Bad Faith Policing

Posted on August 3, 2010 by ehurst

I find it repugnant to read blogs which merely link to other blogs, never expressing their own thoughts on much of anything. Their posts amounts to, “Yeah, what he said.”

Then again, sometimes you run across something so eloquent, you have to give proper credit. If you don’t chase the link, here is what got my attention:

[I]t is ALWAYS a mistake to speak to the police in America without a lawyer present. Be pleasant and be polite, but do not ever offer information or cooperate in any way, shape or form. They will take even the smallest shred of barely relevant information and use it to spin a fictional narrative; their job is to find a perpetrator and feed him into the machine, not to divine the truth. Unless you wish to become a part of that narrative, you must keep your mouth shut. Furthermore, keep in mind that their assurances to you are worthless; courts have repeatedly confirmed that the police are permitted to lie to witnesses and suspected perpetrators alike.

Now, perhaps I’ve been living in Italy too long, but it seems to me that the man would likely have been better off spending the thirty thousand on MS-13 instead of lawyers and court fees if he wanted to get the charges dropped. These miscarriages of justice are exactly why people have historically turned to godfathers and gangleaders instead of being willing to let the machinery of the system run its course.

Having served in law enforcement, let me repeat this: “They will take even the smallest shred of barely relevant information and use it to spin a fictional narrative; their job is to find a perpetrator and feed him into the machine, not to divine the truth.” Never, never, ever let yourself be fooled by that friendly approach, nor the professional demeanor. It has little to do with the sincerity of the individual policeman, and everything to do with the subconscious absorption of an entire intellectual orientation which goes so far as to even despise the truth of anything. They will actively fight to ignore or hide any information which does not fit into their initial narrative. God only knows what will cause them to side with one or another, but the decision becomes locked in concrete for all eternity. That is, unless they discover something even more diabolical to destroy your life. The likelihood their supervisor will correct this is nil, since the supervisor got their position by making sure to follow this orientation.

The whole system exists to destroy. It’s just a different way of making war, and innocence is no defense. Frankly, I have never met a policeman who revealed any hint of the imaginary noble quest to protect the innocent and ferret out the truth. They might use words to that effect, but just a few questions will make you feel like it’s 1984 (the George Orwell novel). In their minds, truth is whatever they say it is.

Nor can I find fault with Vox’s recommendation you consider investing in alternative means of justice. About the only difference between police and MS-13 is the latter are honest about their crimes, while the former currently holds a somewhat more comprehensive and better means to squeeze you — for your own good, of course. Pervasive criminal organizations, those not actually built by the likes of the CIA, prosper because they do the same job better than official government. That doesn’t make them right, just or good, but simply less harmful.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Bad Faith Policing

All Wars Are Fake

Posted on August 2, 2010 by ehurst

First, let’s explain a term which is used, abused, and over-used. My definition of “Illuminati” is not necessarily the only correct one, but I want to limit the scope for the sake of discussion. For the most part, this term is synonymous with TPTB (The Powers That Be). However, it carries a more specific set of baggage: Multi-generational geniuses who maintain a rather clannish identity, carefully keeping to a rather flexible agenda with the aim of taking control of all humanity. Currently I identify the term with a group of bankers, industrialists, academics and whatever other positions of authority which allow them to mostly stay below the radar. They may or may not use the term themselves, but it’s a handy word for something which really does exist, however incomplete or imprecise our knowledge of them.

Now, the Illuminati run things. Simply having control is not the entire game. We note the control is not as full as they like, nor is it over all the earth’s population. Getting there, but not quite yet. At some point they will decide they have reached some threshold of control and make some truly radical changes, which are only hinted at for now. They aren’t machines nor supermen, and things are frankly at risk of coming part all the time, more so as they close in on their goal.

We get hints and insights now and then, but people tend to miss them because the Illuminati do a great job of hiding their fingerprints, as it were, making everything they do look like something else is going on. Right now, there is not a single genuine war on this planet. That is, all current warfare is the direct result of Illuminati creating a false conflict. Piracy off the Horn of Africa? The real cause is other nations dumping industrial toxic waste in the coastal waters, and denying it. It’s not nations per se, but corporations doing the dumping. Sure, the so-called pirates often grab the wrong target, and some of them actually are pirates, but the vast majority of this activity is folks getting fed up with rich nations dumping in their front yard, destroying their livelihood by poisoning the sea life. I can’t blame them, but because there is no such thing as a free press, since all mainstream news agencies are owned by the Illuminati, you’ll never get a sympathetic portrayal of their complaints.

