mile north, and the winds blew it all farther north. However, the woods are simply loaded with tons of dry fuel. As I predicted, once a blaze started, this thing would drift against the wind simply because there was too much too easily consumed.

Right now, almost the entire western edge of the forest is alight. I did help guide some small pumper trucks back into the fire line, but there was not enough space to fan out along the fire front. The woods were simply too thick. So they left it until they could get a bulldozer or some other means to assist the fight. Right now, just the first section of my trail running north along the western edge of the forest is almost all gone. The fire front is about 150 yards north of the nearest mobile home. Oh, and in order to guide the firetrucks, I had them drive on my trail, obliterating a good stretch of it.

I’ve been staying up to monitor things in case it began to drift south, as well. If that happens, I’ll need to alert them. They can do a good job of stopping it from coming into the park itself, since the bigger trucks can navigate our streets just fine, and we have fire hydrants. It’ll probably be a long night. I’ll post more here if there is any news.

Farewell, sweet trail. See you in a few months.

Update: It’s now 2:30 AM local time. The primary threat is past for us.

The fire crews had persuaded someone to run a firebreak with a bulldozer, over in another section near here. Then he decided to quit because it was nearly dark. They had to find someone else. So for quite some time, they kept checking on the drifting fire line as it crept slowly toward the park. Each time, I was there to meet them, and guided them about as needed. It appeared my trail was just enough to slow the fire significantly. Whole stretches of the fire line went out. Finally, about an hour ago I could hear the laboring of a very large diesel motor, and the occasional squeak of tracks. I was standing on the one little portion of my trail still accessible. After awhile it got close enough to see the headlights through the dead foliage. He was gouging out a path, pushing the burning vegetation over and covering it with dirt. In the process, he was creating a substantial firebreak.

But as one of the converted military 2½ ton trucks came roaring out of the open field next to our park, he ran over the cover for a water line, one of the 4″ trunk feeds. It began gushing immediately. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

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Unacceptable Facts

Posted on March 11, 2011 by ehurst

Telling the truth in Washington DC is cause for firing top officials.

James Clapper has let slip the reality of things too often, and is taking flak for it. In a world where the entire political dialogue is nothing less than a string of sound bites whose only meaning is their intent to hide the truth, someone speaking to the substance of things sounds like a clueless fool. As long as you aren’t interested in being cool on the level of Charley Sheen, you can safely ignore the hoopla.

For example, Clapper said Muslim Brotherhood was mostly secular. He was castigated by both the left and the right, which should indicate immediately they either misunderstood, or they are screaming to cover up some important truth. As he explained later:

“In my attempt to shorthand my description of the Muslim Brotherhood my message was lost, and that’s regrettable,” said Clapper. “The Muslim Brotherhood is obviously not secular. What I had hoped to convey, and would like to clearly state here, is that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt tries to work through a political system that has been largely secular in its orientation.”

“In Egypt, it has gained much of its support through both grassroots outreach and non-religious functions like providing health clinics and day care centers,” he said. “It also has different factions, including a conservative wing whose interpretation of Islam runs counter to broad electoral participation and a younger, more liberal wing who is more inclined to work through the secular political process.”

Aside from the fact Islam is more a social milieu than an actual religion, he spoke the truth in terms of what we need to do about it. If we are going to act at all, we have to act on the facts, not doctrine. If there is any religion ignored here, it is the very doctrinaire religious assertion Islam is inherently evil, the subtext of just about everything the MSM and other propagandists have to say on the matter. Again, it’s all empty sound bites, aimed at preventing folks from actually thinking and studying these things.

So more recently Clapper said the biggest threat to us strategically is Russia and China. Again, folks were aghast he wouldn’t point out North Korea or Iran.

Let’s get real. North Korea would put up a fight if attacked, but the only reason that matters is because China would surely be there for them again, just as they were during the Korean War. NK is not the problem, just the location. Iran? This is getting old. Iran is abiding by the the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty; neither Israel and the US can make that claim. Lest we forget, the US is obliged by the treaty to assist any nation making peaceful use of nuclear energy, and no one can produce evidence Iran is doing anything else. Russia is big enough to hurt us, too. That’s the whole point. Clapper was answering the right question, but those who asked were asking the wrong question. It was entirely a dog and pony show, and he refused to play along.

