Deception by Any Other Name

Posted on March 2, 2010 by ehurst

Hiding the truth is evil. God said so; I’m just trying to bring everyone up to date on that.

Fundamentally, deception is aimed at getting someone to act according to false information. It’s manipulation, interfering in the process of decision making, a form of enslavement. It’s dehumanizing the other person. God won’t allow that to prosper in the long run, so any use of deception is removing whatever protection you might otherwise gain by observing God’s Laws.

When Jesus warned about casting your pearls before swine, He was speaking within a specific context. He was hammering the Pharisees about having embraced Hellenism and rejecting their own Hebrew intellectual assumptions. So when they read the Torah or any other part of the Hebrew Scriptures, they always missed the point. His comment was about entrusting the mission of revealing God to people who had no clue about it. It was not about whether you should be honest with everyone. And the question of civility is a matter of not burdening others with information they can’t use for good purposes. Information overload is just another form of deception, since it denies others the opportunity to evaluate for themselves what they must do.

On a human level, ignoring God and morality, it would appear deception is quite effective. For example, the current price of raw petroleum at $80/barrel is not an honest price. We have whole tankers loaded with oil sitting at docks waiting to unload their liquid cargo because the fixed storage tanks are full. Nor is it about refinery capacity, since many were shut down for no reason other than to reduce supply and force the price up. Yes, it was a cartel agreement; they lie about competing against each other. Actually, demand nearly died last year, compared to what it had been previously. Honestly sold, oil would be closer to half that price. Market speculators have created a climate of fear so that less informed market players — the majority — would bid up the price of oil. They have manipulated the market; they are lying and it’s profitable for them.

It’s the same trick used to lie about the alleged threat of Islam. Let’s get real; if the billion or so Muslims in this world really wanted to take over, they could easily and it wouldn’t take long. Just so you’ll know: Not a single “Muslim terrorist” in this world would be active were it not for secret provocations by the CIA or some other clandestine service for any number of governments. Every Muslim terror threat to the US is created and controlled by our own CIA. The idea is to keep us all fearful and worked up so we’ll go along with the measures of increasing the police state.

Want to talk about the threat of Iran’s growing nuclear technology? Come back and talk to me after Israel starts playing by the same rules as everyone else, particularly regarding their own nuclear industry. There is only one terrorist government in the Middle East, and it’s the government of Israel. Compare their actions with the definition of terrorism: the attempt to use fear and terror, threats of violent force, to affect government policies. Hamas was freely elected despite Israeli interference in the election process. The only meaningful opposition to Hamas is Abbas, a known client (employee) of Israel’s government. Oh, and Israel created Hamas in the first place, but it seems to have gotten away from them.

It’s not just individuals; the Laws of God are specifically aimed at governments, and only secondarily at individuals. So prohibitions on deception apply more to governments than to individuals. But it seems to work. For now. No, wait… God’s wrath is falling on the US right now. Earthquakes, anyone? Crazy weather? Massive increase in pests resistant to pesticides? Major diseases resistant to medicine? Stupid-evil-crazy politicians? God could easily stop any of that, but He’s got a very good reason to keep it going. We refuse to play by His rules.

And we lie about it.

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Consider Snail Mail

Posted on February 28, 2010 by ehurst

Many of us have found friends on the Net. Virtual friendship is not stupid or harmful, provided it’s genuine friendship. The nice thing about the Net is it helps us find likely friends due to the grouping of interests, not some random accident of geography. It’s a good thing, provided you take full advantage of it.

But I’m not entirely sanguine about the future of the Net as we know it. Unrestrained surfing has already disappeared in some places, and threats of the same are invading Western nations. Further, economic instability and disruptions could easily close down a wide range of companies providing infrastructure. Sudden changes in utility rates could price us all out of the market for home connections. There is a wide range of uncertainties which could affect what we do real soon.

Now would be a good time for virtual friends to begin exchanging snail mail addresses and phone numbers.

Granted, a great many Net friendships depend on the Net for most of their meaning. You are the only one who can decide if there really is a need to keep in contact with anyone under other circumstances. I have a link to my resume from my “About” page, so readers should have no trouble getting mine; for your own sanity, you should shorten the name shown there. You’ll find an email address there, too, so you can send me yours if you think it’s worth the trouble.