And if you don’t understand how the US warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and the secret warfare in almost every country you may hear is having some turbulence, then you really are a good servant of the Illuminati. Meanwhile, let’s review one of the better articles offered by that crazy professor, Henry Makow from last fall:

As President Obama ponders whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, there is mounting evidence the Taliban is supported by the CIA. If correct, the Afghan war is a charade with a hidden agenda….

On Oct 29, 2009, Hillary Clinton infuriated Pakistani officials by saying she found it “hard to believe” the ISI didn’t know where Al Qaeda leaders were hiding. Her role is to maintain the fiction that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not CIA creations.

Just the day before, (Oct. 18) four American citizens were caught photographing sensitive buildings in Islamabad. All four were dressed in traditional Afghan outfits and were found to be in possession of illegal weapons and explosives.

Their vehicles contained 2 M-16A1 rifles, 2 handguns and 2 hand-grenades. The police held the American citizens in custody for an hour before the Interior Ministry interfered and had them released without charge even as preliminary investigation was being carried out….

Related to that is a more recent one, which points out if the Illuminati weren’t financing both sides of every war, all of them would stop:

The role of America’s Illuminati political “leadership” is to shepherd these funds through Congress (i.e. the credit card terminal.) Last week, Hillary Clinton sounded critical of Pakistan but she was actually campaigning for $7.5 billion in “economic” aid and $3 billion in military assistance for Pakistan. She said the money is needed for more “government services.”…

The Taliban is financed, trained and run by Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence Agency. The ISI is a branch of the CIA, which is run by the Illuminati bankers… In October 2006, NATO clearly identified the Taliban as an ISI operation…

So let’s keep this straight. The US is fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan while using the Taliban as an excuse to fund Pakistan who is maintaining the Taliban. Oh dear. And from Pakistan’s viewpoint, the Taliban is the reason they are getting all this money.

Meanwhile Pakistan is a nuclear power. But it is not our enemy. Iran is our enemy. By some logic, Pakistan can have nuclear weapons but its neighbor Iran cannot.

Yeah. That makes so much sense. All wars are fake, and have been for at least the past two centuries. When you study the historical details, and dig up references not always included in mainstream history teaching, you begin to wonder if The Matrix is not a reflection of your current reality.

Update: Kurt Nimmo adds a little clarity to the discussion on our impending warfare in Iran. Iran’s innocence of nuclear ambitions is no defense before the court of Illuminati agenda. Thus, you and I must give our bodies, and those of our loved ones, for that agenda.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on All Wars Are Fake

On the Legitimacy of Taxation

Posted on August 1, 2010 by ehurst

I make no excuse for referencing the Bible on any topic at all. All humanity is accountable to Scripture on every level. Libertarians are wrong when they use Aristotelian logic to argue taxation is somehow inherently evil. Liberals are wrong when they stretch the meaning of “public good” to things with which God said government has no business.

Jesus Christ did discuss taxation. Regarding the Temple Tax, he paid up using a miracle. Subtle thing here: If God needs it from us, God supplies it in the first place. You could make more of it, but He was not arguing against the Temple Tax based on the Law of Moses.

Regarding the Roman tax, He said if you want to reap the benefits of Roman Imperial prosperity — the roads, the shipping and trade, the social stability — why would you argue with giving them a cut? The Pharisees would carry Roman coins with Caesar’s face on them, something which smacked of idolatry, but felt Rome did not rightly understand God had exempted Jews from paying taxes to pagans. More than once Jesus noted a fundamental problem with Judaism as it had come to be at that time was greed and arrogance. Besides, they were trying to get Him to commit Himself to one of two partisan political positions as the means to find a way to discredit Him. It was one of those rare moments when the Pharisees and Sadducees actually worked together. But the answer Jesus gave dodged that issue, and slapped them for their sinful attitudes.