Let’s just pretend for a moment. Somebody is going to attack us soon, right? What are the real world probabilities? Terror attack: Fat chance. The only terrorist threat here is our own government. Every so-called terrorist act in the US so far has later been found tied back to black ops from our own government agencies, though perhaps with outside help. But if someone did come after us, it wouldn’t be NK, because they want only to rule the whole Korean Peninsula, not the US. Iran could care less what we do to ourselves, so long as we quit meddling in their affairs. The real issue our government refuses to discuss is Iran is not totally under control of the Rothschilds Empire, nor is she kneeling at the feet of Israel.

Russia wouldn’t bother nuking us. If we could imagine somehow she did it anyway, we would reply in kind. Nobody wins. Of course, should Russia decide to clobber us, the only reason would be to break us economically so she could force us to remove all those missiles and other nasty weapons we have on her borders. Russia doesn’t want what we have; she’s too proud of her own self-image. As long as we are on the decline, Russia can afford to wait.

China is the real threat simply because we are utterly beholden to her for our economic stability. We are in hock to more than a trillion dollars there, and something like one-half of our consumer goods come from there. The real threat we have for her is defaulting and leaving her holding worthless debt instruments. But whether it be by economic warfare of real military combat, what would China do if she attacked and won? Suck us dry and enslave us. Oh, wait, someone is already doing that, using our own government. Too late.

Clapper is wrong about one thing: The biggest threat to the US is her own government.

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Morals of Finance and Debt

Posted on March 10, 2011 by ehurst

People do not borrow money for business. They seek investors who become part owners. Shared ownership requires a close familial or covenantal relationship first. Without that connection, that assumption of shared loss and gain on a fundamental level, there is no basis for money changing hands.

The investment in business assumes certain things. The entrepreneur may being taking in raw materials and processing them into desirable products of higher value. He needs the money for up-front equipment, labor and materials costs. The entrepreneur may engage in transportation of materials and goods from the place of high availability to a place of high demand. He needs to pay up-fronts costs in equipment and labor. Or perhaps something similar, such as working to distribute goods by means of purchase and storage, which relieves the producer of having to worry about marketing. He also relieves the buyer of having to chase down producers. There are variations, but these are valid primary business activities.

There is only one other motive for lending and borrowing: keeping people alive. This again assumes a familial or covenantal relationship. The scriptural use of the term “neighbor” assumes they are distant relatives or someone otherwise closely bound to you in a common welfare commitment. While the benefit may be indirect, keeping your neighbor alive is a good in its own right. Therefore, the basis for lending your unfortunate neighbor the necessities for staying alive in tough times is the assumption they may not pay it back in a timely manner, or at all. If you don’t sense a need to seek their welfare, you are an evil person.

In either case, there is no interest charged. The business investor is part owner; they share in the profits. If there is no profits, or if there is a loss, they share that, too. Either way, there is no debt, no interest charge. The investor can be bought out, but at whatever value their share of ownership would be.

We see the specific case where a wealthy nobleman invests money with his vassals, all of whom are likely distant relatives at least. They may also be bond servants living and working in his household. Strong familial bond there in the ANE feudalism. His investment is total ownership, and the entrepreneur simply gains a fat living from the handling of the business. It is wholly understood from both parties the entrepreneur will scrape off a fair percentage of the flow as the motivation for working hard. In the end, the noble investor gains a business, which he can then sell to some other investor, or continue to operate, typically with the same vassal as manager.

There is no other basis for loans, debts and investments. There is no option for removing the personal bond between the members of this exchange. Either you are keeping alive someone whose life matters to you, or you become a part owner with someone you know intimately. Any other basis if evil. De-personalizing things is a complete violation of God’s Laws.

Furthermore, there is this matter of Jubilee. Every fifty years all debts are simply wiped off the books. The books are thrown away and it all starts from scratch. All property held in security is returned, at least to the household, if not to the individual. That’s because all debts are between households, not simply individuals. But wiping the slate clean every fifty years prevents empowering the inevitable injustice of accumulating enough wealth to affect the lives of those not bound to you by blood or covenant. That sort of power is inherently evil; it cannot come to good. Mankind as a whole is incapable of acting morally when possessing such power. We are fallen, and the record of human history shows the exceptions are so rare as to be both remarkable and insignificant — they don’t change the basic assumption.

