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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Worms and Viruses: Government Sponsored Terror

Posted on July 25, 2010 by ehurst

At first it was just the juvenile hijinks of some very skillful hackers, who became crackers. Then they shared their goodies with wannabe crackers we called “script kiddies” and there were far more of them, so incidents rose. Then someone realized it could be profitable, and every decent cracker became either a crook or a cop, as it were, and some played both sides. But the days of merely destructive software are gone, and all of it now has a commercial purpose.

Recently, I feel certain some of it is government spying at work, disguised as criminal acts. Why not, since they often do criminal acts disguised as spying?

It need not be that some government employee or contractor actually writes a worm or virus, only that they make use of one for their own purposes. For example, this Stuxnet beast infecting machines running SCADA software. While the Forbes blogger notes the scanning data from Symantec is biased, you have to wonder if this isn’t some signal to those watching. That is, given the report says most of the infections are in Iran’s SCADA networks, stealing data on their electricity generation and transmission, it screams at us someone is using it to spy on Iran for purely political reasons.

It makes not a whit of difference where the bot-herder is based, since the CIA is everywhere, and can hire anybody with our tax dollars for the most unconscionable evils, and a great many CIA agents possess no conscience in the first place. So if you follow this line of thinking, and consider there are other US clandestine agencies composed of sociopaths who serve the state as god, other wide-spread computer infections might well be under their control.

Remember, they are sociopaths, and no amount of harm to no amount of citizens makes any difference, except as a perverse form of entertainment. They get paid to destroy the taxpayers who provide their salaries. That any such infection of virus or worm also affects many who are not targeted is simply collateral damage. For such people, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. Given Microsoft, and most every other major corporation with lobbyists, is in cahoots with the federal government (despite appearances and noisy prosecutions which accomplish nothing), might it not help to explain their lackadaisical attitude about fixing known flaws?

If it were my job to develop and run such spying programs, you can be sure such ideas would cross my mind, and I’m not especially bright.

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Laws and the Lawgiver

Posted on July 24, 2010 by ehurst

Lately I’ve run into people who just don’t grasp the most basic assumptions behind the Law Covenants in the Bible. As always, we have to start from the assumption God nurtured and created a specific language and culture after the Fall, building a frame of reference in which to reveal Himself to fallen mankind. While a culture can include a lot of trash, and plenty of things which are simply contextually derived from the roots, we must grasp the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) Hebrew culture, essentially founded in the life of Abraham, as the single point of reference, the fundamental matrix of assumptions, the one proper intellectual framework and viewpoint, on which all revelation is built.

We know about things prior to Abraham because he was the one who carried the knowledge, and he is the one who interprets what they mean. He was a scholar among his own kind, educated in the vast array of ancient literature no longer available to us. When the Lord called him and brought his spirit to life, he was in the unique position of setting the precedent on what is necessary to operate under the Spirit of God. That he failed at points serves only to verify that, in that how he failed shows how it works. Paul points out there is a dual legacy from Abraham, one earthly and one spiritual. The latter is what really matters, but is hard to know unless we grasp something of the former.

Moses was another gatekeeper. His gate was much narrower. His mission was to insert into the stream of history a very specialized expression of God’s revelation on the level of the earthly, a covenant of Laws. His work served to filter Abraham’s legacy for a particular purpose, and his forty days with God on Mount Sinai included editorial guidance on what to write among the various threads of oral legacy handed down from Abraham. What Moses left for us in the Torah was a distillation, something which assumed the reader would read between the lines in order the grasp the nature of the Domain of the Spirit.

His primary focus was the part any fallen man could grasp, the Covenant of the Law as the gateway to the Spirit. Even in his legal writing, with a literal application in the rituals of the Covenant, the first generation to read this Law Covenant read it from the mystical ANE Hebraic approach. They might struggle to use the symbolic language, but there was no doubt their cultural background presumed a higher meaning to all such literature.

The baldly literal approach of the Pharisees in Jesus’ day were the result of a cultural shift, drifting away from the intellectual culture of Abraham and Moses. That slippage came in stages, beginning with the sins of Jeroboam, which wallowed in the fundamental temptation to be inclusive of the local pagan rituals. The Canaanites spoke a similar language, and their rituals were quite familiar to the Hebrew nation. Jeroboam said, in essence, the distinction between Jehovah and the Baal/Ashtarte collection was of no significance. Then there was the broad human political wisdom of statecraft. The Northern Kingdom became quite adept, but also quite evil at the same time. Once that bunch was taken away because of that evil, Judah was stupid enough to chase the same human wisdom.