Farther back in Scripture we see the Laws of God ordain taxation as a necessary function of government. In order to proceed, it is necessary to note in passing God’s Laws require we live in a tribal social structure, so that the bulk of your daily social needs are handled by your extended family. Actual civil government was highly limited in scope and power, primarily interested in certain capital crimes and protecting the population from external threats. Regulation of daily human behavior and matters of basic human welfare were utterly out of the jurisdiction of civil government. So while the decisions of the tribal courts were backed by the armed might of civil government, the decisions were always handled by the tribal courts themselves. The judges were chiefly retired elders or other men of leisure chosen by consensus, who had no financial interest at all,  but never a government employee. Yes, it was patriarchal; that was God’s idea so get over it.

Once we establish that, we realize taxation was a matter of freeing the government folks from having to work for a living and giving their time to their mission from God. If they failed that mission, or got too greedy in the taxation, God encouraged the people to rise up and replace them. If violence was necessary for the job, so be it. Deafness to justified complaints was a sin. So was unjustified rebellion. The boundaries are soft, as God intended, subject to negotiation, circumstances, and so forth. Lying by government was not permitted, but it was up to the governed to figure it out. Secrecy in any thing was rightly regarded with deep suspicion and hostility.

So taxes are not evil. But it doesn’t take a genius to see when it isn’t working properly. If the government folks want to be free from leverage, they have to work harder to avoid living off taxes. If they want more money to do more things, they have to justify it. That justification had darn sure better line up with the Law Covenants. Solomon is not a good example of reasonable taxation. David, his father, was pushing his luck. Saul was very fortunate David had a conscience. Taxation can rightly include demands on labor and risk-taking (war and public works), or the money to pay folks to take up that burden, but this assumes wisdom in obeying divine limits on such things.

This also assumes you understand the issue of God’s sovereignty. He decides when your nation shall arise and assert itself. He decides when it will be conquered and absorbed, or outright destroyed. He does have plans, and seldom consults us on them. But aside from that, there is this business of doing things His way. He has adequately explained it all, and if you really want to please Him, it’s well within reach for nations and governments. There is this tendency for Him to protect nations who do so because it’s a very good testimony on His behalf, and He very much wants to show other nations how it should work. Technology has nothing to do with it. So to the degree you do it right, He will offer assistance in ways you cannot measure, and most certainly will throw in the occasional miracle to make sure. If you reject His ways, He will turn things the other way. Granted, He tends to work on a time scale much longer than human life, so most people don’t notice unless they are wise enough to embrace His way of looking at things. Still, He is most certainly in charge, and results vary according to things He stated rather clearly.

If your government tends to be open and honest in their dealings, they can expect a measure of divine protection. If they feel they have to rely on all sorts of skulduggery, espionage and deception, God is not pleased. The discussion of taxation falls right in the middle of this. The government which deceives has lost any hope of legitimacy, and its entire tax scheme is wrong from the start.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on On the Legitimacy of Taxation

Whipping Boy Theatrics

Posted on July 31, 2010 by ehurst

It’s like a play, up on the stage.

He sneaks up, making sure only the proprietor is oblivious, while his audience watches. After snagging his prize, he runs away, hooting and hollering as he stuffs it in his mouth. It’s consumed in seconds.

He is caught, of course. But unable to return the stolen goods, and unable to pay — which is why he stole it in the first place — he is punished. In the open before all witnesses, he is beaten. But the audience doesn’t know the whip is lighter than feathers. It only appears to be a savage beating, but the sting never so much as penetrated his clothing.

Mission accomplished, the punishers walk away with one part of the audience fearing to mimic his crime. The thief walks away with the full street credit of one who can be trusted by other crooks. A mole has been planted inside the criminal network. Try to remember, almost every thing our government does and says is designed to deceive you, even when it appears to be unhappy with something. It’s all play acting.

So it is with Wikileaks. Of a surety, it began with the best of motives, and a good number of those involved are sincere in their high moral convictions. Yet the hands which steer the thing are actors. The recent “leak” of Afghanistan reports is not a leak. The gist of it was published, even by the mainstream press, already.

