Basic Computer Help Service

Posted on February 16, 2011 by ehurst

This is an outline of what I do when people bring me a computer which isn’t working properly. Aside from undoing mistakes and diagnosing hardware failures, most of it consists of cleaning up the operating system. There are no secrets here, and this has been pretty successful with most of my clients. You can save a lot of money using these ideas.

1. If possible, I convince them to switch from Windows to Linux. I’ve never seen a personal computer running Linux compromised, nor heard of one. I’ve not seen any misconfigured by user mistakes once properly installed, even when the user knows the root password and understands how it works. I am always eager to devote significant amounts of time teaching folks how to get used to the Linux way of doing things. I select the Linux distribution based on how they use it, but my choices are limited to Debian, Ubuntu LTS, and CentOS for the simple reason each of these will be stable and supported for a minimum of three years for each release.

2. Assuming they stick with Windows, drop into safe mode and run virus and malware scans. As soon as the BIOS starts to hand off to the operating system, hit the F8 key, and select “Safe mode with networking” so you can download updates to the scanners which offer it. My favorites are Vipre Rescue for viruses (updated daily) and Malware Bytes free version for spyware. Allow significant time for each scanner to complete, and remove the junk they find. If you can’t even boot the system, you can get a bootable rescue CD with a scanner which might be able to recover the system enough to try booting again. I would never trust McAfee or Norton, but I have used the BitDefender and Kaspersky CDs to good effect. They take a very long time to run.

3. While in safe mode, make sure a good AV and malware package are installed for regular use. You can purchase the full version of VIPRE from Sunbelt/GFI, but I find Avast works better for most people. The free version will do if you can’t afford the regular. After installing Malware Bytes free version, you can leave it on the system, but you have to run it manually, because live protection comes only with the purchased version. I recommend running it weekly, but be sure to update first each time.

4. Still in safe mode, uninstall software you are not using, or which weakens security and privacy. The greatest threat comes from entertainment. Those who produce entertainment know you won’t likely pay much up front — not nearly as much as they want, anyway. So they let advertisers pay for it by saddling you with advertising. Those $10 and even $20 games at the big box stores are some of the worst, eclipsed only by the freebies you can download online: Wild Tangent, Pop Cap, iWin, etc. Each of them insists on installing their gameware server, or browser toolbars, and other associated junk software which slows down the system, allows them to track your every touch on the computer, and frankly opens the door to spyware and viruses. Very few download games are safe, and it takes time to learn those which are. Similar warnings apply to music downloaders and players.

The other kind of software which risks security is social software. Don’t download stuff related to Facebook (like FlipToast) or any other social networking site until you understand what risks are involved. Each of them is basically tracking you all over the Net, and they are loaded with vulnerabilities exploited by criminal elements. Don’t let your instant messengers load automatically unless you are using something like Pidgin, which is considerably safer than most alternatives.

Finally, a major culprit for bundling useless and resource-hogging software is Apple and their Safari-iTunes package. If you don’t desperately need what they do, get rid of them completely. Even QuickTime can be replaced with good, free and secure alternatives, such as the K-Lite package. Get the Mega package, and use the bundled Media Player Classic as your default media player. Another is Adobe. You can get a decent and very secure PDF reader called Sumatra. Not fancy, but adequate. If you need more features, try Foxit or PDF-Xchange. Both are less of a threat to you than Adobe.

5. Check security settings. Turn on updates, at least to the point of being notified when they are available. Turn on the Windows firewall; it may not be the best, but it’s better than nothing. If you can afford it, find out what sort of firewall/router device is appropriate for your Internet connection and buy one. If you don’t understand firewalls, use whatever wizard comes with the package. You must change the default password for accessing the device; choose a good one based on something such as the first letter of a phrase or song lyrics you know you’ll remember. Keep the mixed capitals and lower-case and punctuation, and substitute a numerical digit for at least one of the letters. Make sure it’s not less than 8 characters.

