Customer Is Not Always Right

Posted on April 24, 2010 by ehurst

The other half of my complaint — too much of Open Source is so developer centric it can quickly become anti-user — is sometimes the user wants the wrong thing.

But it’s not so easy to untangle this mess, since there are more than two actors in every scene. We might attempt to say the old “customer is king” approach is a major element in what makes Windows vulnerable to every drive-by infection and hijacking. Actually, that becomes the excuse for doing things wrong which encourages the hijackings. Never forget, you who buy a Windows PC are not the customer; advertisers are the customer. Your eyeballs are sold to advertisers. Windows is merely a platform for delivering the user to commercial interests.

Thus, we identify a very real world power which goes by many names, but perhaps a tamer label would be the global merchant culture. It has its own language, customs, and concerns. You might also call it the corporate culture, since that’s how we experience it most of the time. Corporations compete vividly amongst themselves, but will present a united front against government and customer interference. You only think you know what you want because the merchants have manipulated us forever, it seems. Do some research into the background of Edward Bernays. His ilk have sought, and mostly succeeded, in shaping demand to whatever the corporations determine will make them the most money.

Apple does this, too, but simply uses a different flavor of manipulation.

What we are getting at here is nobody really cares what you want. Whether manipulated or not, some of what you might want is plain evil. I can assure you some of what I want is evil, and I struggle to quiet that lustful nagging. There is a God in Heaven to Whom we are accountable. At the same time, He has forbidden me exercising all my options for limiting your evil choices, since I have too much to do limiting my own.

In my computer ministry, I don’t much care what people want to do with their computers. I care in the sense I will pray for porn addicts, but the real issue for me is not their porn habit. The real issue is how insecure computer OSes and software makes the Internet a very much worse place than it has to be. If there were not so much money to be made in keeping computers vulnerable, the Net would be more boring, but more usable to me, at least. The most marketable, most sought after data passed over the Net wires happens to be consumable only with the the most vulnerable junk software available. The vast majority of the people using the Internet want things which get in the way of what the Net is all about in the first place.

But I am in no position to dictate my wishes to the world. We already have enough of that arrogance, so I’m always crushing down my urges in that direction and simply doing what little I can to help. Whenever possible, I try to convince people to use Ubuntu or CentOS. All software stinks, but those two stink least in my nostrils. For now. This at least offers a great deal more protection than any version of Windows with any amount of protective add-ons when facing the predator-infested waters of the Internet. Every so often, researchers who aren’t beholden to the corporate culture will reveal some new way in which MS delivers clients to their partners in corporate perfidy. If I were really worried about morality viewed in the typical logic of Western absolutes, I would be trying to destroy all computers.

Thus, bad as Open Source may be, it’s slightly better than Windows. Apple is some of both, just snottier and more expensive. Then again, if I could afford a really nice Mac, I’d use that simply because it’s a better Unix than Linux, and a whole lot prettier to view.

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Computer Helps Ministry Returns

Posted on April 23, 2010 by ehurst

For the past decade or so I have offered as much computer help as I could for free. People did sometimes offer money, but it was never required. I did what I could because I really like people. In my world, computers serve people, or computers have no reason to exist.

A great many readers have passed through here objecting to my posts about Linux, often with such ugliness I had to delete their comments. I’m reluctant to do that, but particularly among the Linux hobby users and enthusiasts, there is a powerful streak of anti-human sentiment. To understand Open Source, you have to grasp the idea the entire field of endeavor is developer centric, as opposed to user centered. Or perhaps we might say it is centered on the science and art of computer coding, and users be damned. It’s less so than when I first tasted Linux 15 years ago, and there has been a recent upswing in reaching for the user’s favor. I liken it to a very awkward geek trying hard to figure out how to speak to a lovely lass — they are trying, but often miss the point.