Oh, I suppose it serves as a fresh opportunity to focus attention on something very evil. In this, the thief is allowed to eat his prize. There were no secrets revealed; not a single soldier is threatened by the loss of operational security. The only threat is on par with the release of the Abu Ghraib photos — the horror of what we are paying people to do. It gives rise to an urge to question, if not outright stop, the criminal invasion. The only threat is to the war profiteers, which happens to include the majority of Congress, and virtually all of the Administration.

In exchange, we have a large international audience who now will trust Wikileaks as an outsider, an honest broker, a confessor. We can take our secret sins to Wikileaks and confess, gaining our absolution and a clear conscience. Then we can be sure some feeb like Lamo will turn us in and our lives will become a Hell only Kafka could imagine. We know of Manning’s fate only what the government deigns to tell us.

Could it be he was manipulated into this position, with the evil gnomes of counterespionage pushing him over the edge to make an example of him? Let’s be sure, there is no reason to doubt his complaints of corruption, the sort of horror and dishonesty against which it appears he rebelled. That’s the whole point. So very many people in the military system will gladly order the dismemberment and death of unlucky local civilians because it’s more convenient than thinking. I don’t doubt a great many of my former comrades in the military would gladly do it to you and I, and on the same false pretenses they pretend are real. On the other hand, is Manning simply another actor, letting his name be wagged around as some symbol in exchange for some inducement we might find hard to believe?

At any rate, whatever and whomever is running Wikileaks will get more money and more leaks, but not from those who actually understand what’s going on in this world. For example, I’ll be the first to warn you I can’t be trusted. That’s because I don’t trust me, either. Not in the sense of lying, but in the sense I can surely be wrong about something. You have to take my words and make up your own mind.

In my mind, I honestly report to you I could never trust Wikileaks any more than I trust Wikipedia. Which is to say, some things they offer are accidentally correct, simply because these things happen on the basis of sheer volume. I’ll get something right once in a while, myself. But for the most part, it’s just entertainment. Save it for those moments when you could use a good laugh, but remember it’s up on a stage. Donate what you feel is the value of your ticket price for a cheap and silly stage play. Meanwhile, walk according to your own convictions and question everything which involves humans.

If you attempt to help Wikileaks analyze things — I did once, based on my experience with military security — know that you have just handed your name and IP address to the counter-intelligence agents of the US or any other government with an interest in the information. Granted, they don’t have time to investigate all of us, and the more of us who do this, the harder it gets for them to keep up. But in the end, you are compromised, because Wikileaks is compromised. Not merely in the sense all electronic data is insecure, but you should realize Wikileaks now operates as a honey trap.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Whipping Boy Theatrics

Collapse of the West

Posted on July 30, 2010 by ehurst

Pay attention folks. Try not to miss the really important factors as you watch this titanic, extreme slow-motion train wreck. Western Civilization is collapsing. This is no simple rough patch; it’s game over.

The really hard part is almost no one within the civilization has the tools or analytical perspective to really catch the best of this Greatest Show on Earth. If you don’t have the means to step outside Western Civilization, you can’t really understand why it’s crumbling. You’ll be too deeply wedded and welded to “obvious truths” which are the fundamental cause of the collapse.

Presuming man’s intellect is fully capable of grasping all that matters is the initial mistake. As long as you make room for mysteries which cannot be known, and give it lots of room because it’s so very, very massive, you have some hope of escaping the trap. But no, Western Civilization merely pays lip service to that, more as lyrical terms of art rather than truth. The entire structure of human activity is founded on what man can detect, observe and analyze, and that really is a tiny subset of what is behind the universe. Not because our knowledge is so small, as if we need to keep adding knowledge by exploration; that’s the key mistake. It is not possible to learn enough through that epistemology.

So the flaw is built into the very foundation. It cannot stand, though it will appear it does. For a while. The weight of what we have piled on top has already broken the foundation, but because the pile is so unspeakably huge, it will take some time. There won’t be one huge crash, just a long slow crumble into dust. Okay, many big crashes along the way, but not all at once. On the scale of things, because most people are so utterly dependent on it, at the personal level everyone will be hurt, but few will actually notice why because their minds can’t scale up that far. All they can see is some portion of the failed mechanics, and rail at how someone simply failed to keep using the proper mechanism. So they’ll keep trying to turn their insignificant little crank handle as the whole machine grinds to a halt.