In the Exile which resulted from their sin, Judah was introduced to the vast depth of ancient religious literature which had always been kept in the libraries of Mesopotamia, from which background Abraham went out. They bought into the worldly wisdom of that broad education and the religious assumptions of the Babylonian Imperial house. Then came the Medo-Persian conquest and their peculiar assumptions under Zoroastrianism. The latter introduced a very intellectual frame of reference that all deities were on the same team, but it also brought in a very hedonistic money-based view of life. It was like a one-two knockout punch against the Abrahamic culture: Babylon’s ancient ethos that everything in heaven and earth had a price in gold, and Persia’s expansion on that same idea with the notion rulers could be inherently divine in a certain sense, and the Hebrews were ripe for Satan’s harvest.

The returnees in a short time ended up with a greedy, worldly Messianic expectation of political world conquest. It was their destiny from God’s hand to own all the wealth of the world, and be masters over all humanity, enslaving everyone who wasn’t a Son of the Law. But it was Law for which they no longer had a good fundamental grasp. Along comes Greek rationalism in the wake of Alexander’s conquests and this was the final stake in the heart of Hebraic culture. It wasn’t simply the Pharisees, but the entire range of Judean leadership — nobles, priests, scholars, etc. — were deeply enamored with the analytical rationalist approach of Aristotle and friends. And while they tried to keep their mystical grasp of God, that mysticism was so thoroughly compromised; it was at best a caricature of how Abraham viewed things.

They exchanged deep mysticism for shallow abstract logic, symbolism for mere allegory, and the divine ineffable truth in parabolic language became a baldly literal legalism. The Bible cannot be read with a literal mindset, or you will miss everything that matters. When God’s ancient declarations seem contradictory, it’s because you are mired in a concrete logical frame of reference while trying to read a symbolic mystical revelation.

When you approach it properly, you realize there is no way a fallen human on this earth can possibly hope to grasp the Divine from mere human intellect. That intellect is fallen, damaged, entirely subject to the failures of sinful nature. The very nature of the Fall was choosing to put human intellect on the throne of life’s choices, versus enslaving the intellect to serve the spiritual element. That choice in the Garden killed the spiritual link which was our birthright. Only God can restore it. When He does, you spend the rest of this life struggling to reconstruct the dominance of the spirit over the mind, much as the mind must dominate the flesh.

A critical element in that renewed order of things in the human soul is the realization you cannot reconcile all the apparent paradoxes and discontinuities of Scripture until your spirit rules your mind. That mind must be renovated under the ANE Hebraic mystical orientation of Abraham, so it can better learn to implement the unspeakable strategies of the Spirit of God delivered in the spirit He births. God’s Laws are not God. They are mere manifestations of someone who cannot be contained in words, thoughts of the intellect, or any other part of this fallen world. God can command His servants to do something which is ostensibly contrary to His Laws because His Laws cannot possibly contain the whole truth of what God demands of humanity. Yes, that is a very dangerous place to stand, because men with evil in their hearts can use that as an excuse for all sorts of nastiness. People who walk in the spirit will know the difference. That is God’s promise.

The tension between the Laws on one hand, and the inexpressible demands of the Spirit on the other, is the place God has built for His people. Get used to it. A final and all encompassing objective standard is not going to happen. Your standard is Jesus Christ, a Person. You cannot objectify the living Son of God.

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Joe Jobs and Other Net Attacks

Posted on July 23, 2010 by ehurst

Someone managed to trash my first Gmail account in a “Joe Job”. That’s where someone spoofs your name and email address and commits naughty acts which get you in trouble.

A few years back when Google Mail was brand new, I got an invite and set up my account. I used that address for people I didn’t know or didn’t trust. Much as I like Gmail, it’s still a throwaway, something not essential for my life. It’s nice the account unlocks other Google services, but only my Blogger account gets used for much.

You should never rely on free services for anything which really matters to you. Those people don’t know you, and don’t know when some idiot is masquerading as you. They can’t even really secure it from relatively light-weight cracking attacks, so treat it as expendable. Always maintain at least four such free accounts and make sure the people with whom you really need to maintain contact know all of them. I have at least a half-dozen on different services, and keep track of a half-dozen more free servics just in case I need a fresh one quickly. Just Google for “free webmail” and you’ll never run short. It helps if, like me, you can read a couple of foreign languages and register accounts on services in countries which use those languages.

