Illegal Israel

Posted on July 12, 2010 by ehurst

This is a follow up to Poor Little Me.

It makes no difference if Israel can justify their actions regarding the Gaza Flotilla and subsequent aid missions under modern laws and human expectations. One standard alone matters: Was it according to the Covenant by which they claim to be a nation?

Israel is quite secular, but she claims to be a nation of Jews. The Bible doesn’t actually use that word “Jew,” since it wasn’t written in English. Still, we all know the term is derived from what should have been translated “Judean.” The identity of a nation since ancient times was a matter of affiliation recognized by the in-group. To be a Judean meant you placed yourself under the laws of Judeans, that being the Covenant of Moses, however corrupt their understanding might be at different times. (BTW, the Treaty of Westphalia and it’s provisions regarding what constitutes a legitimate state and government are all completely against the Bible.)

The God of the Bible permits little argument on this point: To be a member of the Nation of Israel — or what was left of it after God removed the northern kingdom — means obeying His Law. In other words, there is no such thing as a secular Jew. If you are not faithfully practicing the Laws, you are not a Jew. The Law requires ceremonially ostracizing anyone who refuses to abide by the Law, unless they do something to justify execution. The term “Jew” requires being under the Law of Moses. Thus, the entire modern state is illegitimate, as noted in the previous post. However, since it’s all on the stage now, let’s deal with the reality of things. If the modern state of Israel acts contrary to the Law of Moses, they are wrong. Simple as that.

They are judged by the standards well established in the Old Testament. Viewed as a whole, we know modern Israel failed at every step of the way. They did not have a mandate to conquer the inhabitants of the land simply because those inhabitants weren’t Canaanites who sacrificed their children on the altar of Molech, nor worshiped any Baals or Ashtartes, etc. They didn’t have temples with prostitutes of any persuasion, nor did they sin in any of the ways God found worthy of genocide. In other words, whomever was there back in 1900 or so were just fine, and God didn’t call anyone to remove them. The notion there was no one there is a blatant lie.

For Jews to move into the land, they were obliged to do so peacefully. They were obliged to avoid provoking their neighbors, and certainly were not permitted to engage in terrorism. But they did. Look up the name “Irgun” — current members of the Israeli political scene were members of that terrorist organization. Now, granted some of their terrorist acts were against the UK, which was part of the arrogant Western nations thinking they had some divine right to make everyone in the world behave according to their own unbiblical standards, but the point is those claiming to be Jews badly mistreated the local population with zero justification under God’s Laws.

They still do. Look, everyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty can see this whole thing is fake. Mossad is responsible for Hamas (in the same way al-Qaeda is a CIA creation), responsible for every stinking toy rocket flying out of Gaza and the West Bank. Almost everything which appears in the mainstream press, including Wikipedia, is a lie. I don’t say that lightly. I really do wish there was a Jewish population in Palestine living according the Law of Moses. It would prove to all the world how nations ought to conduct their business. Deception is not part of that, yet Mossad’s own motto is “By deception will you make war.” The very meaning of “Orwellian” lies, reversing the standard meaning of words in every language, is drawn from the example of Mossad and Israel. Even the missiles coming out of Lebanon are mostly launched by agents of Mossad. Almost everything you hear in the mainstream press about Israel is a lie, because modern Israel wants to fool the whole world.

So it won’t matter a whit how various nations, maritime laws, etc., view what Israel does with Gaza and the flotilla, because every justification is one Israelis created themselves. What matters is whether Israel is acting according to Moses. I’ll give you hint: They are not even close.

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JavaScript Still a Mistake

Posted on July 11, 2010 by ehurst

In my research, I read an awful lot of sites I really don’t recommend. Most of them for the content, but a few have infuriating use of JavaScript (AKA JScript or ECMAScript). Some sites are run by technicians who clearly hate most of humanity. One page in particular I can detect something scripted chugging away in the background, hammering my Athlon X2 at 20% steadily. The script does nothing at all, and as soon as I turn off scripting on that page, the chugging stops and it makes not a whit of difference in how the page displays. But I read that site because the author has a peculiar viewpoint which serves as a reference point on many issues I follow. He is usually partly correct, while reliably wrong in the same consistent fashion every time.

Because I don’t tolerate peripheral animation of any kind on any webpage, it requires learning to use several different tools. I’ve contacted that peculiar author about his page, and he refuses to respond. For example, his server blocks the Lynx browser, which is a common error among webmasters who wrongly associate such tools with cracking. It’s the same class of webmaster I accuse of intellectual laziness, paying no heed whatsoever to user complaints about how a page works. If they like it themselves, public be damned. That so many writers are not also webmasters means the pairing of interesting output with hateful service all too often.