With Ubuntu, we have a solid couple of layers between developers and users. While this means the developers get less useful feedback from the Ubuntu community, at least the users are treated better. For older hardware, or simply utility computer use, I still recommend CentOS, but for home desktop users, Ubuntu reigns. This past week I installed it on a lady’s machine, and she appears to have adapted quickly. Perhaps that’s because she does so little with a computer in the first place, but that’s what Ubuntu is designed to cover. All of her hardware works with Karmic Koala, and in a month or so we’ll upgrade to Lucid Lynx. She will be much more comfortable with that Long Term Support, since frequent re-releases would annoy her.

While I could steer most folks to the Ubuntu forums, frankly that thing has swollen to such a scale it’s hard to get involved. I have tried to offer my help suggestions there, but it’s just too hard to keep up with the high traffic. I gave up for the most part. I’ll keep my comments here.

For the most part, I’ll still be supporting the various iterations of Windows, but my primary efforts will be aimed at migrating folks to Linux. It seems to me, after all my years of effort, a couple of Linux companies understand the idea that frequent wholesale upgrades were driving ordinary users away. With all the hassles they experience with Windows, it’s a much easier sell these days. Now that I have more time for this, it seems it might finally fly.

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Propaganda Ambush: Accusation of Racism

Posted on April 22, 2010 by ehurst

Her costume was assertively African. The colors, the cut of her dress, the accouterments — in every detail it spoke loudly of her heritage. It was actually quite attractive.

He sat in a folding chair on the platform, his impassive blue eyes scanning the audience while the lady spoke. Nothing about her words surprised him; she was nothing if not consistent. In her element now, she played the audience, saying all the things she said before in countless other speeches. Every gesture, shift in the tone of voice, even down to the blinking of her eyes, was carefully scripted. The only variations were the many different ways of expressing the theme of racism.

Finally, she turned to him directly. “And Mr. Brolin, I believe it is racist of you to propose such a thing.” She moved from the podium and sat down to hoots, cheers and scattered applause. The booing was rather muted.

Nothing in his face or movements evinced the least bit of agitation. He stood and walked to the podium. “Thank you, Mrs. Jackson. Food for thought. I know a lot about racism, myself.”

He paused, and was rewarded by audible sounds of surprise and scorn. “My people face racial oppression, too. Your ancestors were brought to this nation in chains, and treated as property. Mine were here already here when the Caucasians of Europe invaded, and we were simply slaughtered.”

The mood of audience was very unsettled now. “Do you assume simply because of my blue eyes I cannot claim a minority heritage? That goes to very heart of racism itself. My appearance is deceiving for the simple reason many of my ancestors were not racist, but felt the differences were of no consequence. Yet today I can easily take my place on the Tribal Roll. I choose not to, simply because I find it has been reduced to mere political propaganda.

“Instead, I simply maintain my ties to my Native American heritage by promoting the values I learned from my elders. My proposal is not a White thing, but a tribal thing.”

Turning to his opponent, he asked, “Should I assume your ancestors understood living under a tribal social structure?” Her face was a frozen mask of anger, as she stared straight ahead without meeting his gaze. In that brief pause waiting to see if she would answer, the chorus of laughter, cheering and applause rose swiftly in the audience.

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Fascist Modern Medicine

Posted on April 20, 2010 by ehurst

Let’s understand first what “fascism” means.

Fascism … is a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to organize a nation on corporatist perspectives, values, and systems such as the political system and the economy. (from Wikipedia)

Looking it up in the dictionary may not help you, because academic definitions don’t do well in helping most people unlearn false meanings. Fascist is not precisely Nazi. Frankly, running up to WW2, the Italians were more precise about it. Reduced to its lowest level, fascism is the state as god, and government is by and for major corporations. Thus, the rich and powerful run the country, which is hardly new, but fascism is a particular flavor of mechanism. Add to this the basic methods of controlling information and maintaining a bogus climate of fear and war-time mobilization, and the package is complete. Is this a great country, or what?

Given the incestuous relationship between every government agency and those entities they regulate, our national government is fascist by definition. Lobbyists influence the process of legislation, the executive regulators are all beholden directly to those they regulate, and much of the courts system is loaded with lawyers of the same corporations. For example, Clarence Thomas, so revered by the right, is a creature of Monsanto. He fiercely defends their “right” to take over the entire food production system, and sees nothing wrong with Monsanto poisoning the farms and entire human population of the world. Background research will reveal each of the other Justices have similar allegiances.