I suppose if you are a perceptive reader, you’ll notice using Western language and thought structure is pretty limiting in describing this mess. We can’t even talk about it, so I have to wonder, even if all Western people were made aware of my warning here, just how many would have a clue. Now, I don’t pretend to be all that bright, just very fortunate to have some insight dropped on me from outside the system. Let that be a hint how Reality actually works, as opposed to what everyone falsely believes is “reality.”

But the West is dead. It’s still slumping over, and it will take awhile. It grew too fast, too big, and upon practically nothing. As long as it kept spinning it stood on that fragile point of balance, but it’s wobbling and completely out of balance now. The point of balance was not strong enough to prevent wearing down, so the smooth rotation was impossible to maintain. The whole grew faster than any previous civilization, though it appeared ancient because it pulled up threads from previous ones. Still, the best stuff was stripped out in the process, and it was dead from the start. All that was left were the weakest parts and this civilization will be the shortest lived in human memory. I can’t pretend to know what comes next, only that I can see all too clearly this one is gone.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Collapse of the West

Medium Destroys the Message

Posted on July 29, 2010 by ehurst

A friend sent a link for me to read. I clicked. The page loaded, then immediately the whole thing was blocked by a Flash window. I couldn’t read the content nor close the window.

Granted, I had Flashblock in place, so it couldn’t run without my permission. That’s my prerogative.

The war of advertisers against users has gone up just a notch, and the webmaster is rooting for the wrong side. It turns out the article buried under this flash page was written by someone whom I regard as a neocon partisan hack, someone who promotes Zionist Christianity. I checked by loading the link in Lynx. I don’t support that brand of heretical religion, so doubt I was missing much.

That makes two wrongs. First, the message was unacceptable. Zionism is blasphemy. Second, I don’t tolerate when Flash is required to see textual page content. It’s just one more way for advertisers to restrict your freedom to choose. I refuse to visit such sites, and as usual, I sent a message to the webmaster.

Not that it matters. That type of organization is all about money to support their elitist lifestyle, and everything else is secondary. Forcing me to actually pay attention to advertising on the Internet is simply not an option; it’s a violation of the fundamental principle behind the operation of the Net. I don’t bother getting all cranky, threatening and hostile. I simply decide in advance it won’t matter what the message may be, if it comes at that price, it can’t be important. In this case, I proved to my own satisfaction that was literally true.

Posted in computers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Medium Destroys the Message

A Gulf of Doubt

Posted on July 28, 2010 by ehurst

It’s a doctrine of record here you can’t trust the mainstream news sources. Why should we now assume they tell the truth about the Gulf Oil Disaster? Have you been there? And why should we give all credence to a few cranks who put videos on YouTube? I’m sure none of those videos ever turned out to be false, right?

I suppose the initial disaster — the explosion and fire on the platform — did happen. That’s covered from too many angles. I’m not at all sure what was on the seabed underneath it. Yeah, they were drilling, but aside from a batch of grainy videos, we have no direct evidence what they found. We do have a lot of stories from experts about what went wrong, but frankly the sources of information are quite few. I’m not in a position to know whom to trust.

In at least some cases, the alternative sources are being gamed. The latest comes with the name Ken Price attached, and he says this thing is just a rather common grade asphalt volcano, not a high-pressure blow out from deep earth petroleum. He denies there is a second leak some distance away, which contradicts directly some other high profile experts. Price says it’s all about an excuse to spray a few tons of Corexit and kill or poison coastal folks intentionally.

Then we hear there are massive subsurface plumes, saw videos of flyovers with vast swathes of floating goop, and yet now we hear they can’t find much of anything. One group claims a high degree of methane release, but the doomsday scenarios of massive bubbles are now regarded as silly. Way too many of these reports, either with the MSM or alternative offerings, seem to come out with only a single source, or sources hard to identify.

I suppose what is not in doubt is the vast number of people getting sick from what obviously appears to be exposure to toxic chemicals, and they didn’t even have to go out on the open water. That BP representatives and US government officials are lying should be taken for granted. But we can’t seem to get a good consistent story from anyone else. There is not yet a solid organized front with genuine experts lined up in large numbers like we have for debunking the official 9/11 story. Never mind which story line you accept from them, as there are several, we have a pretty solid foundation on disproving the official lie. We don’t have that with the Gulf Oil Disaster.