This is the fundamental moral law, written into the very cosmos in which we exist. Our modern banking system is an abomination. Thus says the Lord.

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Not Likely to Notice the Coup

Posted on March 9, 2011 by ehurst

Most people are unlikely to notice when the current coup d’etat is complete.

We’ve been experiencing here in the West an incremental coup. It began at different times in different places. Here in the US, the single most significant event was the establishment of the Federal Reserve. It’s a little harder to explain for other parts of the world, and has not yet fully started in some places, but here in America it’s plain as day. But most people haven’t been paying attention, in the sense they don’t recognize it.

At some point the job will be finished.

Most of what follows between now and then will make it all seem as ordinary as it has been so far. In other words, in the minds of most, it will be just one more event in the midst of fear and dread. We really do not have that rebel spirit in the West, and especially not in the US. So America will end in a whimper. Indeed, the trappings of our current governmental processes may not change that much.

Sure, the US will probably be declared bankrupt, or in default, but it’s unlikely you and I will know when it actually happens. The point is, all our future as a nation has already been sold, and the owners will soon take full possession. But they don’t need to announce it, because that would mean a messy transition. So they’ll just incrementally pull in more and more centralized control using the current system as their screen. I’m sure there will be lots of theatrics along the way, but none of it will be the full reality. Even if whole regions of the US secede, the states themselves are already on the hook. We will be slaves nonetheless.

Currently Iceland has some more room to run, because they broke the primary linkage when they repudiated their national debts. I wonder how long that will last. The Irish may do it. The Greeks want to, but I think it’s too late, since all their social institutions are dependent on the mechanism of control. Their “rebellion” is run by unions, which cannot function without a government holding the economic controls, because the whole point is to demand more stuff from the government. It requires the control mechanism be even more pervasive.

That mechanism would be debt, of course. You can have economic growth without borrowing, but it will be slow. From ancient times it was known taking on debt was selling yourself into bondage. Nowadays, we can’t imagine life without it. Pity. We’ll never be free. One world government is almost on our heads, because the US hasn’t the kind of resolve to repudiate the debt, to shutter the Fed and break off using borrowing to get things done. It would mean such a dramatic shift in our fundamental assumptions about life, it would provoke horrific rioting and bloodshed.

So all those folks predicting some kind of revolt between now and some obvious announcement about replacing our government? I think they’ll be disappointed. They aren’t even looking in the right direction, much less watching the real action. There will be some ugly scenes, because agitation and unrest are cyclical, and we are in the upswing on that right now. But it won’t change anything but the window dressing. They won’t even stop pretending it’s fully representative government, with elections between carefully selected team members already under full control of the real government.

This is the way America will be destroyed.

Yes, I do believe this year will see some major events. Some of the biggest of them will be genuine acts of God, as natural disasters escalate beyond our imagination. But I honestly believe sometime this year, the prices will spiral out of control, and the official government debt load will cross some invisible threshold, and the deal will be done. We will become a client state of something much bigger. But everything has been put into place in such depth, and across the board in our daily lives, we’ll never know what hit us. Many will never know after it hits us, because they just don’t have any feeling left.

It doesn’t even have to be absolute. They can afford to have some places pretending to opt out, pretending to repudiate their share of this incalculable debt, but only a precious few parts of this world are capable of self sufficiency. A large enough number of people, all in one area, can’t be unified enough any more to make it stick. Too many can’t do without certain things.

You’ll recognize it when the austerity really sets its teeth in your world. Not just you personally, but everyone around you, everyone you know. The state of dependence for daily existence will be all encompassing. When standing on your own means starting from scratch and rebuilding your way of life, your whole culture and orientation on things, you’ll know that day has arrived. Not to mention it will probably be illegal. It’ll be like living in Gaza. It won’t matter what appearances are, what the propaganda says, or what everyone believes.

When you can no longer opt out of intrusive minute controls over every moment of your day, will you notice? When resistance means sure starvation, because there are pervasive controls over all sources of food and the other necessities of life, will you notice? When there is nothing, absolutely nothing you nor the whole population your entire jurisdiction can do to remove an abusive police officer (or any other functionary) from your local government payroll, short of killing him, will you notice?

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