It was with my old Gmail account I contacted the service provider for a spammer who was posting links to pornography one of my blogs. Turns out the service provider was the spammer. He cracked my Gmail account, registered for a large number of high traffic forums, then proceeded to post his nasty porno pictures on each one. Then he changed his domain registration and I couldn’t find him again. Meanwhile, all these fine people sent me torrents of angry messages about those nasty forum posts. Most had never heard of me, and haven’t heard from me since. I had to close that old Gmail account.

One forum he found I already had an account, the Ubuntu support forums. I contacted the admin from another address and explained the situation, and made sure my old account was deleted. He recognized the porn spam was not at all my style, and assured me I could create a new account any time I needed. He had experienced the bruising of a Joe Job himself.

People who know you will not believe it when they see something like that. Those are the folks who can always find you if you have to close one or more free accounts. For the folks who don’t know you well, you’ll just have to work at keeping track of those who matter for whatever reason. Not every one you meet in virtual space is worth that effort, and it doesn’t always mean it’s because they aren’t nice people. However, it typically does mean that. Some of them are predators of various kinds looking to take whatever they can for their use or simply for their entertainment. I won’t pretend to analyze the motives of them all, but the world is full of folks who would not missed if they disappeared. They are well represented on the Net, in part because it is so very easy to get away with things you can’t pull off in the real world.

It helps if you aren’t stupid enough to provoke people needlessly. This is another of the Net psychology things, in that most people act differently on the Net than any other part of their lives. It’s like “flaming” — sending vicious messages through email, Usenet or forums. Some of those people understand the Net better than you, and can do some very nasty things to you. I don’t regret hammering that spammer, even if he turned out to be running his own service. You can let a lot of stuff slide, but when they don’t quit after once or twice, you have to act any way you can. When deleting the filth didn’t work, I traced the source and complained. I should have taken it up one level, but I had no way of knowing that.

At any given time, I’m only a couple of incidents away from simply dropping off the Net. That is, while I would surely keep some things alive if I could, blogging is not a “have-to” thing. None of the forums are essential to my life. The people I really need to talk to know where to find me, and I can always get hold of them in other ways. If you have friends on the Net you truly value, now would be a good time to elicit their snail-mail address, phone number, or other means of contact.

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I Won’t Do Facebook

Posted on July 22, 2010 by ehurst

At one time I had a Facebook account. It was a  bad move.

The only reason I have a computer is communications. My first and deepest need regarding computers is writing. That was my first and primary use for one when I first put my hands on a keyboard back in 1989. Had it advanced not at all beyond DOS and word processors, I would have found it worthwhile to own one. That and a printer.

Since that time, I’ve done a lot of writing. I’ve also learned my way around the Internet, but mostly a way of researching for my writing. Then I learned about email, and finally blogging. That’s far enough. Whether people want to read what I write is another matter; I write and publish on the Net. I play precious few games — mostly the logical puzzle games — and I don’t do social media. The only interest I have in computers, and the reason for my extensive discussion here about computer technology and software, is because it’s a great tool for communication.

The reason I hate Facebook is only partially due to the medium. I am called to the gospel ministry, and that’s the whole point in all that writing in the first place. It’s what matters to me, and everything else I do must serve that purpose. On Facebook I was constantly pestered by friends whose only interest was the silly social gaming, mostly junk from Zynga. Let’s get this straight: I despise Zynga games. They create an artificial atmosphere of something which resembles friendship, but actually you interact only with the game, not each other. The game gets in the way.

Want to chat? Fine. I’m usually on both Yahoo Chat and Google Talk under the username “br073n” (bee-arr-zero-seven-three-enn). Want to discuss faith and current events? Yes, let’s do that. Oh, wait. No one does that on Facebook. No, everyone I know, or those who know me, want to play silly games, want me to install this or that useless idiotic plugin, etc. So I politely declined. They kept asking. What should I do? Get hostile? I’m not sure most folks would notice. The people who use Facebook aren’t there to communicate.

Facebook is nothing more than an extravagant advertising platform, designed to get folks who know you to pressure you into looking at more advertising. The games themselves quickly become unplayable if you don’t purchase in-game credits. If I post important stuff, or even the silly things I end up posting on this blog, no one is going to pay much attention to them. Believe me; I tried it with a couple dozen posts. I wrote about things which really mattered to me. Out of some two dozen friends, I got a single comment on one such post.