6. Consider changing your Net surfing habits. Especially with Windows, use just about any browser but Internet Explorer, saving it for those few websites which simply will not work otherwise. Install Firefox configure it with security addons. Use this for basic surfing and all the random stuff you do; make it your default browser. But for strictly business, or sites where you have to login often, even if it’s as frivolous as blogging or Facebook, use a different browser. I recommend Opera for Windows, though it will take some time to understand and browse the configuration options. It remains one of the most secure browsers, and it’s built-in email client is excellent for security uses. You can also use Google Chrome, but it’s not as fully developed, yet. It’s challenging to configure some of the settings you might want to change. However, it includes the advantage of built-in Flashplayer and PDF display. Again, it will take some time to dig around the configuration settings, and getting used to a very different set of functions. It has some of the same security addons as for Firefox, called “extensions.”

For some, the safest way to handle email is using one of the webmail providers, instead of downloading email directly to the computer. This will surely compromise privacy, particularly with Gmail, but any viruses will be on their computer, not yours. Yahoo and a few others will scan attachments for threats before you download them. Frankly, I like to use foreign-based webmail providers. A good example is GMX.net, based in Germany. The interface is in German, but there are others like them who accommodate English language users. GMX does have an American-based operation (GMX.com), but their site has been pretty rude about blocking browsers other than IE. You can always try Hush Mail and others.

Finally, stop using Google, Bing or Yahoo as your default search engine. Both will track your searches in such a way they can be traced back to you personally, and sell that information to advertisers. Use StartPage or DuckDuckGo. Either of them will preserve your privacy much better.

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Blocking Animated GIF Images with User CSS (Updated)

Posted on February 15, 2011 by ehurst

Warning: The instructions here are obsolete in that Blink (the engine underneath Chrome) does not support user style sheets. If you find animations a problem, the single best solution is to use Slimjet, an alternative browser built on Blink/Chrome. In the configuration options for Slimjet is a toggle to disable animations as a built-in function. So far as I have tested, all of the Chrome extensions work in Slimjet.

Original post:

This basically applies to Google Chrome. Since I am not a CSS expert, this took a lot of digging. Why it is so very many tutorials leave this out, I don’t know.

You cannot selectively block animated GIFs. You can only block all GIFs, but even that is a little complicated. Since Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera all include switches in the configurations for turning off animated images, this is an issue only with Webkit browsers, such as Chrome and Safari. For the latter, see this. For Chrome, you have to use a secret incantation.

First, start Chrome from the command line with the proper switch:

google-chrome --enable-user-stylesheet

This creates a folder in the config system where you can add a User CSS:

~/.config/google-chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css

Open this in your favorite editor. You should add this one line to block all GIF images:

img[src*="gif"] { display: none !important; }

It took some digging to find out how to set the selector. Adding that asterisk before the equal sign indicates any item on the displayed webpage where the img tag defines a src which includes the sequence “gif” in any portion of the URL. This line tells your browser not to display it regardless. That “!important” makes it imperative, and the power of CSS is to honor the user’s style sheet over that of any webserver instructions.

Granted, it makes some pages look funny, but at least in Chrome I can read without fighting the animations. Since the “Pause! Pause! Pause!” extension is broken, causing a race condition on many pages, there really is little else you can do. Maybe someday the Webkit developers will listen, since this has been a rather noisy demand on the Chrome discussion boards, but I am dubious.

Oh, and if you want to remove that broken extension from Chrome, just delete the entire folder at:

~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Extensions/gpgcolmilkcnccpllfdleobpflemehec

Update: Better yet, there is a greasemonkey script which simply removes only the animated GIFs, allowing the others to remain when you press the ESC key. Here’s how.

Go here and copy the JScript from the display box, and save to a file. I named it stop-animation.user.js and left it in my Home directory. Then I opened Chrome, hit CTRL+O for “open” and found my JScript file and clicked on it. Chrome asked if I was sure I wanted to install this “extension” and I clicked “Continue.” Now when I visit a page with animated GIFs, I hit ESC and they all disappear.

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Get Acquainted with Hunger, America

Posted on February 14, 2011 by ehurst

Never mind the official definitions; for you and I the real issue behind a recession or depression is a decline in the standard of living. In other words, everything we have gotten used to will cost more, and we’ll be getting along in the future with less of it.

Here in the West, our technological advances are no longer resulting in more jobs for more people. Basic unalterable fact: If people aren’t making or harvesting stuff other people want, there is no economy. Entertainment and information isn’t “stuff” by that definition. Such intangibles have to be supported by something more fundamental to life. Well, we long ago passed the point of saturation on stuff. And now we aren’t coming up with any wholly new technologies, at least not here in the West. You should expect to see them in places like China, India and Brazil, as their economies blossom, but they won’t really get roaring until they work out how to break loose from the Western banking powers.

So if that’s not bad enough, we got more problems. It may be pretty hard to get food at any price after this whomping big freeze, following upon a couple others. We kept reading all these experts talking about how, any day now, the sun should reawaken the heavy sunspot activity because it’s that time in the cycle. It’s not happening. That single greatest factor in our climate is not cooperating, and the mythology of Global Warming is coming apart, even as the faithful proclaim all the more loudly how this is all a result of anthropogenic climate change. The point is, we have every reason to expect this winter was just the first in a long series which could so easily become an ice age.

But just for the current time frame of this year alone, we will have serious food shortages coming on top of a general decline in economic activity, and government oppression coupled with profligate borrowing which could hardly be sustained in the best of times. Think about this: An awful lot of people alive right now here in the US will soon die before their time. No other result is possible.

The wealthy elite know it’s coming. We can argue they planned it and caused it, but the point is they knew it was coming and have taken measures to ride out the storm. Not that they should necessarily escape the wrath of the masses, or at least the few out of the masses with an understanding and a penchant to act, but they have prepared. Most of us have not. Instead, we kept buying into their lies and buying their junk, and neglecting the preparation for disaster. Fear we have aplenty, but action is missing. Instead, we are going to see vastly increasing activity based on panic response, along with an exponential increase in predatory crime. That predation will come as much from government people as from the non-government competitors. There is no restraint largely because we have tossed aside any real civilizing influences in favor of something cheap and superficial. The wealthy elite have been preying upon us so quietly and secretly all these years, promoting that decline as they consolidated their control.

Not that it was so challenging to bring us to this place. Western Civilization was never much to begin with, being so completely materialistic and worldly. When all you have to hope for is more and better stuff, you completely ignore the moral nature of everything around you. All the energy was expended in getting and keeping things which just don’t matter. Thus, it peaked very high and very quickly, and the decline will not be gentle.

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Simplicity of Madness

Posted on February 13, 2011 by ehurst

If you want simple answers, you shouldn’t be reading my blog. While I do try my best to make certain aspects of Linux simpler and less mysterious, I can’t do that with reality in general.

However, I can save you a lot of time in one respect. Start with the blanket assumption anyone with power and money is scum. In this world, you don’t get power and money without major moral compromise. For purposes of this discussion, “power” is roughly equivalent to “influence” of any sort. A very popular mainstream journalist has power, in that sense. The same journalist most certainly has wealth you can’t match. Once we establish that distrust, then we are in a position to note when someone with power and wealth isn’t quite such a complete psychopath. It’s bound to happen, since most psychopaths have no talent, and building empires requires a certain amount of talent. A few of  the harmless, and even the rare good guy, is going to get hired by the psychopaths because they actually need to get some work done once in a while.

If you observe closely how Julian Assange acts as a player on the stage, he is exactly the same sort of psychopath-in-effect as the government and corporate psychopaths he claims to confront. He keeps secrets, manipulates public opinion with carefully staged press releases, and is simply one more actor on the stage using exactly the same theatrics, with exactly the same motives, as everyone else. Real revolutionary leakers simply expose the information when they get their hands on it. They understand, on some level, the most fundamental moral code of all Creation: Truth wants to be free. That’s similar to the hacker’s assertion, “Information wants to be free.” The point here is, information is not necessarily truth. It’s not always accurate and not always pertinent. Truth is always truth regardless of niggling measures of accuracy, and thus is always pertinent. Assange is not about truth, but about making Assange more wealthy and powerful.

It requires a mystical bent to grasp the difference. Truth is God, a Person who is determined to break through all human boundaries and bondages. If you manage to participate in His process of revelation, you’ll be rewarded — that part is plain and simple. If you are mercenary about it, you won’t get much, but you’ll be rewarded. If you are committed to it, you will already have the most valuable rewards.

At any rate, this is what percolates in the back of my mind as I observe the wacky theatrics of the Wikileaks saga. The latest act stars Glen Greenwald and some truly disgusting thuggery by a handful of corporate PR companies. I suppose we can believe the idea several of the company honchos who disavowed the operation really did not know what their subordinates were up to, but I really doubt they were surprised by the skulduggery. They were surprised by the exposure of said skulduggery. If it can be plotted this once, it was always a part of their repertoire, and surely a part of their normal business operations. In other words: Don’t trust them to be totally honest. On the other hand, I tend to believe so far Greenwald is mostly a good guy, somewhat misled about the nature of Wikileaks and Assange’s dreams.

Assange is part of the Hacker Culture. I could care less about distinctions of black hat versus white hat, simply because the standards are not a matter of morality, but of competing ethics. Ethics may reflect a moral commitment, but a moral commitment isn’t necessary. It’s just a commitment to playing by certain rules which are commonly accepted within a given context. Morality is far more fundamental. So the hackers of the world are simply a competing force with their own skewed ethics. Individual hackers can surely be as morally pure as the driven snow which recently covered the ground outside my window, but as a whole, the Hacker Community is much more diverse. That community includes all sorts of criminal elements, simply because the Hacker Ethic ignores the standard definitions of “criminal” in favor of a competing standard. Whether it is more moral is a matter of debate, though it does draw some admiration as the underdog in this fight.

I think Greenwald does understand this part:

After Anonymous imposed some very minimal cyber disruptions on Paypal, Master Card and Amazon, the DOJ flamboyantly vowed to arrest the culprits, and several individuals were just arrested as part of those attacks. But weeks earlier, a far more damaging and serious cyber-attack was launched at WikiLeaks, knocking them offline. Those attacks were sophisticated and dangerous. Whoever did that was quite likely part of either a government agency or a large private entity acting at its behest. Yet the DOJ has never announced any investigation into those attacks or vowed to apprehend the culprits, and it’s impossible to imagine that ever happening.

Thus, while Wikileaks gains some cachet as the underdog, we should not be fooled over the questions of morality. Assange is a wretch, but comes off as the lovable rascal in this play. HBGary and friends are permitted not a stitch of redeeming virtue, and rightly so. The US government as a whole is the biggest and baddest of all wretches, and rightly so, completely unable to even fathom ethics, much less morals. Poor Manning is a pawn in the game; not particularly moral himself, he did what he thought might serve to help in some small way to level the playing field. He gains credit for being brave, if devious, and for understanding clearly no one in actual authority would dream of doing the right thing on any level. He is already paying a very high price for this, and deserves a bit of applause.

That the handiwork of bad people can still bring salutary results is manifestly obvious. Don’t confuse the general moral goodness of bringing truth to light, and a relief from human suffering, versus the fundamental commitment to truth and justice. Simplistic evaluations and labeling don’t serve any good moral purpose, and certainly can’t help us in our search for sanity in this world.

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Don’t Use Google Chrome Browser on Linux (Updated)

Posted on February 12, 2011 by ehurst

Update: After more research, this whole issue turns on the lack of code in the Webkit engine to support stopping animated GIFs. I always included the Chrome extension “Pause! Pause! Pause!” because I cannot read text on a page when there is something moving anywhere on page. Apparently that extension is what activates the race condition on so many pages. Removing the extension will solve the problem, but leaves Chrome still unusable on pages which include animated gifs not blocked by other extensions (Adblock, Ghostery, etc.).

The Webkit devs have been asked to include a means to stopping animated gifs, but I doubt they care. At any rate, I have come up with a temporary solution.

Original post begins here…

I cannot imagine the folks at Google don’t know about this. I even tried to make a bug report, but it never posted, as far as I can tell. It is not necessarily a sinister plot to silence my complaint, but it doesn’t matter. When I peruse their question board, I notice certain issues have not been addressed in two years or so.

Correction: My bug report finally showed up on their forum.