The entire US medical system is similarly perverted and fascist. Medical people can be really fine humans, but the system owns them, and that system is fascist. Doctors are not even allowed to think for themselves on a vast range of issues. Thus, anyone with a single shred of independence is quickly labeled a “quack” to ensure no one listens to them, despite the pretense of scientific method. For the time being, the Internet remains one of the few places where just about anyone can publish just about anything, and the old means of press censorship is breaking the monopoly of government-controlled media.

Consider Dr. Joseph Mercola. I have yet to detect in his work the sort of arrogance which marks someone who cannot be trusted. As one who does not frequent his site, I seem to recall at least once he has issued a mea culpa and asked his readers to forgive the error, and sought to offer advice to counter his mistake. Yes, his site is loaded with advertising, but at least he is selective enough to sell what he actually supports directly in his articles. Most of the time I visit his site using either Lynx or Elinks plain text browsers. Still, the information is presented for your consideration and his stuff is linked from all over the Net.

Today I ran across his discussion of vaccine contamination. You’ll note his article states only what can be supported by the facts: Big Pharma is careless with your health. He allows you to draw the inference getting the FDA to act on real evidence is like pulling teeth. He suggests you research what folks do to you, and offers links to get you started.

But I’m not required to be so circumspect. Having done some of that research, I have concluded Big Pharma is a bigger threat to your health and life than almost any disease from nature. No, not every medical remedy is inherently dangerous, but medical care in the US is loaded with layers of downright lies which doctors tell with a straight face, if for no other reason than they are too deeply deceived to know any better. Big Pharma in practice owns the full medical establishment, which includes the entire process by which doctors are educated and trained. Elementary kids in public and private schools alike are seldom offered anything at variance with the dogma demanded by Big Pharma (along with the various dogmas of other interested parties). So it’s no surprise med-schools are owned, as it were, by Big Pharma. Doctors are almost bound by law to accept whatever Big Pharma says is truth, if nothing else, by the AMA.

But this happens throughout the system. What about the services you need once the medical system is through with you? Right here in Oklahoma, it is illegal to sell a coffin unless you are a registered and licensed undertaker, in good standing with the state bureau. That bureau is run by a handful of elitist morticians who do not want their obscene profits infringed. If you don’t charge at least ten times the actual bare retail value of a cloth-lined box for human remains, you aren’t allowed to do business in Oklahoma. Yes, most Oklahoma funeral business folks are crooks. They depend on the very fundamental fact almost no decision made under stress during a personal crisis is wise. They can be decent to deal with when you actually need their services, but they are gouging you without mercy, operating as a cartel protected by law. This is fascism by definition.

If you trust yourself to the kind intentions of experts, neither your life, liberty nor property are safe.

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We Will Not Forget

Posted on April 19, 2010 by ehurst

Is your church BATF-approved?

19 April 1993 — Waco, Texas

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The Hermit Impulse

Posted on April 17, 2010 by ehurst

I empathize; I understand completely.

Imagine living in a world where you see the most massive storm blowing in — so huge, it seems to take forever, creeping ever closer. You see it, feel the stiffening cold wind, smell the ozone from a million bolts of lightening. And everyone around you ignores it. Not just don’t bother looking up, they don’t comment on it, but talk and act as if no storm exists. They wipe away imaginary sweat, discuss the bright sunny heat, turn up the A/C and pray for rain. If you dare to mention it, they look at you as if you were nuts.

If you stay in such a society, you will be treated as a nut, even to the point of persecution. If you go away, keep to yourself and avoid the fools while you prepare for this storm, you at least avoid the hassles. In some parts of academia, it’s called the Elijah Experience. You may recall the crazy prophet to the Northern Kingdom of Israel during the Omride Dynasty. Queen Jezebel tried to have him killed because he dared to speak the truth of things.