A few times, my close friends have played with JScript features which hammered my system. At such a high cost, I would sometimes avoid their sites, until I began learning how to “fight back” as it were. Sites which rely on heavy scripting are simply wrong-headed when the scripting requires continuous or frequent response by the browser. With inhumane webmasters and the culture of “that’s so cool,” gee-whiz crap on their pages, you can’t let them drive you away. It takes a little work, but the tools are available.

As noted previously, when a server blocks Lynx, try Elinks (or on Windows, WebbIE). If you really do need a partially graphical output because the page is incomprehensible in a text browser, I highly recommend you check out the latest release of Opera browser. It’s different, and frankly deficient in many ways, but it has one big advantage: built in customizing of the interface toolbars.

Here’s what I do. Right-click on the bottom toolbar in a blank space; your one option is “Customize”. Click that and select from the submenu “Appearance.” You’ll get a menu window with all sorts of options. Click the tab which says “Buttons” and in the right-hand window pane, select “Preferences”. Full drag-n-drop here. Drag from that display the buttons you want to see on your bottom toolbar; I prefer to push them all to the far right against the built-in controls for zooming. I keep the following, which ends up looking like check boxes with text to the right:

  • Enable Animated Images
  • Enable JavaScript
  • Enable Plug-Ins
  • Enable Cookies

On the fly, you can simply disable any of those features by removing the checkmark in the box. Most of the time I leave cookies turned off, and turn them on for sites I trust. If I notice on any particular page some heavy CPU use in my GKrellM monitor, I click off JScipt and that usually stops the CPU churning immediately. If I need to see a video, I can turn on the plug-ins for that page only.

Once you feel sure you’ll be visiting a particular site often, you can always right-click on any blank spot in the page and select “Edit Site Preferences” which allows you toggle a large number of options for that site only. If a page includes elements you never want to see, that same right-click menu allows you to select “Block content”. All the typical media elements are highlighted and the rest of the page goes dim. Pick the one which annoys you and tell Opera to block the source everywhere you go. That’s how I prevent seeing racy pictures and such. Some sites I end up having no graphics at all, just color and layout, because they just can’t behave themselves.

Sometimes I really need to see the textual content, and I’m willing to take a second or two to manipulate how that page runs in my browser. There are similar controls available for Firefox, but I find them far less simple to use. Google’s Chrome browser has precious few controls, even in the add-ons. For example, there is absolutely nothing you can do about animated graphics. I can assure you this is the Orwellian advertiser/marketing side of Google showing through; that is Google’s main source of income, after all. Like Microsoft, users are the product delivered to advertisers — that’s the nature of their business. So if you really need to see something on a site which seems intent on demanding too much from you, take advantage of some of the better features in web browsers.

My number one complaint remains oppressively heavy JScript pounding on my system resources. There simply is no excuse for that. Yes, advertising is necessary to pay for some sites, but I reserve the right to block unacceptable material and scripting as the steward of my Lord’s computer, and thus the eyes and mind He gave me. His concerns outweight yours every time.

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Poor Little Me

Posted on July 10, 2010 by ehurst

While it’s obvious not every one in the world carries this particular weakness, far, far too many can be driven into a defensive mindset. Put them together in a group, and it gets downright ugly. Then there are those who make it the primary assertion of their religion. (Caveat: Only fools will struggle with my choice of terms here. Wise people will allow the context to define the words. Semantic wrangling is foreign to true faith.)

Scan the writings of those who profess Judaism, and you will see throughout history those writings carry a sense of sorrow over oppression. In recent centuries, this is inevitably paired with a militant spirit of fighting back on some level. In ancient times, bearing sorrow was taken for granted. Do the right thing and you’ll always be in trouble. The very existence of Judaism is a slap in the face of all other religions. Of course, when you realize the Bible says that was partly the whole point of revelation, you take it for granted.

In other words, God made it clear from the very start walking in His ways would always bring you trouble from those who don’t. It’s never going to be so simple as you’ll have nothing but trouble, because the Word of God promises there are distinct benefits in this life of seeking to obey His Laws. And those Laws tend to make a nation rather friendly to others, mostly by teaching you to leave other folks in peace when you can. Share the revelation of God, but live it first so they’ll ask. Show them how well it works. If they react with uncomprehending envy, God will defend you. If they pay attention, God will make you a witness. You can’t choose for them how they will react.