So we got a platform explosion, lots of something petroleum based in the water, but no one knows how much, or what precisely it is, in part because anything of that nature would separate some on the mile-long journey to the surface. We have reason to believe a bunch of stuff was dumped in the water, and they keep calling it Corexit, and there is much wrangling between BP and government on it. We have a lot folks being jerked around, lots of boats of all types all over the place, and apparently serious friction between state or local governments and the BP/government folks. We have disaster response folks flocking to the Gulf Coast, but many are not getting any work. And BP is seriously stiffing a lot of people on promises and contracts. Finally, hundreds of people are getting seriously ill from exposure to something toxic which can be carried on the wind.

There are stories of fake cleanup efforts, crews which come only when some public official is en route, and disappear right behind the official. Stained beaches aplenty, and lots of folks getting that brown goop on them. Stories of sand trucked in to simply cover up the stained beaches, or stained sand buried, and lots of clean-up waste disposed of illegally.

Plus we have reports of several other petroleum spills, all quite close together in time, but scattered around the US. Everyone denies they are connected. I don’t buy that, but it’s another question. I can’t pretend to discern any motives for all this, any nefarious plans and conspiracies, simply because the whole thing smells like one big pile of conspiracy, perhaps in competition.

Something — a whole lot of it — is missing. We have a lot more questions than we have answers.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on A Gulf of Doubt

God’s Justice and War (Updated)

Posted on July 27, 2010 by ehurst

Among the many stories you’ll find regarding the Wikileaks release of secret government reports on the warfare in Afghanistan, you may note the complaint by some officials this threatens the safety of troops and operations.

The primary issue at hand is massive and senseless civilian casualties. That is, we are slaughtering thousands of innocent bystanders. Troops are trained to kill and break stuff, but we proclaim so loudly to all the rest of the world these actions must be taken with some reasonable care to prevent harming innocent bystanders. Maybe it’s hard for our troops to differentiate, as we heard so often back when we were trying to subdue Vietnam. They don’t play fair? Fine, we’ll nuke `em all, right?

Where did we get the notion there was some moral obligation to avoid harming non-combatants? It goes back to the values proclaimed at the dawn of Western Civilization, and particularly as pressed upon warriors by the Western Church. While I maintain the Western Church gets most things wrong in one way or another, this is one thing they got right. All the way back to the Old Testament, we find the only justification for harming non-combatants is when God specifically pronounces judgment on a nation, typically for some deeply ingrained commitment to their own horrendous practices. To wit: The Canaanites who willingly burned alive their own firstborns in the arms of Molech, the bronze oven god. Or the Amalekites who had a religious conviction Israel must be exterminated. God alone gets to decide this.

Guess what? God is no longer in that business. That’s because no one is qualified. There is no longer any nation vested with such authority, or the authorized mechanism for discerning such commands. This is unlikely to change since there is not a single government on earth today with the faintest interest in doing things God’s way according to any covenant offered in Scripture. Any imaginary nation seeking to adhere to such a covenant has to actually commit to it publicly first, then they can talk about getting a word from God about such things. Not in mere lip service, but that nation has to be sincere, and it has to be a credible commitment evidenced by laws and conduct. No, not 100% every breathing citizen, but a majority, obviously. So when we find some nation meeting that test, we might be able to discuss it, but as long as there are no takers, no one can justify significant civilian casualties in battle.

Further, there is ample evidence most of these casualties are the result of bad faith. That is, for whatever reason, the troops on the ground knowingly commit war crimes. Official policy is not an excuse, even by the military code of law which applies. That the reviewing officials find no violation of policy does not absolve anyone on the moral level, nor under any imaginary International Law. Insofar as there might be a plausible war crimes tribunal or some such review, the US and her troops would justly face serious sanctions. Either way, it doesn’t take a legal eagle to recognize we as a nation are morally responsible for some really awful stuff.

And it puts us on par morally with some of the nations Israel was commanded to wipe off the face of the earth. The greatest threat to our troops is not the publication of our sinful secrets, but our sins in secret. By refusing to restrain them, we have called down upon our own heads the wrath of God. May the Lord continue ripping the cover off all sin, holding them up for public ridicule.