I’m not called to prophesy like Elijah. That lets me off the hook in may ways. Still, I am not allowed to remain silent. The one current soapbox God allows me is this blogging stuff. I’ve tried quite a few different other ways of letting folks know there’s a storm overhead, ready to start making a mess of things any day now, but most of the time I’m treated like a madman. It no longer gets under my skin. Nowadays, it’s almost amusing, in that I grin and laugh to keep from collapsing in tears.

I realize there is nothing I can do to make people hear or see. That’s not in my hands. At the same time, I can’t simply give in to the hermit impulse, not entirely. Sure, I live out in the boonies, and in flyover country at that. And there was a time when I preached to fairly large crowds, but that was back when my message was familiar to them. I saw the storm on the far horizon then, but hadn’t started talking about it much. The closer it seemed to me, the more I talked about it, and the more they pushed me off the platform to silence me. Making signs and clever t-shirt messages didn’t help much, nor vast libraries of writing. No, those who see the storm as I do are quite few.

There is no way I can guess whether God has plans to change the current efforts He has placed in my hands, but for now, it seems altogether unlikely. I’ll continue dealing with one or two, here and there, and a small portion of family and friends who already believe. I’ll keep writing on this and my other blog, and keeping the better stuff on my static archive site. I’ll keep messing around with computers because they are my most important tool for now. When God decides there is something else I need to do, I’ll get on it.

Meanwhile, there’s an awfully big storm overhead. It’s God’s wrath about to fall on America, and many parts of the rest of the world. But I’m not called to those other parts right now, so it’s all I can do to see how bad it is right here. Gonna be a big’un. Got yourself a storm shelter?

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Government and Threats

Posted on April 16, 2010 by ehurst

I’m a pacifist by God’s grace. Chances are you won’t have a clue what that really means unless you understand Christianity from some intellectual ground other than Western Aristotelian logic. Either way, the label “pacifist” is essentially accurate.

Regular readers already know this, that I have no sympathy for the Tea Party folks. I also have no sympathy for the Fascist government now running the US, decked out with Marxists and any number of other nuts. But the Tea Party has already been hijacked, and the true Patriots — such as they are — are not getting it back. If it’s organized, it will be infiltrated, hijacked and defanged.

However, I wanted to note the chorus of voices, led most recently by the doddering old Bill Clinton, warning protesters against government should not threaten violence. Let’s get one thing straight: The government officials started it. As long as there are Ruby Ridges, Wacos, Elian Gonzales raids, Katrina disarming raids, and so forth, it is the US government officials who are threatening violence. They are the ones holding most of the guns. So when they tell you threats cross the line, ask them about the thousands of armed federal officers.

It has nothing to do with “protecting them while in performance of their duties” and everything to do with forcing you to obey whatever filthy sins they demand.

On the other hand, let’s make sure you Patriot types stop playing silly games. If you were serious, you would have killed a bunch of government thugs a long time ago. Do I have to list for you the prime candidates for assassination if you really plan to restore the Constitution? Stop lying to us and pretending you have any intention of standing up to the criminals in Washington DC who run the government. It won’t happen and we all know it. By the time you are forced to defend your home from invasion by government forces, it will be too late. Indeed, it’s long past too late. Give it up.

This country is under God’s wrath and there is no turning back. The time to have done something was before I was born, by at least a century. Our nation was born in sin, and there was never anything to save. The few real Christian believers involved were deluded, and provided a neat cover for the rest. Soon it will all come apart. While it’s possible the nation will actually disintegrate into manageable chunks, it’s more likely we will simply be swallowed by something much bigger. That is, once we have all been crushed under grinding poverty.

And it will happen with guns pointed at us every step of the way. They are not a part of us, nor we of them. The ruling class is a foreign occupation force. The only terrorist organization in the world is the US government; all the rest work for them. Your only hope is to realize this world and it’s political idiocies mean nothing, that life here is meant to miserable because we have all sinned and deserve even worse. Turn from this wicked generation and invest yourself in the Kingdom to Come.