But to assume the worst is not part of that revelation. Bad times come and go, and you don’t get too wrapped up in either the good or the bad. You get wrapped up in doing what’s right regardless of the costs. Somewhere along the way, the Nation of Israel slipped away from that ancient attitude, and fully embraced the wisdom of fallen man. At the same time, they bought into the common arrogance of nations, thinking they were the center of the universe, bearing the only really right way of living. So when they went away from God’s call to depend entirely on Him, they were most sure they were right. Their prophets say that. The problem was they drifted so very far away, they completely lost touch with the ancient mindset, so that they hardly understood any longer what the Law was actually demanding of them.

When God sent His own Son to correct that problem, they rejected Him. At this point, they no longer even knew their own God, and He decided their purpose on earth was done. They rejected that, too, of course. Their false concept of God would not permit it. In reality, they had some other god, one which was a product of their imagination. That imagination included an unbreakable closed circle of logic: They alone understood God and any suggestion of misunderstanding was blasphemous on the face of it. Their understanding included a lot of things Jesus criticized, but the smug self-assurance, elitism, and racist arrogance (as far back as Jonah) made them intolerable to the rest of the world. They mistook insufferable hatred for holiness, and turned inward, so that any effort to continue the mission of showing truth to the world would naturally fail.

Today we have some Jewish folks who are so very reasonable, decent and civilized, trying to represent a religion which is anything but. Granted, there are threads within that religion, various schools of thought, but what the world sees is the nasty stuff associated with the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Bluntly stated, Judaism has only the most tenuous connection with the Old Testament religion of Moses. So it stands to reason the current perversion is an open insult to God, and He’s not going to help them with that. Whatever is going on right now with Jewishness is more likely the result of God’s disfavor. But at the same time, you can expect more than the normal amount of disfavor from the rest of the world. True holiness draws some negative response, but a hateful caricature of it draws universal despite, and justly so. It gains none of the promises of God.

But the Jews as a whole don’t see that. They are pawns under the manipulating hand of an elite group who actually hates them, even as it embraces something which is theirs. It’s using them and their broken religion to serve Satan, with all the hatred of life, love, liberty, truth, beauty, etc. It’s a lie, within a lie, within a lie…

Thus, Judaism itself is characterized by this sense of beleaguered persecution. Lacking the peace of internal justice from God, they have chosen to be defensive with a vengeance. Instead of embracing and owning the world, which was their spiritual birthright, they defy the world by clinging to one of the things God Himself took from them — the homeland in what we now call Palestine. By man’s power they have taken it, and are taking more of it. Even the poor benighted pagans of this world can see how every step of the way this has been utterly contrary to God’s Laws. But to help justify this, some very rich and powerful Jewish elites have ginned up a huge lie even they don’t believe, taking advantage of the ignorance of a bunch of folks who didn’t understand Jesus any better than Jews themselves. Utterly cynical. We now have several generations of highly educated fools who are wholly owned by the silly notions of Dispensationalism, because they bought into the same assumptions as the Pharisees about a lot of things. This is simply a way of enslaving a bunch of Gentiles to their dream, a bodyguard of powerful thugs who embrace the self-righteous nastiness as justified.

Today, we have this singularly troublesome state in the Middle East, highly accomplished in espionage, torture, terror, Orwellian lies, and a brand of Judaism which hates everyone who isn’t a member — Israel. Always whining about threats, they own enough nuclear weapons to destroy half the world single-handed, and their elite leaders own virtually all the banks in the world. Why don’t they just take over? I’m not sure, but I sense there is some perverted pleasure of toying with those who are so far beneath them. What kind of unspeakable dishonesty does it take for them to say they are threatened? They already rule all but a handful of nations via the banking system. And if that’s not enough, they own the companies which provide the means to control virtually every means of communication in existence. For example, they bought out Zone Labs (ZoneAlarm firewall) and rewrote the software which, even now, protects most government computer systems in the world which run Windows. In other words, the biggest single threat to all the world is Israel.

Yet they keep whining about how they are so alone and threatened.

Just sitting here reflecting on it, I find myself in little ways infected by this awful mindset. Sometimes I feel very much alone because everything I read out there either denies, lies and repeats the mantra of poor little Israel, or I see massive vile ugliness about hating Jews. If I run across Jews who embrace Moses and eschew the Talmud, and manage to read the Torah from the original Hebrew mindset (ANE Mysticism), I’ll be first in line to support them. If they just take a step in that direction, I’ll support them. How many people can simply sit down, without some big agenda to push, and discuss openly this madness which threatens to take the whole world down in flames? It has already destroyed the US, but something so big as America takes awhile to hit the ground, and it won’t happen all at once. But it makes you a little crazy when there are so few who dare to say what you are thinking, and I am not permitted by God to remain silent.