Update: A few wiser heads have noted the supposed “revelations” in these leaked documents say nothing new. Indeed, it appears the whole thing may be little more than propaganda theater, since reading this pile of reports seems to indicate little more than the warmongering elite already wanted you to believe. “It’s all Iran’s fault, and we have to go to war to stop them!”

Yes, no doubt there are a great many “ideological sympathisers” of the Taliban’s Shiite-hating Sunni extremists among the, er, Shiites in Iran. But such nuances don’t matter; all that matters is that you get some headlines out there about “Iran’s covert operations in Afghanistan.”

The only effect this has on my thesis above is to support it.

Posted in religion, social sciences | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on God’s Justice and War (Updated)

Dangerous Rule of Law

Posted on July 26, 2010 by ehurst

I keep hearing from a large number of commentators and friends on the necessity of “rule of law” — a sacred cow doctrine born from a rejection of God.

The entire concept of modern democratic government arises from two sources. First is the perverted doctrines of Judaism which turned God into a body of legal precedent abstracted from the Covenant of Moses. The Hellenized rationalist approach to understanding Moses amounts to a rejection of Moses, since the God of Moses was all about personal relations which cannot be abstracted. Jesus fought this with His life by calling people back to a living relationship to God. Yet, somehow we have an entire two millennia of Church History which finds church leaders apparently accepting the view of the Pharisees, by agreeing with their approach to understanding the Bible.

Second is the secular rationalist Enlightenment influences. The leading lights of this intellectual movement understood that to embrace the Aristotelian epistemology — the way of structuring knowledge — one could not include any notice of God or any other deity. That epistemology rules out any acceptance of revelation, at least as it applies to the real world and human behavior. You can believe and love anything you like, but this god business can’t be analyzed without destroying it, so we might as well just set it aside, put it in a category or superstition where it can’t get in the way. Frankly, this is a more honest handling than the entire record of Western Church theology.

So we come to that grand American Experiment as the ultimate expression arising from the Treaty of Westphalia, and all those movements in Europe which sought to reclaim what they thought was meant by the Greek and Roman classical literature. This brings us to that heresy known as the Rule of Law.

Here we have this notion which comes across as a body of obvious truth about what man is, what he can and should be, and how we build a frame of government and social order to achieve that great untapped potential. And while the debate about various elements within this solid and oh-so-sacred structure continue with time, it assumes the rules of debate must follow known laws itself, so that logic is consistently maintained.

Except, nobody ever does it for more than a few spare minutes. The first bunch who seize upon this stuff contains a mere handful of rare true believers, while the vast majority are opportunists waiting their chance. So the true believers get to set it up and the opportunists help them by craftily tweaking things here and there, but keeping it seeming pure and true to theory. Once it has been put into place by whatever means, the opportunists quickly and quietly displace the true believers, typically sounding and acting the same as those true believers, but convinced there is a better way to get it done in the actual execution, and maybe profit a bit on the side.

In other words, it is utterly impossible to root out the personal element. This Rule of Law is more like Pie in the Sky. It has not ever stood more than a brief span before the reality of human nature takes over. The people who truly buy into it never have the drive to sacrifice enough to make it work, and they are the majority. There is this tiny minority with the drive to run things, and they virtually never believe in it, but are cynical enough to play the rest for fools. There has never been any human government honest beyond the lifespan of the one honest guy in charge. So the best you can hope for is one, maybe two generations, and then it’s gone.

It has been tried, again and again, throughout human history. It has always failed. We have had some fairly enlightened dynasties, but never has any elective process kept an honest government. Notice: It requires a non-democratic process to even come close to decent government. It’s random at best, but when you build a government which is founded on popular will, it cannot help but fail. The popular will is too easily manipulated by those with the drive to power and wealth, and that ambition arises directly from evil motives. The only people who win elections are those singularly unfit to rule.

Nothing we can imagine, or structure by our great Aristotelian logic will ever change the fundamental nature of fallen humanity. If you don’t start with the core assertion man is fallen, sinful by nature, even when decent in most social settings, you cannot hope to understand what it takes to make a good government, a just social order. Funny how that truth is rejected by the same people who insist on the analytical approach. If you analyze all the samples available, you are forced to conclude — for whatever reason — mankind is incapable of Rule of Law for more than a brief span of time.