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Not Enough Words for Love or Knowing

Posted on April 15, 2010 by ehurst

The English language is not logic, but art. We string together roots from different languages because it sounds better than purity of extraction. As one language historian noted, our language does not borrow words from other languages. English chases them down dark alleys, beats them senseless and rifles their pockets. Thus, our Germanic root tongue offers the single word see (“zay” = sea) for our puddle, bath, pond, pool, lake, reservoir, and ocean, along with the properly derived sea.

I’m not the first to notice modern English suffers a paucity of words in those things most important in life. Each of those words for “body of water” carries a connotation, a difference in flavor, which makes them not simply descriptive but also giving character. We have no such elaboration for love, and with precious little do we cover knowing any better. Modern language arts has enhanced our knowledge of material things, but has surrendered any hope of discussing higher things.

Thus, we know precious little of love. There was time when poetry in the English language did yeoman duty in covering these gaps through other means, but it has died. That is, poetry was killed when knowing was killed. How do you explain knowing from some source which is not mere intellect, and certainly not base emotion? When I was younger, still in school, I was exposed to decent array of poetry. I liked poetry itself, but found some of the samples were repugnant, though I hardly had the development of mind to know why. I knew, but not on a conscious level.

These days, I can probably tell you more about it. For example, a whole school or “modern” poetry in English is nothing more than sheer propaganda, lies of Satan to further press his materialist vision. Indeed, it should not be so hard to find Frost, Whitman, Pound, Cummings, even the revered TS Eliot, were all avowed socialists, among other things. While more subtle than the blatantly existentialist James Joyce, it was still the same ugly decapitation of the human soul. Socialism philosophically was aimed at deflating the entire realm of higher grasp, chopping it off and replacing it with some artsy materialism. They had an agenda, and it was to destroy what little was left of mysticism in Western Christian faith.

These writers fed directly into the mythology which now besets and imprisons Christian religion. The call of Christ is to leave this world first by a commitment to Heaven, then to leave it physically when God is through revealing Himself. This is imparted wholly across the fallen human race, but is an individual experience, as well. Eliot in particular destroyed that other-worldly appeal, making Christian faith a mere adjustment of mind to a better life in this world. Even CS Lewis, flawed as he was in his theology, called Eliot on his evil.

Faith is not rational, but is almost anti-rational by virtue of being far, far above it. Socialist poetry aims to make faith less than rational. Even allowing how faith can make one more noble in this life, they subtly denigrate it, making it out to be a mystery which can be ignored if you don’t really need it. Faith and things of God are a mystery, not because they aren’t up to the intellect, but can’t be told because intellect can’t reach that high. It’s part and parcel of the same move which shoved love into the realm of the unknowable and uncontrollable. In Scripture, love is the choice you make to exert yourself on behalf of another’s welfare. It was never simple sentiment, but we recognize emotional attachment comes from that underlying commitment. The feelings are derived, a response of the emotions to something which emotion cannot control.

The biblical anthropology asserts we are flesh, that the flesh registers in the mind as emotions. The intellect can quell emotional raging, and decide by the will to act more rationally. But that is in the absence of a living spirit. Fallen man is born with a dead spirit. That is what the Fall did to us. Only by grace does God invade our beings and awaken the spirit to life with His Spirit. The modern poets of socialism deny the existence of the spirit, not overtly, but in denying it’s power. They make it a lifeless mystery, a something which does affect us, but they are resolutely agnostic about it. This is but a step from denying it. The Bible assumes the spirit is the only true part of human nature which can be real, because “real” means eternal. All Creation, after the Fall, is quite “unreal” — it’s not what God had in mind.

We have no power to love or know what is truly real, in that sense, until our spirits are born and put in charge of the soul. So long as the intellect rules, we cannot ever quite grasp reality as God calls it. The spirit knows from the Spirit of God what love really means, that there are no words for the sacrifice on the Cross, nor that same sacrifice reborn in every act of grace which flows from His power working in us. In Christ alone can we know and love. Even the word “faith” has been so perverted by a vast shift in background associations it no longer means a conscious lifelong commitment and loyalty.

Thus, in the Bible, the spirit is meant to rule the intellect. This is anathema to the socialist poets of Modern American Poetry. How it is they invaded and took over the entire range of institutions which tell the public what is and is not good poetry is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. That this was their goal all along, to usurp all the arts and the full range of academic pursuit, and thus take over the entire culture of the West, cannot be denied. Thus, by denying the existence of any higher reality, Western Civilization has died. The corpse is rotting even now, and the time for burial is long past.

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Ubuntu’s Broken Defaults on Fonts

Posted on April 13, 2010 by ehurst

Running Karmic Koala 32-bit, it’s not the first time I’ve been unhappy with the way Debian and friends do fonts. It’s the one part my Debian experience which has always dissatisfied. So this time I decided to check into the current state of the Freetype2 bytecode interpreter question and anything else which seemed pertinent.

While it turns out Ubuntu has thrown caution to the wind on the bytecode issue, fully implementing it in the Freetype2 libraries, they then hash it up by disabling it by default in the configurations. You can get the full effects in GNOME using the “Font” tab of the Appearance settings, but it won’t apply to everything. Primary examples are Firefox and Opera, which are unaffected by GNOME desktop settings.

This is where you get a dirty deal from Ubuntu. To fix this, you can’t even use the old “dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config” because that does nothing. You don’t get the dialog for choosing your detailed settings. Instead, you have to fiddle directly with linked files in the /etc/fonts directory. There we see one folder which holds the available options — conf.avail — and one for active settings — conf.d.

In the latter folder by default you have 10-hinting-slight.conf, for example. This means by default the entire system will use the lowest quality of bytecode hinting, which can often mean crappy display. The details are covered here on fixing it, which I have modified as follows for LCD use (beware of wrapped lines):

sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf
sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-no-sub-pixel.conf
sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.available/10-hinting-full.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/.
sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.available/10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

With the apparently large number of people complaining, you would think the developers could figure out to at least default to medium hinting.

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Half-Right: “Don’t Fight the New World Order”

Posted on April 12, 2010 by ehurst

Interesting video attracting some attention.

The name attached to the face is Ziggy Eichhorst. The preacher suffers from a serious case of Western epistemology. Otherwise, he’s not too far from the mark.

By mixing the spiritual and worldly provisions of the Bible — mixing the two realms — he presents a very confused message. Building on this broken foundation, he reaches false conclusions. He misreads Romans 13, which says on the fallen level, governments are God’s idea, and He controls them. You don’t have to understand it, or like it, just realize it’s true. Not in the sense He promotes their sins; rather, it is He who holds them accountable for their sins, not you and I. So Ziggy is partly right in saying our Lord Jesus does not call us to fight evil on those terms. You can’t beat Satan by armed revolt against the NWO. There’s more evil governments where that came from, and armed conflict is hardly the way to fix it.

Indeed, Ziggy rightly notes if you make plans to resist, you’ll simply paint a target on yourself, and on everyone who joins in your plans. It really is a doctrine of the Devil to teach popular Patriot Resistance theology, that somehow God needs us and our guns.

But the rest is pretty messed up. Reading John’s Revelation literally is heresy. I’ve written plenty about that elsewhere. Romans 13 bluntly points out there are two realms, so you would have to be blind or intellectually dishonest to believe it states some sort of “Christian Law” we must submit slavishly to whatever any human government wishes to do. Please note a few verses later Paul says if you walk in the love of Christ, God considers your duty to such government fulfilled, regardless whether that government agrees. Obviously, when your spiritual convictions demand something such governments don’t like, it’s their problem.

Instead, we are to embrace the other-worldly mind which says, “If obeying the Lord gets me killed, so much the better. I can’t wait to go home and see Him face to face!” So while it’s worldly wisdom not to provoke the NWO, sooner or later you can’t help doing just that. It’s rough on organizations, but not too challenging for someone who has already nailed their lives to the Cross.

Bro. Ziggy, you have the right idea, but you need a better education.

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