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Warning: Before It’s Too Late

Posted on July 9, 2010 by ehurst

Given the climate of things in US government, as well as that in a few other places, my ability to connect regularly to the Internet and keep this blog alive could simply stop some day without warning. At the same time, other things could happen in my life to stop my posting here, also without warning. Then again, on a different level, I’m not sure we have much room left for discussing these things. We may all soon be very busying doing, as in doing everything we can to survive.

No, it’s not hyperbole. I’m not predicting anything in particular because I’m not privy to any special plans you can’t discern for yourself. But we all have this tendency to think things are going to roll along pretty much the same, simply as a subconscious assumption. What I will say is this is the time to examine all your assumptions about life, because a great many of them may be lies told by someone else. Question your own sanity while you’re at it, but the point is you would benefit greatly by pulling more of that stuff out in the open. Conscious consideration of those things we’ve always taken for granted might save you a lot of time when you compare it with what now approaches.

If I had to guess, I’d say 6 to 12 months will see our world turned upside down. I hardly know precisely what will change, but there are some general trends. I’ll list a few on my mind right now.

Don’t assume any goodness or sanity in the US government, nor even your own state government. People in the ruling circles and those who rub shoulders with them tend to quickly isolate themselves from our daily reality. Put bluntly, they might as well be your worst enemies. Increasingly, they are less interested in simply fooling us and more interested in bluntly forcing compliance with their plans. Those plans bear no relation to our best interests.

For example, a great many tax deductions and cuts which have been in place for a long time are set to expire this year. It will feel to most of us like a huge tax increase. At the same time, a lot of state and local governments are broke, or dangerously close to it. Most of them don’t have the sense to discuss cutting programs. Indeed, if anything, most of them will be increased, particularly military budgeting. It may not have anything to do with the cause or conspiracy, but a very real result of 9/11 was killing a bunch of people and destroying records for an audit at the Pentagon of trillions of dollars gone, for which no one could account. The recent bailout did nothing to help anything except folks who already had all the wealth of the US in the first place.

The military draft has been introduced again, and conditions favor it passing for the first time in many years. There is talk of a civilian draft of sorts. And with the virtual certainty we will start a war with Iran in the next few weeks or months, warm bodies with boots on the ground there will be a necessity, without taking them from our other illegitimate warfare (colonizing efforts) around the world. It won’t matter whether those wars actually protect us from anything; there won’t be anything here worth protecting. Meanwhile, regular jobs will continue fading into the air. Obamacare will make all jobs much more expensive for those who still work.

Prices for just about everything will go up. We just had a ginned-up IMF audit of sorts on the US as a cover for excusing genuine tax increases. Life will get very expensive in every way. That evil Carbon Cap-n-Trade is going to come one way or another. While the current trend is to offer some thin cover of justification, the first time a real protest or genuine stiff resistance comes against these things, the blood will run in the streets. Some of that military-civilian draft will be for troops on our own soil who will guarantee bloodshed.

Yes, things could change, but it would only be a change to a different set of threats. Either way, things will get a lot tougher very soon. This is not meant to scare, but simply awaken. I’m still a pacifist with no intention of preparing for armed resistance. I may be moved to shoot some marauding thieves and such, but that’s another matter. I can afford to sacrifice my own safety and life, but I can’t neglect the safety of neighbors who might not be so ready for death. Still, I am in general rather eager to see Jesus, and have no hesitation facing death for the right reason. This world is not worthy of much concern, but as long as He keeps me here alive, I have a mission about which I do care very much. I hope you’ll join me in this commitment.

Meanwhile, keep your eyes and ears open — wise as serpents, harmless as doves. Almost no one really knows what is going on, and those who do will not likely tell the whole story. Most of those telling anything are lying. There is more to gain from stirring false fears than there is to from keeping disaster under cover, but both seem to show up at the same time. Most of what you are led to believe is a really big deal is just misdirection. But that we are headed for tribulation is not in doubt. Most of the important things I could say about tribulation have already been said.

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Progress toward Death

Posted on July 8, 2010 by ehurst

Progressive — another word for inhumane communist.

It assumes that we somehow are better than mankind was thousands of years ago. So much does this view pervade our society it becomes necessary to produce a whole library of work to counteract the big lie, and show, not only has mankind not progressed at all, but is fully incapable of it. Civilization has not risen from height to height, but has declined deeper and deeper. Each wave in the cycle is more pedestrian and empty. All it takes is a few years of reading the great works of the past translated from ancient tongues. Even then, you still have to show how the very frame of reference itself as declined, and we hardly understand greatness itself. A fool measures wise people against his folly.

Even the relatively small shift from our nation’s founding on the fervor of the Enlightenment to the current Progressive humanism is painfully obvious to those who bother to look.