So what we end up with is some core group of elites who are quite sure no one else understands, and they take over. But instead of actually being good rulers, they are always the worst possible. Eventually they discard any pretense and simply crush everyone who dares to question their expertise. Tyranny is the natural end product of every democracy; it is the nature of the beast.

God’s revelation comes to us in what is these days an entirely foreign epistemology, going back far before Aristotle. It assumes you will spend some time considering how that revelation applies, and you will be held responsible for reading between the lines. That is, you will look at what is stated, and realize that is merely a bare manifestation of truth, not the truth itself. You absorb the truth; you don’t construct it by discovery. It is your duty to work back from the words to the assumptions so very hard to put in words. That’s because the truth of what makes for a good and just society is a Person, and truth is best understood as a living being, not some disembodied matrix of ideas.

That epistemology — that path to knowing — shows us the only government you can and should trust is your own family. That is, any government which attempts to usurp any portion of what families do when left to themselves is evil government. You can make the family household responsible for certain results in the broad sense, but civil government has zero claim on the internal processes until those internal processes leak out and interfere with others. Yet because of our modern Aristotelian approach, we cannot hope to find such a view of things unless this is clearly stated somewhere. Sorry, but as far as God is concerned, it’s so obvious it need not be stated, since it is written into the very soul of every human who can think.

So when you read the narrative of God’s revelation — always a narrative, and often symbolic — you realize His Laws require the underlying structure which we label in various ways, but amounts to the extended family, household-clan-tribe social structure, and only those to whom you are related can govern your daily life. Not the Rule of Law, but the Rule of Love — the rulers are bound to you by blood. Sure, they can be cranky idiots, but the risk of such on the balance of things is still far, far better than the guaranteed failure of democracy.

Rule of Law is a fable, a fantasy, pure fiction. The fundamental truth of the universe is knowable only in terms of personal relationships, because the very essence of Truth is a Person. This understanding is the one God Himself presented to humanity. Any other understanding, and any other social order than what He revealed, is doomed as sinful. Thus, I teach again and again, any government which does no conform to the revealed Laws of God has no claim on your allegiance; it cannot be called “legitimate.”

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Milk Wars

Posted on July 25, 2010 by ehurst

If you aren’t keeping up on Will Grigg’s Pro Libertate blog, shame on you. Let me draw your attention to his most recent post, The Regime’s War on Food.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the Regime is conducting a low-grade war against producers and consumers of raw milk — a campaign that bears an undeniable family resemblance to the murderous, decades-long farce called the War on Drugs. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that a government presuming to dictate to us what mood-altering substances we can consume would likewise presume to tell us what foods we can eat and offer to others.

Will presents something near and dear to my heart. If I want your advice on what to eat and how to eat it, I’ll ask. Otherwise, having spent most of my life studying such matters, I’ll give you one chance to butt out before I ask God’s permission to use more forceful means. While I am a pacifist by nature and religious conviction, that is hardly an absolute. One area where I generally make an exception is in the matter of being forced to accept poisoning.

I find industrial milk poisonous.

It’s one thing for a presumed authority to pronounce their best answer to any question, but when it comes to food, no one this earth who isn’t your mommy or daddy (at least, in effect) has any right forcing their food and drug choices on you. The state is not mommy or daddy, nor a proxy for them. God says so. His Laws presume no one can make such decisions for you unless they are related by blood or a covenant sworn before Him. A government which isn’t your kin is evil if it tries to enforce things which are only a family’s business. That includes food. So obvious was this provision God never bothered to state it bluntly, because it was how all mankind lived back when His Laws were published, and everyone knew instinctively it was evil to depart from it.

We’ve come a long way, baby, and it’s all in the wrong direction. Thus, it would be entirely just under God’s Laws to resist with all available force the moves of the FDA and related agencies. It may not be wise, and may not be God’s will at that moment, but in principle it is no sin to resist such a thing by violence.

Just for the record, I prefer my milk pasteurized for the most part. If I was buying from a friend or relative the milk of their own cows, I would make an exception, but my trust is highly limited. However, that is my choice under God’s leading, and I can’t presume to make that choice for anyone else.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment