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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Morals in a Sick Society

Posted on March 8, 2011 by ehurst

We need to understand morality in this world is always contextual, always complex.

In my theology, there will always be that sharp distinction between the Two Realms, the Spirit Realm and the Fallen Realm (AKA, the world). If you prefer the Science Fiction mode, there are two dimensions of existence. The warp tunnel between them was closed at the Fall, in the sense humans could no longer pass alive between the two dimensions. Now you have to die to leave this one. Never mind the temporal associations; the Cross reopened the way by shifting the boundaries of death, giving “death” a new meaning. You can embrace death before you actually face it. So people before the days of Jesus could find that path, because it had always been there, in a certain sense. However, the path was much more difficult to discern in the temporal stretch of time before the Cross.

That path was through the ancient Law Covenants. All of them are connected to the Covenant of Noah. If it suits you, call it all mythology or fiction or parable, so long as you understand that mythology still points to eternal truths which bind you nonetheless. The point is not so much what happened back then, as what it indicates about our reality.

Grace from Heaven is determined in Heaven. Nothing of human choice has any bearing on such things. However, the entire gamut of morality in this world, the whole matter of God’s Laws, is fully within human reach. In short, grace is predestined and inscrutable, but morality is entirely a matter of free will. Insofar as any mind can do anything at all about grace, it requires embracing the morality of the Laws of God for this fallen realm. Law is the path to grace, gives meaning and context to grace. We who have experience in evangelical churches can recognize the failure to distinguish between the two realms, with all this verbiage about making sure folks are “born-again” before they become members. It simply is not possible to know; no human can know, not even reasonably sure, another is spiritually alive. The only thing you can know is whether that other is tolerably close to compliance with the Laws as you understand them. A commitment to such morality is all you can surmise based on evidence you see, and is the only proper grounds for embracing fellowship and membership. There is no such thing as “a saved church,” because all human organizations are still human, and having an eternal purpose for organizing, and making it belong to Christ, cannot change the fact. It is a human organization which must fall entirely under the requirements of God’s Laws, because it remains a human activity.

And it remains utterly contextual. We can know the absolute truth of some things, know the whole social structure is broken beyond repair, know that God’s wrath rests upon it, but find moral approval for certain choices within that context. That I reject the whole of Western Civilization does not mean Western evangelical churches are entirely worthless. I remain outside such churches because they don’t tolerate me. That’s their choice, and they are required by God’s Laws to make it. They are required to state certain boundaries and adhere to them, or they must as a whole embrace a new structure in defiance of their culture, and inevitably in defiance of national laws. By no means should we mistake national laws for moral Laws of God. The latter is binding; the former is a matter of strategy, because no nation in history has long held to any Law Covenant. The prophetic word makes clear this situation will get worse as time drifts toward the final close. So we who understand these things are still stuck in a less than optimal situation.

That I may be totally committed to raising a consciousness of God’s optimal moral society does not mean I am committed to making it become a reality. My duty to God is not the accomplishment, but the struggle to reveal. I am accountable to my commitment, not the results. This is the fundamental nature of the His Laws, something we find foreign in our Western world. I have no trouble realizing my commitment may have me engaging in activities I otherwise despise. The context in which I live is not under my control; only my response to it is mine to direct. The fundamental morality is to uncover the jarring, earth shattering disconnect between “reality” here below versus what it ought to be. The moral code itself does not permit a full rebellion, so my actions must range between various levels of resistance within the context. By whatever small and incremental amount, my conduct must constitute a gentle tug back to God’s ideal.

So while I despise war as we do it here, the context of a warfare empire is where I live. I have no trouble finding good morals within this evil regime’s crushing Orwellian lies. I can find a place and mission within that disgusting context. What is evil and immoral is attempting to discern what is moral and good by using the fallen reasoning of mankind, when the standard was revealed long before. In case you don’t know it, despite all the modern schools of philosophy and their trendy departures from the Enlightenment, it all still stands on the fundamental epistemology of Aristotle. It all assumes human reason can grasp all that matters, and rejects revelation. The Laws of God came well before Aristotle, and we can be sure he knew of them, and rejected them outright. They are still binding. But I live in Aristotle’s legacy, and must choose actions and words which speak to that context.

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Garden Is Ready for Spring Planting

Posted on March 7, 2011 by ehurst

Last summer, after the rather disastrous growing season in our little garden, I took over from Dad. Instead of leaving our red clay soil as is, I broke it up using an all-steel shovel and very many hours of slicing and dicing the brick-like slabs into small crumbles. Even more hours went into schlepping mulch from the other end of the trailer park. Each time, I would spread a thick layer, let it rain, then turn it all under. I did this for three layers. Finally, I tilled it all two more times with the shovel.

Then I covered it all in pine needles and left it for the winter. It stayed above freezing just below the surface, and was damp throughout the recent drought. I know this because there is only one weed in this area which likes pine needles — we call it chickweed. Edible, but not very tasty and not especially nutritious. It grew immediately after the first snow thawed, and stayed green through unusually low temperatures and more snow.

That meant in order for me to make it ready for spring planting, I had to pull off the pine needles, pull those weeds, and turn it all under a couple more times. It looks more like potting soil than hard red clay. That’s done today, and the pine needles are back down just in time for our first spring rain tonight and tomorrow.

We plant later this week, starting with blue potatoes. We also have some strawberries, tomatoes, beets and a few other goodies. The choosing and planting really isn’t my department. I’m just the rototiller.

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ANE Culture and the Place of Violence

Posted on March 6, 2011 by ehurst

We should not assume we understand violence the way it was understood in Scripture simply because we know how to use the word in modern English.

The world today as we know it is not what God had in mind. I have no doubt He knew it was coming, but it was not what He desired for us. The world is broken; we are fallen. The ideals of Edenic Innocence no longer apply. Step by step, at pivotal points in human history, God revealed what was necessary to get the most out of this bad situation. Those portions of revelation apply to all human life, as what I refer to as Laws. Grace is another matter entirely. Though it overlaps, what we who have experienced grace and spiritual birth offer to the world is Laws as the path to entry into grace. If we don’t understand Laws, we cannot understand grace, and we cannot participate in God’s revelation.

A few people understand this. What most do not understand is the vast gulf between where we are today in our understanding of the world, and where folks were back when they were still rather close to Eden. God revealed Himself within a specific context, a cultural background which holds to a particular intellectual heritage now utterly foreign to us today — Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) Mysticism. Without embracing that context insofar as we are able, we cannot hope to understand Laws. My blather here warning people to divorce themselves from their Western roots is based on this very thing. Western intellectual roots are actively hostile to a proper grasp of God’s Laws.

So if I suggest a word study of the term “violence” in Scripture, and you approach it with Aristotelian categories of logic and epistemology, you won’t get it. You’ll find yourself trapped in one of several fractured threads of thought, all mutually exclusive, and all wrong. Violence in Scripture is understood in terms of context, not as a concept which stands alone. If you chased all the references in something like Strong’s Concordance, you might quickly realize the words commonly translated into English as “violence” are more accurately terms describing motives or the results, not the thing itself. In other words, they didn’t use the term(s) as we do. That’s because the biblical concept of violence is more about injustice.

That is, a vigorous action which brings physical harm to another is not intrinsically wrong of itself. We are smug in our modern Western world, considering it barbaric to spank children. We may put forward numerous studies showing how spanking leads to children becoming violent. You can gin up a study to prove just about anything you want when it comes to human behavioral science. The only reason kids grow up to become violent due to spanking is because their world was really screwed up in the first place, and their human development was never finished. Children who actually finish most of the tasks of human development are grateful they were forcibly restrained from the habit doing things which would harm themselves or others. In other words, as Scripture suggests, it is the failure of proper spanking which makes kids grow up to become violent.

You’ll most likely hear campaigns against spanking from people who don’t have kids. Most parents do it improperly if they do it at all. That’s because they adhere to another false notion about violence, that somehow society and the state have an unlimited grant to do violence, and call it “patriotism,” or even more asinine, “keeping the peace.” They place spanking into the same basket.

Both false views are threads of a whole tapestry of lies. If I say violence has its place in this world while calling myself a pacifist, you would call me an idiot. That’s because you don’t yet understand the proper ANE viewpoint on things. I use the term “pacifist” because folks understand what that means; I’m speaking the language of these times. If I then write several articles refining that position (as I’ve done here), that I am not a peace activist because organized political action as we know it today is always a failure, then they realize their standard definition of “pacifist” does not fit. But my actual position is closer to that than other terms I might use. It’s a way of opening the door to discussion about such things. It’s a way of unraveling the tapestry of lies.

I prefer to make peace. But peace can only come on certain terms in this fallen world. Those terms are inscrutable from the Western viewpoint. The first thing absolutely necessary is destroying the notion of the modern nation-state, the evil legacy of the so-called Peace of Westphalia. Such a construct is intrinsically evil, and the only peace involved is the silence which comes after killing everyone who wants something different from what the government has decided will be offered. It’s what we call an Orwellian abuse of the term “peace,” because the whole idea is the state has the monopoly on the use of force, and uses it generously.

The ANE culture would demand there be no state. Period. Government was required by God to be people, not impersonal structures. It must be people who are directly accountable to those they govern. Not simply held accountable out of fear of revolt, though that helps, but accountable out of fear of God. It demands accountability on that deep moral level of a good moral parent accountable for the well-being of a child. It requires severe cultural and personal character breakage to make parents willing to harm their own children. In other words, God says no one on this earth has any business directing your daily affairs unless they are bound to you by blood or covenant. The only enforcement God endorses is that of your own kin keeping you from making trouble for them or for any one else.

Who in this world is ready for such an idea? Not anybody tied to Western Civilization. Rejecting this idea is why we have so much filth in government. Step back; let it crash and burn.

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Why Western Civilization Has Failed

Posted on March 4, 2011 by ehurst

Western Civilization has sided with God’s enemies.

You might think this deserves a book, but most who read this will already understand. All I’m doing is giving some words and mental shape to what we all know. Some of you could surely write this better than I, but this thing sits on my chest like a loaded tractor-trailer rig. I have to get it off.

Let’s start small, where everyone can understand. It’s familiar territory to me, since I’m a disabled military veteran. Civilized suburbanites want nothing to do with most disabled veterans. That’s why our government gets away with ignoring them, too. Drop a bill in the hat and keep on walking, if that. I’m one of the lucky ones, can blend in when I feel like it, and no one knows unless I tell them. The scar on my leg is not highly visible. Arthritis in the other damaged joints doesn’t change the color or shape of your exposed flesh until later in the game.

It’s the scars on my soul that matter most. I can’t do much for some of my fellow disabled veterans. I’m better at tolerating their presence than most, but there’s only so much of that you can offer before you start hurting other people you care about. I know better than to think any agitation will change things. Money is hardly the answer, and we can’t even get that. What we really need is to stop creating these rusting hulks of humanity.

It’s not enough to say our ruling class is all psychopaths. It doesn’t put a proper perspective on what little you can and should do. It’s better by far to see it from another angle, the angle you can’t get without a touch of mysticism. I’m not sure precisely what it’s like in the other countries composing Western Civilization as we know it when it comes to military veterans, but I do know some of our evil is the same as theirs.

For example, we have The Franklin Scandal. Europe as The Dutroux Scandal. If reading stuff like that makes you hug your children just a little closer, you are normal. But chances are you really don’t understand the worst part of this. The vast majority of the child victims were not simply nabbed off the street by strangers. They were placed in this awful situation by their families. If it makes you feel guilty about letting your kids off the leash too much, you are wrong. That means the other side has won. It means you are listening to the voice of demons.

It’s part and parcel of the reason we can dare to allow our government to hire, train and protect from exposure those who torture for reasons other than sexual pleasure. Okay, so maybe there’s some of that, too, but it’s not the point. If you fearfully clutch at what you think you have, you will lose it. If you have to be that protective of your children, you will have already made them perfect for such abuse. If all you worry about is you and yours, then you have already lost it.

Yes, it is a horrific tragedy, all this abuse and torture, the heart rending tale of each child, each life destroyed with such vigor. If you understand the greater tragedy is how this changes our entire social fabric, then there is hope. These nasty things are part of a much wider evil, a mere symptom of something far deeper going wrong. We surrendered to demons. They run our civilization, running each government.

It won’t matter at this point to discuss in detail how the very foundation of Western Civilization was an open invitation to demons, except as a reminder to help you shake loose any fondness for it. Western Civilization was wrong from the start, and what we see now is of the essence, the natural fruit from the seeds planted. If you continue clinging to Western Civilization, you will go down with it. God is not pleased with the West. If you step away from it, denounce it and renounce it, you just might save your children and yourself from at least part of the sorrow from its collapse.

Then you won’t be surprised our governments are doing everything they can to drain away the last vestiges of private wealth and productivity and hand it over to the banks. And if that’s not enough, they borrow against alleged future productivity and hand that over, too. Yes, somewhere in all this mess is batch of dreams of one-world government, a global tyranny still twinkling in the eyes of many globalists. And some of them engage in horrific molestations of children along the way, because the impulse to torment the innocent in every way possible is part of their natural instinct. It comes from what makes Western Civilization different from what preceded it.

These are the same kind of people who gave birth to Western Civilization. This kind of people have been in charge every step of the way. It’s the reason we have news outlets giving so much time to the likes of Charley Sheen, and Lady Gaga, and spending staggering amounts on the bread and circuses called “professional sports.” It keeps us from noticing what really matters.

I’m sure you get it. Take it from there and fill in the blanks. Most importantly, step away from it. Let it go. Embrace something else. Stop listening to the demons.

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