By rejecting the existence of natural rights, accordingly, the Progressives consciously repealed this limit: “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” Merriam observed, “but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle…. Each specific question must be decided on its own merits, and each action of the state justified, if at all, by the relative advantages of the proposed line of conduct.” In devising the content of the law, legislators need not worry about respecting the individual’s natural right to rule himself, because “there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way.”

Look where it has brought us:

In other words: when we decide that an American citizen is Guilty of Terrorism, there is no need for a trial, or due process, or even any public presentment of evidence. It suffices that we have concluded this in secret, with no checks or external review. Once we decide that, the death penalty is imposed and we will execute it ourselves. We are literally Judge, Jury and Executioner. And, despite the fact that we have been continuously wrong in our accusations of Terrorism and have even knowingly imprisoned innocent people, you’ll just take our word for it, on blind faith, that the citizen we want to kill is really an Evil Terrorist. Yes, it’s true that you refused to accept that same rationale when the Bush administration used it merely to eavesdrop on or detain American citizens — in fact, you screeched that those less extreme policies were tyranny and a shredding of the Constitution when they did it — but you should nonetheless accept this mentality when we use it to murder your fellow citizens who have never even been charged with any crime.

And that seems to be fine with our political class. All because there are a few hundred people hiding in caves in remote tribal areas who are really, really Scary: who will get you if don’t acquiesce to endless war, the transfer of enormous amounts of money to fight those wars, and the most unlimited and unchecked government powers imaginable. And even when they come right out and say that this is all about nothing more than a few hundred people — many of whom are motivated by the very violence we’re perpetrating — it changes very little. Fear is an extremely potent motivating force, overwhelming all reason and skepticism of power. That’s why political leaders — in all eras and all places — like it and use it so much.

We don’t even know half the time what our so-called Founding Fathers believed half the time. So we have these wild characterizations such as Thomas Paine as a libertarian, when the man wrote proposing the welfare state, social security, population control, etc. He was a socialist, but his ideas were couched in older terms, and the Progressives consider him rather backward. Thus, the Progressive grip on public education taints Paine as a “conservative” and only mentions stuff he said which might sound that way.

Now those things Paine suggested arise from a concern for human welfare, and that is a given. The problem is how you implement that concern, and the measures you take to provide for human life and comfort. You see, the Enlightenment presumes to take it’s ideas from the Classics — Greece, Rome and so forth at their height. If they felt like getting funky, they could add Persian and Egyptian culture, but no one seems to have much of a clue about Hebrew culture or its biblical predecessor. The Enlightenment is a rejection of the Bible and faith to begin with, so any presumption by Christians to embrace the Enlightenment means rejecting the Christ of the Bible.

Folks, ancient man did not have our technology, but it seems that lack is what prevented them from being such shallow fools as we are today. For all our modern assumption this life is all there is, does it not seem odd how life is so much cheaper to self-important government elites? Ancient man felt death was simply the world beyond, but seemed to do a much better job of treasuring life. They thought a battle was a really big thing if so much as a hundred died, but we kill thousands and never bat an eye.

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Shifting with the Wind on OSes

Posted on July 8, 2010 by ehurst

There is nothing wrong with turning your sails to the wind if it gets where you are going. I find it ludicrous people feel there is some necessity of being tribal about a computer operating system. It requires a particularly childish turn of mind to think it matters. Sure, it’s okay to playfully poke at one another, but children throw a fit over the smallest failure to show sufficient reverence and devotion to their favorite.

I use whatever matches my needs and the hardware at hand. For example, as long as my HP Deskjet D-2660 was working, it worked best under Windows. This despite the much-ballyhooed HPLIP project where HP actually writes Linux drivers for their stuff. Fine, but it always printed too far down on the page, so the Windows drivers worked better. That is, unless you get sick of their oppressive bundled software which acts as if your computer has no other purpose than to run their stuff. But the printer was on sale, and some of their inkjets worked okay in the past, so I bought it. And some ink refills, which cost about the same as the printer, of course.

Well, the darned thing simply quit working. Under Windows it said something about not communicating properly. Under Linux, it says, “print job completed” when the stinking thing never so much as twitched or clicked. So the internal circuit board is probably fried. As you might expect, HP support was less than helpful. As in, “Oh, you run Linux? Good luck. Thanks for buying our crap.” And of course their HQ wants to see a long history of support tickets before they bother to respond to any complaints about the process. So I went through the motions, but their support staff says they are unauthorized to even discuss Linux. Yeah, they want your business, Linux users, but you have zero means to proving it’s a hardware issue so HP can honor their warranty.