I don’t have much room in my life for those games. They are worse than TV at keeping you from things which matter. Indeed, it would be much more important for people if they simply learned to sit in contemplative and prayerful silence instead of clicking their mouse in games specifically designed to prevent real communion.

Don’t send me invitations to join Facebook. Send me email, start a blog and tell me the URL, post comments to my blog, or join me at Sakamuyo (gone). Invite me to join a good discussion forum you frequent. But until the atmosphere at Facebook chances, forget it.

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Violence Rising

Posted on July 22, 2010 by ehurst

In general, I avoid TV. I won’t try to present the arguments and research here, but TV watching is promoted only because it has a subtle hypnotic effect. This effect is denied by the primary victims, and proven repeatedly in every honest lab test available on the subject. The act of giving that device your attention will cause you to suspend at least a portion of your normal reasoning process, will degrade the filters we all have to test whether perception is reality. The effect is not absolute, in that the less you watch TV, the weaker it is. So I carefully select when I’ll give that time. I never watch national news for more than a few moments, because it is by far one of the most egregious forms of manipulation. Local news broadcasts are at least marginally useful, if only so you can learn what local politicians want you to focus on, while they do their nasty deeds in the background.

Local news channels live and die by sensational reporting. If nothing is happening, they’ll always pull out some filler, but if there is anything which can be portrayed dramatically, that always trumps everything else. While specific stories are most certainly spiked by local editors, who are kept in line by any number of inducements and threats from higher up the chain, in general: If it bleeds, it leads. So you can be sure if there is a violent incident, it will be on the air, albeit surely highly slanted.

Thus, we can discern at least one basic fact of our local situation. If there is more violent crime, you’ll see more stories about it on the local news channels. There are known factors which contribute to provoking more crime from the folks who typically do them. You might expect more crime when the weather is hot, because fools who lose their temper do so more frequently and with greater effect when the weather is hot. If they are poor and out of work, all the more so, since they are bored and don’t have much access to air conditioning.

Density of the various contributing factors is a consideration, of course. If only a few folks in a poor shack town are out of work, the crime will be unreported, because most of it will be amongst their own kind. As more of them lose that income, they have to find other prey, which means folks in the better neighborhoods. Then it gets reported on the news. Along with these considerations are the trends in the types of crimes. So for example, stealing copper is pretty big right now, because recently the price one could get for scrap copper went up. The easily accessible copper infrastructure which no one bothered before is now a high-value target for theft. In times past it was movable electronic entertainment devices. Trends are noted by the experts, and sometimes that makes the news.

Having once served in law enforcement, I am familiar with the statistical trends. When you account for those trends, I would say we are beginning to see the first wave of economically based violence. That is, we are seeing locally a wave of crime which cannot be explained merely by the current heat wave, because the nature of the violence is not random enough. It’s much more purposeful. Most of it arises as a contingency to economic crimes. More and more of the perpetrators are not members of the typically defined “criminal class.” Statistics are about to be shaken out of place.

Net result: Folks in flyover country are about to experience a crime rate more consistent with major urban centers. At the same time, agents for public order are more likely to escalate, rather than deescalate tensions. We are seeing the results of a higher degree of dependence on government, with an increasing inability to deliver on the promises which justified that dependence. But in order to maintain that dependence, government-sponsored violence against civilians will rise precipitously. So there is a collision of greater desperation among the general population as government policies remove life support, more aggressively interfere with self-reliance, at the same time mindlessly crushing anything which resembles mere dissent.

Not everyone in the system is aware of it all. Most of the enforcers, for example, are not informed they are pawns in an ugly game. For decades their training has increasingly aimed at making them intolerant of normal human behavior. Most cops have a deeply perverted sense of what to expect in their daily encounters with the civilian population. Most bureaucrats aren’t aware the entire regulatory system assumes dehumanizing people is a good; they simply absorb it and become less human themselves. There is, however, at some level a pervasive intelligent evil at work creating this impossible situation.

This isn’t your ordinary crime wave resulting from perceived loss of comfort. This is a diabolical provocation, a carefully structured incitement equivalent to chasing down rats and cornering them. Everyone denies it, yet no other explanation covers it. Christian Mystics cannot afford to let this pass unnoticed. In the coming days, even years, we must carefully note how God is granting those who reject the norm — humans steered by conscious awareness of convictions — enough rope to hang themselves. The dead souls channeling our Enemy will succeed in the sense of creating chaos, but they do not realize it will overtake them, too. In the midst of the storm, surely severe beyond imagining, we can see where this is going. Our hope is the divine sanity of clinging to ineffable truth.

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