At any rate, here’s the beef: Chrome slams the CPU when you visit a page which uses lots of JScript for displaying the content. That would be just about every mainstream media site on the Internet, as well as most others these days. We call this “entering a race condition” — something grabbing all the CPU resources and not letting go until you shut down the process. So if I close that particular page, the CPU meter stays pegged at 100%.

Oddly, the browser is working fine, as if nothing is wrong. But then my CPU fans starts running fast and I can hear it, when it’s seldom needed during normal operations. These days I run GKrellM so I can watch stuff like this. This happens on multiple different Linux distributions, with or without any extensions installed, and has nothing to do with FlashPlayer or anything else. It has happened on several different machines running Linux.

The only way to stop the race condition is to kill the browser. There simply is no excuse for such shoddy software design. Again, I can’t imagine Google developers don’t know about this, and that I am the only one experiencing this. I can only surmise they hope no one else notices. One more reason you can’t trust Google to even come close to their own motto about being evil.

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The Debian Experience

Posted on February 10, 2011 by ehurst

I first got acquainted with Debian by using Sarge. It was okay, and I got comfortable with apt and all the other unique things. Etch was truly excellent. I still love it, especially on older hardware.

Lenny stunk. I tried it a half-dozen ways, and it always stunk. I thought that was the end for me. I played with Ubuntu, which was okay. I loved Kanotix back when it was based on Sarge, then Etch, but it stalled somewhere back there and I lost interest. I tested a few other derivatives, but never found anything I could tolerate.

Then I tested Squeeze recently. I’m in love again. I still can’t forget the nasty experience with Lenny, but I don’t have to go back there. Squeeze is the good stuff.

For those who amuse themselves watching me test all these various operating systems, let me tell you this: When it comes down to the looming economic collapse, a lot of Linux distributions will die. Some will die for other reasons. For example, I’m pretty sure whatever Canonical does to Ubuntu is going to kill it for a lot of folks. Barring some great surprise, their user numbers will plummet soon. Red Hat may survive, and I’m pretty sure Scientific Linux will survive, as will CentOS, so long as Red Hat remains economically viable. Fedora is just a play ground, just a hobby, a toy. It produces nice things for Red Hat, but it’s just a toy. Those who play with such toys do dominate the entire Linux community, so that’s not a slam. But they depend entirely on Red Hat’s support system. I’m not sure how much longer SUSE will stay alive, either. SUSE was once my home distro, the one I always trusted, so I don’t hate SUSE for the deal with Microsoft. But SUSE has suffered much under the big corporate flags, and I’ve not been able to use it since about 8.2. If it doesn’t revive and put out good product, it’s going to die.

But when all the others die for one reason or another, Debian will still be around as long as there are computers. It’s about the only one which has no commercial sponsor, so it’s not dependent on economics in that sense. It’s got one of the largest developer communities, and probably the largest user community, too. For all their stickiness about purity of the Open Source philosophy, they have one of the easiest routes for breaking those rules. They don’t include the proprietary code with their distribution, but you can download and install just about anything with their own Debian tools, and it works better than any system I’ve tried. Better than Ubuntu, too.

If you are looking for something to survive tough times and a mass of great unknowns, I recommend you start investing the effort to get to know Debian.

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Have You Thought About It?

Posted on February 10, 2011 by ehurst

Like the frog in the pot as the temperature rises ever so slowly, we don’t notice we are being cooked alive. Revolutions happen because peaceful and gradual change always goes in the wrong direction. You would think at some point the frog would notice and refuse to be cooked, but the great experiment of the psychopaths here in the US has been quite successful.

Notice how little difference there is between the US and Egypt when it comes to the excesses of the ruling regime:

Under Mubarak’s “Emergency Law Rule,” police powers are vastly increased, constitutional law and individual rights are suspended, and complete censorship is legalized. This law forbids any non-governmental political activity like street demonstrations, non-approved political organizations, and all “unregistered” financial donations. In addition, and even more heinous, is that under this law, the government has the right to imprison individuals for any period and for virtually any reason. They may be kept in prison without trial for as long as the government desires. Considering recent events there, with police and military actions, rules and curfews, murder of innocents, and the shutdown of communications, including the Internet, this evil law is obviously in place. Does any of this sound familiar? It should, because the U.S government has either committed many of these same crimes, or is threatening to do so. Just consider Guantanamo, secret renditions, black prison sites, suspension (or elimination) of habeas corpus, incarceration without charges or trial, suppression of speech, spying and wiretapping, and brutal torture. The U.S. government and its police-state accomplices have committed all of this and much more for some time now.

The United States government and its corporate partners in crime have already achieved a level of corruption beyond any in history. I base this on the monumental scope and reach of this empire.

The primary purpose of all the corruption hasn’t changed since the first warlord shook his spear over a cowering tribe of troglodytes. What started as organizing defense from all too natural threats in the environment became an excuse to demand privilege and comfort denied the rest. When the real treat subsided, it was necessary to create fake ones. The only real threat to America today is from her government. There are virtually no terrorists in the world today we did not help to create through the CIA and other black ops agencies. This is a matter of record if you bother to research it. The only difference between democracy and naked tyranny is the level of deception and manipulation.

We are the evil empire, and everyone hates us for entirely justified reasons. Granted, our standard of living currently exceeds that for Egyptians, but not for long. If you can discern the pattern of actions taken by our government, you can see there is a determined will and intent to bring us down to that level. I’m wondering when anyone will notice. I’m wondering when folks will decide they can’t take any more, and we see genuine revolt here. Given what I see around me every day, I feel certain we will be pushed a great deal farther than the Egyptians before we react. As a nation, we simply aren’t paying attention to much of anything except the Super Bowl, which congressman got caught trolling for illicit sex, or some TV bimbo’s latest fashion statement.

Those who continue to cling to this most arrogant and farcical notion will be the last to grasp the reality that in many regards, the U.S. political structure is little different than that of its so-called enemies. The reason this truth is still so elusive to most is due to the fact that the general citizenry of this country has over time been dumbed down by the government school system. In addition, our society has become one based on almost total dependence, with little concept of personal responsibility or self-reliance, one without morals, and one that is consumed with a belief in the myth of American exceptionalism. This distorted conventional thinking will have to change dramatically before any true progress can be made.

But I’m not calling for an armed revolt. What we see is the norm for human government from The Beginning, and will be to The End. While an armed revolt would indicate we have some national soul left, it wouldn’t really change anything that matters. What I’m calling for is folks realizing how stupid it all is. If just a slender marginal minority could continue promoting a higher grasp of reality, stuff like this would never get so far out of control, but would wither and die much earlier. We have allowed independent thinking to be hijacked and channeled into narrowly restrained partisan bickering.

Until your soul is free from the chains of this world, your body cannot begin to experience any form of liberty.

The United States while considered the freest country on earth, has the highest incarceration rate in the world. With less than 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. houses over 23% of the world’s prison population. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1 in every 32 adults, or 3.1% of the population was either on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole in 2009.

The literal reality is symbolic proof for the truth of our condition. And because we are so nationally stupid and enslaved, we allow the elite to run rampant and bring that slavery to the rest of the world.

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Bad Moon Rising

Posted on February 9, 2011 by ehurst

Go look up the lyrics for Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising.” It fits today.

I’m not making any dark and secret predictions. I’ve been letting my secrets out of the bag since the first day I began blogging nearly a decade ago. The very most fundamental mysteries of the universe don’t interest too many people, so I talk about other stuff, too. But those secrets point out how much trouble is coming our way, and Fogerty’s classic dark warnings mated to a cheery upbeat tune is on the verge of coming literally true.

There is no pinpoint accuracy to such predictions, nor even a timeline.

Did you know we still have a growing number of people dying, or deeply disabled from the poisons in the Gulf of Mexico? The volcanoes of Iceland are twitching again. This winter weather — it snowed again today in Oklahoma — probably signals a coming mini-ice age. The New Madrid Fault just a few hours’ drive from here is active in ways nobody wants to say.

But it’s not just natural disasters. The business in Egypt you know about, but the the whole point now is for the protesters to hang on, because if they quit before the regime topples, they’ll all be murdered by the thugs of that regime. And there’s similar stirrings in a lot of other countries, not just in the Middle East. Pakistan, unstable as an oil slick at sea in the best of times, is pretty raw with us right now. One of our guys assassinated a couple of motorcyclists and they are holding him for murder, but our government is acting like a big bully, lying about every part of the incident. Nothing new there.

It’s going to get pretty stormy in many ways. “I see a bad moon a-risin’….”

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As We Watch the West Collapse

Posted on February 8, 2011 by ehurst

I want you to be free. I can’t do it for you, but I can tell you about the prison in which we all live. Then you can decide for yourself when and how much freedom you want. Let me challenge you to see those chains more clearly, because you’ll be amazed how easily they fall off.

Let me rattle those chains. This is by no means a long and organized thesis, but a short challenge to common mythology on just one issue. But I have to explain the context first.

What we see is merely the latter symptoms of collapse, because the destructive turn was taken quite some time ago. Civilizations on the rise will begin to develop a moral code, growing in complexity as the culture deepens, particularly in the arts and intellectual pursuits. Immediately upon reaching the intellectual apex, decline follows. That is, while the majority begin warming to some portion of this peak of achievement, those who lead in exploring are already chasing the front wave down the far side. It’s a cycle which can be found in every great civilization of the past. If you chase ideas in a particular direction long enough, you’ll find its flaws.

Oh, and the time scale of rise and fall is a function of the speed of communication. Yeah, the Internet means it’s going to be very fast.

Since no civilization arises totally free from previous influences, it’s a matter of choosing wisely. Our Western Civilization in particular, for example, is utterly and foolishly materialistic. That simply is not a realistic viewpoint of the cosmos. It leaves you with nothing except the here and now, and all your struggles will aim for something which you cannot ever have — security and peace on this plane. But this was the fantasy of Western Civilization; it has run its course, and is coming apart in our hands.

This is why so many are in chains, bound to a lie so big few bother to challenge it. I want you to outlive Western Civilization, which may well come fully apart before I die of natural causes (I’ll be 55 this year). Barring that, I still want you to be free to step back and not be consumed by its fiery end.

Take any issue — the more visceral, the better. When it makes our stomachs churn it shows us our weaknesses. How about sexual molestation of children? That’s so visceral, even the scum of the earth are hostile about it. Career criminals in prison will beat to death anyone convicted of that who is thrust into their midst. If you can think about child molestation rationally, you are already more free than the vast majority of humans in Western Civilization.

As society collapses, you should expect to see a soaring increase in human predation. You can also expect those who rule to scream and cry about it all the louder. Whether we actually have a significant rise in child molestation is a subject for debate, but we surely see a lot more about it in the mainstream press. However, I suspect we haven’t seen near as much as we soon will. In general, when things go bad, vice prospers. Preying upon the weak is what we should expect, and children are inherently weak.

Infants are nothing but appetites, with no sense of individuality. When they are hungry, the whole universe is hungry. Toddlers are developing a sense of individuation, and learning they aren’t in charge. They’ll still do whatever feels good at the moment, but begin to recognize it might get them something which doesn’t feel so good later, either by discipline or by experience. Young children understand rules, but won’t obey unless they are watched. At some point, they internalize the rules as necessary for their longer term best interest. Somewhere around age 8 or 9 they develop a sense of logic which slowly shifts to the abstract. In adolescence they’ll challenge the rules on logical grounds. Should they actually continue to develop and mature, they’ll understand what rules are for, and will operate under self-restraint with a larger moral purpose. We call that adulthood.

Adults who don’t finish the tasks of child development will exhibit behavior which is no better than where things stopped for them in any particular area of human personality. Western Civilization is ripe for inculcating arrested development, and we should hardly be surprised when the majority never quite made it. Most folks have managed to internalize the rules, but never got beyond that. Quite a few haven’t even gotten that far. A huge number of really bright and talented folks are stuck in adolescence. At any rate, our world is filled with human predators, and an adult intellect is not necessarily paired with adult morality.

So we shall have a soaring rate of all sorts of predation. A rise in child molestation, in all its forms, will be a mere reflection of that. Get used to it, in the sense that prevention is hardly possible in our culture. Since the majority are stuck in the rules stage of development, they are easily panicked when the structure of their world seems threatened. They are utterly dependent on that external structure. And saddled with an utterly here-and-now orientation, they will surrender to whatever the authorities offer as a solution.

I’ve seen post-molestation therapy up close and personal. More than once, I’ve been under strictures of policy forcing me to embrace whatever philosophy ruled the system. At least, they tried to force me. I managed to escape before the system found it worthwhile to imprison me in more literal terms. In the US, in particular, being insufficiently enthusiastic about policy orthodoxy is a sin. Yes, it’s a theology and operates like an organized religion.

That theology is largely a revival of the Amazon Cult. Not the river valley in Brazil, but the ancient Greek Mythology of a man-hating. These days we call it “feminism.” Feminism marks all males as predators, either caught or soon to be caught. The only way to avoid this is to embrace the neutered or metro-sexual behavior pattern, and gay is even better according to this cult.

So with all the shrieking hysterics you would expect, post-molestation therapy does more damage to children than the molestation in most cases. It strives to make them fearful and hateful of adult males, utterly dependent on the system to protect them, and totally unable to evaluate anything at all on their own. It is the central orthodoxy this molestation was irreparably terrorizing, and any child who resists the notion they were severely injured for life is considered a therapy failure. Then they are kicked out of the system and into juvenile confinement. It’s pretty much the same treatment for children who are simply physically beaten. Nothing is done to restore sanity because sanity is considered perversion, and perversion is sanity.

Yes, children are hardly ready for sexual relations. Neither are most adults, but that’s another matter. However, children can recover from this and go on to a normal life, same as any other victim of abuse at any chronological age. Dr. Thomas Szasz is a really good starting place if you want to understand what’s wrong with Western psychiatry. Instead, our current system churns out permanent victims who never mature, because if there is one thing the modern state must have, that is your devotion as if it were God.

If you feel like exploring the evils of the Modern Nation State, examine the philosophical tectonic shift which arose with the Peace of Westphalia. In terms of politics, that was the beginning of the end for Western Civilization. It is deeply wrapped up in why we can’t have a sane program of recovery treatment for victims and perpetrators of child molestation. It’s why the West is doomed.

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I Can Be Suckered, Too

Posted on February 7, 2011 by ehurst

Don’t trust me. Sometimes I’ll believe a lie because it’s close to what I want to believe about someone. I won’t perform due diligence because it strikes me as plausible.

Today I posted something on my other blog about syncretism. Part of what prompted my post was the breathless tale told by one Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. on his website, The Last Crusade (you can find it if you want). His article, “CHRISLAM SPREADS THROUGHOUT AMERICA” (note the all caps) was picked up by a large number of other sites, and was predictably posted by one member of a mailing list which I help moderate. I didn’t check out the story because it lambasted someone I dislike (Rick Warren). I didn’t make too much of that, but did use it to launch into a related topic.

Then someone called my attention to how this article was pretty sorry journalism. So I checked, and found out this Dr. Williams is the sole source of this whole thing, stretching some facts way too far to back his wild tale. This author used an image which was almost surely fictitious, since you can get one saying anything you like. Furthermore, Rick Warren’s New Age theology is bad, but even he knows better than to say Muslims are the same as Christians. He gets awfully close at times, but hasn’t gone that far, yet.

Rather, Warren has promoted peaceful relations with Muslims, and I’m all for that. Indeed, Dr. Williams is even more wrong here, simply because he gleefully promotes a fear and hatred for Muslims, in the sense he wants us to kill them all. At least, that’s what I get from his site. Think about it: “The Last Crusade” — the graphics on his site depict a very belligerent intent, and a war-like Jesus.

Once I checked it out, I changed my post and dropped the links to Dr. Williams’ site. I didn’t put any here, either. As for Rick Warren, he’s a disciple of Schuler and several other New Age/Christian syncretists. Were he honest with himself, he would call it “The Purchase Driven Life,” since it’s all about him and his profits, and the politics of taking over churches across the US. But it would be dishonest of me to call him a devotee of Chrislam.

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