This is not news. Most major corporations hate consumers, but love their money.

So with that sucker dead, and I haven’t even used up the original ink cartridges filled at 10% capacity, I have little reason to run XP. All the other stuff I did was doable under either OS. I keep XP around because so many folks I serve in the computer helps ministry won’t switch to Linux. It’s called “dual-booting” but without that printer, XP will have a lot less time on this machine.

This is not a victory for anyone. Linux slightly edges out XP at this point simply on the basis of my personal habits. It has nothing to do with superiority, and the next time something in Ubuntu irritates me too much, I’ll switch. Then after awhile, I’m sure something in Windows will irritate me and I’ll switch again. I don’t love either, and the realities of variation in any supported operating system, and the various software packages which run on them, means things can pass through rough periods on any of them. To the fanboys that appears to be childish because their whole orientation in life is backwards. If computers are your life, I suppose it matters, but computers are only so useful as they serve the needs of people. In my world, people rate more highly than computers. At the moment, computers are my one best tool for helping them, but never more than a tool. That’s the way it is with all God’s Creation.

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Firefox Container Never Closes

Posted on July 7, 2010 by ehurst

The most recent release of Firefox browser contains a new technology which was supposed to help with the way FlashPlayer, Silverlight and Quicktime runs inside the browser. It’s new and sometimes kinda shaky on Windows, at least. Since so many of my computer ministry friends use Windows, I run XP on my desktop to keep track of such things. (On my laptop, XP eats up the battery far faster than Linux, so it’s CentOS 5 there).

To help me diagnose some of the issues with Windows, I run GKrellM for Windows. Linux and BSD users will recognize this very useful utility which allows you to keep track in real time of CPU and memory use, among other things. I am amazed at the number of applications which default to chugging away in the background on Windows, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t run a CPU monitor which picks up on this stuff.

So I found that Firefox container, once opened in any browser window, or any tab in that active window, will keep the CPU pumping once the media stops playing. Even if you close that tab, it will keep chugging away. You have to manually kill it with Task Manager, or close Firefox. Compare that with the behavior of K-meleon, which knows when the media stops playing, there’s nothing left to do. So the meter on GKrellM goes quiet.

It’s how I found out Nero 7 (bundled with my DVD burner) has this nasty thing called “Scout” which likes to run in the background the same way. Most Windows users have no clue about such things because they don’t use CPU meters, and this is a great way to figure out when something is hogging system resources. Thus, I find K-meleon is far better than Firefox. You might want to get the spellcheck plugin.

I would note if you dig through the K-meleon settings menu, and you find the box which says you want animated graphics to run only once (I hate it when they loop continuously), the checkbox doesn’t work. You’ll have to actually configure it manually. Just open a new window or new tab, click the URL window and blank it out (or hit CTRL-L), then type in about:config. Click the warning button and type in the search bar image. The list of options displayed will be whittled down to very few. Look for the one which says “image.animation_mode” and right-click. Select “modify” and in the box type once. That’s the way you manually set this on all Mozilla-Gecko products, regardless of what OS it is running on. Different settings have different possible options, so you have to research it before you start poking around. This particular issue was widely known among geeks long ago.

K-meleon is the way Firefox was advertised to act way back when it was first proposed. You know, lightweight and simple, not taking too many resources, etc. Yeah. You want K-meleon on Windows.

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Not My Friend

Posted on July 5, 2010 by ehurst

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my ally.

My only friend is Truth, AKA God. Everyone in Him is also my friend, but a great many of them still work against His revealed truth. My allies are those who work for that truth.

In every cause men discuss, I often find myself standing alone in the answer I propose. Since I don’t approach any of this with the attitude of needing to win anything in particular, I can afford to lose at every game. There is no competition which interests me. It’s about Truth, and if you start thinking in terms of absolutes, you’re certainly going to miss the point.

For example, I understand the notion electronic data cannot really ever be sold. You can take money in exchange for releasing it the first time, but after that it’s wide open. You have to continue poking and prodding around and finding ways to leverage your ownership, as it were. Given the vast efforts of government and corporations to do just this, it’s still a miserable failure. If I really wanted to run Windows 7 for free, I know where to get it, and Microsoft can’t really do much about it. The running game between corporate control and crackers always favors the latter simply by the nature of the thing. That so many are publicly pilloried with huge fines and sentences is more a testimony to how careless are those who refuse to play by the rules than it is for enforcement efforts.

Frankly, I believe they are doing it all wrong. In a certain sense, the old economic model of controlled access has no place in software. More, I find it not simply wrong headed, but wrong inherently, as in morally repugnant. If you reduce it to bits and bytes, you should know better, and have no justification for trying to control it after that. But I also find it not worth my while to push the issue. That is, not every moral evil is a crusade which calls me. God is God and He reserves the right to decide what will be important to me.

Further, He gets to decide what I will do or not do, not some corporate idiot stiff at Microsoft. The laws of the land are not a moral absolute, and the Bible made it all too clear only laws which fit the revelation of God are godly. Thus, any rule, law or whatever must pass the smell test of Heaven. (Hint: Almost none currently in place pass.) I obey God. That usually works out to obeying man’s laws, but no one should pretend they can count on that. Nor do I pretend there ought to be no consequences as men consider such things. No other man is required to consider my feelings on the matter, unless God puts that on his heart. Either way, it is not in my hands, and I won’t pretend it should be. You are not bound by my calling, nor I yours.

Thus, pirating software is by no means a moral issue. Attempts to control knowledge or information makes you an enemy of God. He is a God of revelation and truth, not of secrecy and hiding. Information is any knowledge which is expressed outside your own mind, and once expressed, it belongs to God. You no longer own it. Read between the lines of Scripture; all knowledge which can be known (information) is the common property of all humanity. It is His very nature to open things up, and I would maintain quite bluntly software piracy, so called, is not a sin of itself. But software pirates aren’t angels, either. Too many of them are moral reprobates. But so it is with a great many software developers, and most certainly true of anyone who takes advantage of laws which favor corporations. The very legal notion of corporations as persons before the law is an abomination before the Lord. So is most crime. How many software pirates do you know who love Jesus and walk in purity? The piracy isn’t the issue.

There is a global war already under way in our world. It’s not good versus evil, but one brand of oppressor fighting another for turf. The very categories of winning and losing themselves are not a part of Truth. When Truth wins, there is no consideration for what it costs any person. It’s not that we don’t matter; the Cross makes it obvious we do. But caring is the path, not the victory. Truth has already won long ago; the issue before us is manifesting the victory by manifesting Truth. We don’t lose ourselves into the great Nothingness or some other Eastern silliness. We lose ourselves into the ultimate Person, even while He regards us each individually. Paradox is the language of Heaven’s logic. We are at war with anything which attempts to reduce Truth from a person to something dead, lifeless and powerless.

There are no moral absolutes in the typical sense. There are some actions which are always wrong, simply because there is no right way to do wrong. But wrong is always defined in the mind of God, which is not quite within our grasp. We can know, at best, only what is required of us at the moment. Chances are we’ll get it wrong in some way most of the time, but God looks upon the desire of the heart — which is shorthand for saying He measures only your commitment to Him. Performance is simply what we can make of this living, dynamic and ineffable Truth.

So while I have friends, they aren’t necessarily allies. Allies are those who share that commitment and understanding. Friends can be enemies at the same time. But a lot of folks out there do things which are useful in my calling who are neither friend nor ally. I care about them as people, and they are a lot more important than the service they perform. The battlefield is not in actions of men to be shaped in moral paths, though we would like to see that. The battlefield in not in the minds of men to make them all see or agree with morality. The battlefield is my own soul, seeking to reclaim it from the years and years of a thousand sucker roots of sinful commitments I don’t even recognize. I’m not fighting people, and I’m not fighting for people, because I really can’t do anything to fix this world or people.

I can’t even fix me, but at least that’s where the focus lies. I keep seeking the path to Truth within my own soul, and in so doing my thoughts and actions produce an image the world around me can see. In both failure and the mere handful of victories, they should see the Truth, and what He says of things. The battle I fight is me, to kill off the desires of the flesh and die as soon as possible. Not according the wishes of this dead man of flesh, but according to the whims of my Redeemer, who owns me in full.

“Software piracy”? Feh. Talk to the sky, or the ground, or my shoes or my clothes … my attention is elsewhere.

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American Soviet Terror

Posted on July 4, 2010 by ehurst

So you surely have heard by now the infamous Russian spy ring. It took the FBI ten years to act against a crew which did almost no spying on a nation which has more spies than any other. Given the obvious lack of threat from this bunch, the backlash of criticism had to be shut down. Thus, the New York Times jumps to the cause and publishes this little heart-wrenching tale of a Russian mayor up against the FSB. Nobody with an ounce of Holy Cynicism would fail to notice the timing of this story from two years ago.

There is no doubt the Russian government remains as corrupt as ever, and the FSB is more so. The NYT article, along with some other similar efforts to support the corrupt American government, are doing their best to remind us of that, while at the same time ignoring the big stories of our own national moral turpitude. America isn’t the good guys. We are different, but by no means better. Our court system is equally Kafkaesque, just in a different way. We spy on everyone, and our national policy is to force others to do things which make us rich, regardless how it affects the local population.

There is one difference, though. We have a history of rising against tyranny. Just what do we celebrate today? That we killed a bunch of people in throwing off an oppressive regime. How appropriate we should find it’s back. So we have a bought Congress which has already passed an utterly foolish plan to raise taxes in the middle of a very deep depression. Why? Because they are so corrupt they can’t imagine cutting back on expenditures. So having borrowed to the hilt to give a trillion or so to bankers on the taxpayer’s dime — just because they are bankers — we now have to pay that debt, and they have raised taxes. But they aren’t going to pay that debt, just spend more money on things nobody really needs. So while the Russians are somewhat feudal and still rather communist, we are fascist. That is, we secure massive corporate debt against the taxpayers, but the profits always go in their private pockets, so they can share with our alleged Congressional representatives. And I predict this will cause an armed revolt.

That’s because there is no way on God’s green earth Congress is going to wise up, nor any of the millions of DC bureaucrats. No, they will insist you and I have to go along with this, and have prepared a court system and local police force conditioning to think of us as criminals just because we breathe. To make sure there is no way to question this situation, we have a vast horde of insane laws which means not a single beating heart has failed to commit some crime which would justify on paper worse treatment than the Russian mayor. Do you doubt this is all wrong? What was the sage advice God gave to Rehoboam through his elder counselors? Lighten the excessive burden of your father, Solomon. He refused and there was a revolt, fully justified by God’s own prophets. How about Nehemiah thrashing the nobles over their abusive taxing of the poor? Armed revolt against tyranny is not a sin, and many know this instinctively. Russians have no history of such things, but I rather believe it will happen here. Soon.

Christian pacifists like myself should be on the watch, and prepare your heart to face serious unrest. We have a very bad government, but when authority breaks down you often face even worse from the rebels.

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Ignoring Game

Posted on July 3, 2010 by ehurst

People who understand “game” — AKA, the Battle of the Sexes — will tell you in modern Western societies, America in particular, the best approach is none at all. That is, for a guy who really wants to get her attention, he has to pay her almost none. Glance at her because she’s attractive to you, but don’t let her see you overcome by it. Glance away as if she isn’t really all that interesting. The game is to come just short of ignoring her, says one expert, and so say a lot of others, as well.

The biggest struggle for guys is overcoming that overcoming power of feminine beauty. Women dress to compete with each other, and in part simply to please themselves; that it happens to affect guys is just part of the fun, but not central. If it knocks you out, they win, and you lose. If you don’t seem to be impressed, you are more interesting. The ball is still in her court as to whether she notices you, but that’s another matter. If you keep putting yourself in situations where other men are strutting like peacocks, you have to be competitive. If you put yourself in situations to encounter women in other settings, you are more likely to be the center of her attention, if only briefly.

So game is a matter of grabbing her attention, and a critical element is not letting her take the high ground. She is driven to seek the high ground, but oddly reacts more favorably when she can’t have it. The best gamers, of course, are those who aren’t driven so driven by their neediness. You have to convince her you aren’t desperate, or she will simply toy with you. You don’t win her affections; she has to win yours. Make yours precious and hard to get, because you have more important things to worry about. It’s crazy, but generally accurate.

Walking in the Spirit means you know God put men in charge by design, and if women take the lead, things go awry. It’s not as if she can’t advise you wisely, but you are the president and carry the final veto. That’s not a privilege or right, but a burden of responsibility. But walking in truth means not playing the game. So while the game is ignoring her, as it were, it’s best of all to ignore the game. The real man of God needs God, knows it, and is never satisfied with what he has of God, and what God has of him. Women are important only if God says they are. See where this goes? You don’t have to play the game to win.

The spiritual man is decent with everyone, but not fawning. He has a mission and needs no one’s approval on this earth. He can afford to relax and let people have whatever it is they demand, unless that demand is something in your hands God does not permit you to give. You and you alone can discern what God forbids, and no other human on earth can do more than advise you. Being your true best self — committed to Truth, empathic, yet disengaged — ends up putting you at the top of the game. This puts you in a position to draw more suitable women in the first place. That they may not be the finest foxy babes should not concern you, if you are spiritually minded.

Rightly does Apostle Paul describe human sexuality as the single greatest affliction in terms of holiness. Stop playing the game, and you’ll win anyway. You’ll have the very best God can build for you. In a sense, the same holds true with women who seek the Spirit. Don’t pursue him just because he is interesting to you. When the time comes, and you meet him, God will can tell you if you are listening. If not, both of you have better things to do. If it matters too much, you are already wrong.

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