It won’t be any more secure than email, in the sense if anyone is really trying to keep an eye on you, they can easily intercept your paper mail, too. That isn’t the issue. Aside from exchanging encryption keys physically, or exchanging a set of one-time pads and a common dictionary, or some other method like those, there is little you can do to keep communications secret any more. The idea is not entirely the issue of privacy, but an exchange of information by alternative means. That’s how you’ll decide if it matters, when you consider whether the exchange currently taking place on the Net is worth the trouble of printing and mailing.

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Cataloging Evil Is Evil

Posted on February 27, 2010 by ehurst

I get lots of links sent to me about this or that horrific evil plot. I don’t doubt most of them carry at least a kernel of truth. An awful lot of folks out there would love to rule their world, and aren’t too concerned with what it takes to get there, as long as the costs are borne by others. In a certain sense, that’s how most of the human race operates.

There remains a tiny core of elites capable of carrying out such wishes, but even they suffer from limits. After all, evil people are defined as those with weaknesses in which they indulge. Evil isn’t power; it’s failure. That failure may rope in a lot of innocent victims, but that’s one of the mysteries we aren’t permitted to understand.

Still, if we waste a lot of time trying to understand how it is these people intend to harm all their victims, we would never have time to focus on the mission of escaping that evil. We escape evil by embracing the call of mysticism. Don’t be fooled into thinking mysticism is some peculiar intelligence; it’s not. It’s commitment to what cannot be put into words, to what cannot be understood by simple intellect. If you can understand it, it’s not mysticism. Mysticism is that wordless drawing up from this world.

While I do attempt to indicate something about it, talking of such things as my three pillars — transparency, empathy and disentanglement — a mystic would recognize them as simply facets of the truth itself. You can probably come up with your own words, and be just as useful. If you strive to grok the fullness of what is demanded of you in rising above yourself and rising above this foul plane of existence, you won’t need to catalog what’s here. The moment you think you have a name for it all, someone will come up with a new flavor. Don’t rely on lists.

And don’t try to catalog the evils of the ruling elites of this world. Sure, we can probably discuss the particular weaknesses of this bunch — Zionism, pedophilia and other perversions, war, deceptions — but what about the next bunch to come along? What about the mundane evil on your own street? If you get too wrapped up in the tactics, you find yourself crusading against a moving target. Fix one problem and up pops three more, probably worse and harder to fix. If you simply draw harder to truth, anyone who can be helped will be helped by the sharp discord of your refusal to let evil own you. You can be fully engaged without compromising.

Chasing demons ties you to them. The very art of not being owned by them is the whole message of breaking free, the whole service of God in making Him known. Evil will become obvious by the good which follows you around. Every step you make with a mystical heart is like ripping the fabric which separates this world from the next, and light and love comes pouring out in your wake.

Don’t be surprised or shocked by any evil men do. Sure, sorrow and suffering touches your soul, but you don’t have to let it own you, or it will chain you. Know it and feel it with the victims, but keep your orientation beyond it all. You can’t beat evil by paying homage to it.

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More What We Can Do

Posted on February 26, 2010 by ehurst

This post continues the theme from yesterday’s What We Can Know versus What We Can Do.

I left off with the assertion you should attempt or aim to live by the ancient tribal social structure as much as possible. Not the popular image of clannish and hateful distrust of anyone outside your extended family household, that was never the biblical concept. You’ll notice even today many Near Eastern folks are still quite hospitable, trying to be helpful to strangers who are no obvious threat. That is a carry over from ancient times when God’s Laws were widely known and practiced. We aim to cultivate that sort of graceful living, even if we must modify it some for a context in which human predators are far more likely to be active. You can be guarded without hatred.

So does that guarded-but-gracious living mean avoiding like the plague all interaction with an evil government? Of course not. That would call for entirely too much effort for too little gain. On the one hand, we justly regard all government agents with suspicion. For example, I have no trouble referring to TSA as ridiculously expensive security theater, with absolutely zero benefit in terms of actually making things any safer. By God’s standards, the whole thing is a complete ripoff, because the people in charge know it’s not doing any good, and they are blatantly lying about it. And so it is with almost every form of enforcement activity, because the theory is perverted, the people running at are often singularly arrogant and unaccountable, and far too many LEOs you encounter will simply act the part of armed thug. I’ve always said don’t ever dial 911 unless you are ready to die, or at least lose everything you value. But, you shouldn’t jump through a hundred hoops to avoid every encounter.

If what you do in this world calls for encountering the idiots who work for TSA, then do so with grace and peace. There is nothing to gain by forcefully standing up for your rights, simply because what those rights may be on paper hardly matters in the real world any longer, if they ever did. We are justly cynical and skeptical any of them can ever learn from even the most glaring court victories. We’ve seen TSA only backs down when they are utterly shamed on YouTube or the like, and it has nothing to do with what is just or right. Even when they know they are wrong, it won’t change their determination to exercise their authority with the most egregious petty abusiveness. Plus, we have substantial evidence they have no conscience in the first place, which seems to be a condition of employment. Resistance might serve some purpose, but it’s not very practical. If you decide you must resist, go right ahead, because nothing I write will help you.

By no means do I counsel you to ignore it all, and pretend it’s okay. What I’m hoping you’ll understand is not allowing their petty meanness to rule you. The danger here is building a system of social interaction which assumes truth is objective and concrete. It is not, but only those who have the insight of mysticism realize it. Western Civilization is but a passing fling, a seduction of humanity into some insane notion reality can be fully addressed from mere concrete logic, that the human intellect is capable of handling all truth. Mysticism admits right away things that really and truly matter most are beyond words, and certainly beyond human logic. The best we can hope for is a tolerable negotiation for any given moment between Ultimate Truth beyond logic and some particular necessity to act and react for this moment. Yes, all human governments today, so far as we know, are utterly abhorrent to God, but it’s His problem. He is crushing them each in turn, according to His own agenda and schedule. It’s not in your hands.

So when you walk through the see-you-naked scanners at the airport, what can you really do? It works best if you act as if it won’t matter — because it doesn’t. That is, unless you have some obsession with fixing everyone else’s problems. Sure, write your congressional delegation, agitate for political change, write ugly things about TSA. But don’t expect that to fix anything. Instead of making a scene, find out what is most likely to get you through quickly and adapt. Let it all slide off.

Have you ever seen slate floors? People can walk on them with almost anything on their feet, but after literally years of heavy foot traffic, a slate floor is hardly even worn. Give it a couple of decades, and about the most you’ll see is the slate surface is polished and shiny. A couple of centuries and maybe it will be thinned just a bit. People are going to walk on you, but you get to decide whether you’ll be slate or something much weaker.

Indeed, not only do I recommend gracious interaction with the Police State, but you can even take a government job. It won’t hurt to have a few mystical minds making someone’s day just a little sweeter. Of course, you know if you remain true to the mystical nature, it will annoy your fellow government employees. It might even get you fired. But neither taking nor losing that job should make any difference in you.

The best you can hope for in this insane world is simply keeping yourself sane by not taking it too seriously.

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What We Can Know versus What We Can Do

Posted on February 25, 2010 by ehurst

“Well, the solution is obvious.” No, it’s not.

Just because we can see harm, we should not assume we know the actual cause. Much less should we assume we know how to fix it. We see poverty as people unable to offer anything in exchange for food, clothing, shelter, etc. Simply putting money in their pockets is not the answer in every case. Much depends on how they got there, the system around them, and a host other factors we often cannot see. We might be guilty of rejecting the existence of those factors, especially if something we do contributes to them.

Some could be familiar with the propaganda trick of painting the scene of poverty with such rich sorrow as to presume a solution which is not spoken. “Don’t think! Just react! Oh, and I’ll tell you how to react.”

It’s the same flaw in the propaganda on the other side.

We can easily see how government agencies tend to act as if the humans they govern are mere property. We can see how government people speak and act as if all that we need to know is whatever they wish to tell us. If there is a notion they didn’t tell us, it is by definition a lie. And those who dare to speak that lie require silencing, even if it means death. So we have this agitation which says back to the government figures it is they who require silencing, even if it means death.

We have all this grand theorizing and explaining how the current ruling regime is far, far from the US Constitution. Correctly we note that fact is self-evident. But what can we do about it? Is there any reasonable hope of steering the system back on its proper course? What would it take?

Get enough voters to support the right people — people with the right theories and plans — and we win, right? I have serious doubts that can be done. Did the will of voters stop the TARP bailout? Nope. We can prove with firm legal certainty Congress was derelict. Did the voter support get Ron Paul his nomination for President under the Republican banner? Nope. We can prove in a court of law the criminal actions which combined to deny him that fair chance. Not only did he simply fail to win, he never was allowed to compete because key individuals broke their own rules, and even federal and local laws, to make sure of it. But the system has been slanted to make it too hard to even address that. Instead, we are offered a steady diet of candidates who are always thoroughly unfit to serve in any position, people who will never tell you the truth they are hostile to what we want, nor what is required by their oath to the Constitution.

Okay, so the system is fixed against truth and right actions. Do we find some other path? Isn’t that the obvious answer? Honestly, that is a legitimate question. Given the broad sweep of human history, it’s not just fancy words when we note those governments which reject peaceful change are demanding violent change. Is there any question change is necessary? Regardless of your particular persuasion, you surely believe things must change one way or another. So maybe we come up with some forceful action short of armed revolt by which we replace the evil army of elitist thugs running the country. What has changed?

Not much. First, those who permitted things to go so wrong are still the dominant life form in this country. Can they be persuaded to support a reinvigorated Constitutional government? Not on your life. While individuals vary widely, the bulk of the citizens together don’t understand what it even means. Further, they lack the means to understand, and are too far gone to get it. Just making that claim — which claim isn’t that hard to prove — will be rejected in the first minute after we begin to act on it. The bulk of Americans aren’t just ignorant, but have been conditioned to reject the facts. You can’t fix that, not even in one full generation. I know this because I have worked in education on several levels. Can’t be done.

Instead, we will have a mass of idiots who remain vulnerable to the same manipulation which got us into this mess. In just a matter of hours after setting things right, the agitators will be pumping up the crowd to demand things be wrong.

Okay, so maybe if we just outright killed everyone who is making things so difficult — armed revolution to “take back our country.” That would be an awful lot of killing. Then you would have to oppressively force people to do what is in their own best interest. How is that different from our current oppressive regime? What if the bulk of the US citizenry really don’t like living under a truly constitutional government? Frankly, they won’t. They aren’t intelligent enough to know, so they reject it and a lot of other things they don’t understand.

For example, take the aforementioned poverty issue. I can prove it is utterly impossible to end poverty in this world. Can’t be done. Humor me, because it would take a large book to prove it for most folks. No power on this earth can manipulate conditions to the point everyone will have their “fair share.” The very idea assumes things already proven false. You personally can voluntarily alleviate poverty within the limits of your resources, but there does not exist in this world the means to persuade the rest of humanity to buy into such a thing. Furthermore, the kinds of action and the system necessary to produce material advancement precluded even results. The moment you try to even things out, the very means of bringing that material into existence goes away. Fact. If it weren’t for greed and evil desires, there would be no material improvement.

But Americans as a whole still carry around this residual belief — in their fractured and inconsistent mental frame of reference — that we simply must do something about poverty. It’s a matter of sentiment divorced from reality, but it’s very solid. And an awful lot of them, if not entirely conscious of it, assume when things are bad for themselves someone darn sure better pony up to alleviate their misery. Never mind how utterly impossible it is in the long run, they demand it due to several generations of false civic religious training. They even have the audacity to blasphemously insist this is what God says.

Do you understand these things? Then perhaps you also understand you cannot, utterly cannot ever, conceive of an honest political solution to human misery. You cannot possibly tweak it and reform it and improve it until it covers all the bases, nor even most of them. The moment you begin to adjust, the conditions will change and make it invalid. It all comes back down to one literally damned notion: Central government is a good idea. God demanded under Noah there be government, but He promptly thereafter destroyed the Tower of Babel. Obvious that was heading the wrong direction, was the wrong type of government. What’s left, then? Family, clan, tribe.

Read between the lines. Ask yourself: What is the one greatest threat to bad government? Competing loyalties. What is the one primary feature of “government” within a household? Competing loyalties. While it makes ruling a household difficult, you at least have a bond of love to make everything negotiable. Under non-family government, there is no room for that, neither love nor honest negotiation. At the Tower of Babel, Nimrod demanded loyalty and control which was not his. At the very least, his rule was a symbolic attack on God’s authority.

Can we really return to the dictum: No one has any business controlling or ruling you who isn’t related to you by blood or marriage? God demands it, so there must be some level at which it is valid. We can know this. What can we do about it? We can expect the human civil government to seek to crush every effort to bring that back. But God has promised when we aim for that ideal, He will bless it, even if we don’t perceive it easily. By no means should we dream we will displace the modern state, though we should surely expect it to collapse periodically. Indeed, entire civilizations will collapse cyclically. But the basic Law of God regarding human government by kinship ties is built into our very instincts, and will always return even as civilization collapses around us.

Don’t expect to win, just try. That’s the standard.

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Mission First

Posted on February 24, 2010 by ehurst

I stole the title from an Army slogan. It’s state-speak demanding you turn off your conscience. My mission now is a direct reflection of my conscience, and the very title of my blog reflects an interest here in practical applications of that conscience. The last thing you’ll get from me is pontification, since I presume here only to entertain myself by exercising one of my few passions — writing — about things I’ve experienced in pursuit of that mission.

If you have to ask, that mission is serving the God of the Bible. I’m hardly orthodox by most established standards, but I am exceedingly comfortable, at peace with my conscience and what I can perceive regarding God. I strive to improve, expand and deepen that sense of peace, and my posts here reflect that struggle. You can apply such a concept to just about anything in your life, as I do mine. It won’t matter how minor or insignificant the issue; I hold a mystical regard that every element in my earthly existence is subject to divine veto. My loyalty and burden of responsibility allows nothing to escape.

That’s not a pedantic assumption every choice is between holy and profane in itself. But I always seek to know. Sometimes I perceive God doesn’t care to guide some choices discretely, and leaves it to me. For example, today’s issue is one which has cropped up often: using computers. There are no particular moral choices simply because a significant element of the development and production of all computer OSes includes a rejection of the God I serve. Thus, any claims to moral high ground are spurious, since God is the sole source of morality. Any counter-claims this or that one is immoral is equally bogus. The whole debate becomes silly and immoral itself. My point in announcing my break from Linux fandom was not a rejection of Linux, but a rejection of the common Linux-hobbyist mentality. In my service to God, the attachment itself was a serious hindrance.

That said, I note I am typing this from a machine running Linux. I left the Dell Inspiron 545 running Vista and gave it to my wife. It was a compromise between the hassles of XP and the all-too-new differences in her eyes in running Win7. The machine was designed for Vista and it works just fine. Whatever the rest of humanity disliked about it does not apply in this case, so it won’t matter what the reputation is for Vista. It works; it serves the purpose and the mission of God for her is advanced. In exchange, I took back from her a machine I had built a couple of years ago (motherboard), but kept the Dell LCD monitor.

I’ll skip most of the details, but we found the nVidia drivers for Win7 are broken (GeForce 6100), have been for quite some months, and aren’t likely to be fixed. Lots of complaints online indicated it was something about the drivers themselves, as it seemed consistent across a wide range of nVidia chipsets. From what I understand, the GPU itself enters a race condition, and the system display bogs down and becomes unusable, even while the system reports everything is fine. So I tried different Linux distros with my monitor. Each had it’s own failures and I was not in the mood to try resolving the issues. Knowing Win7 did not like the GPU, I bought a Radeon HD4350, simply because it was the most affordable card I could find. I used it for several weeks that way with Win7.

While I found the hardware profile verification annoying, I didn’t feel threatened by it. I found quite a few favorite applications worked fine: Opera, Cream/Vim, Notepad++, PDF Xchange Viewer, etc. There is something wonky with the odd way Microsoft elected to create for 64-bit a default installation target in “Program Files (x86)” while keeping the backward compatible “Program Files” folder next to it. Most of the time, I found it was necessary to install 32-bit apps in the latter — which meant just about everything I installed (the same applies for 64-bit Vista), but it worked well enough. Still, I never quite got comfortable.

Part of my mission includes having a laptop. I had considered ditching my Inspiron 4100 for a netbook, but decided I just could not come up with the money for it. Given how I expected to use it, it was a purely pragmatic decision to switch the laptop to CentOS 5. It’s too wimpy for XP plus defensive software, and Win2K lacks things like a built-in WPA supplicant capability, nor was anything available for free to fix that. Plus, some of my cards had no drivers for Win2K. That’s just a sampling of reasons, but CentOS had all that, plus ran usably fast. Using it reminded me of those subtle differences which I missed when using Win7, so on a lark, I checked on how other folks were coping with the Radeon card under Linux.

That HD4350 chipset has been out for two years, but X.org is just now getting some preliminary 3D support. This, when the card as a half-GB of VRAM. Then I stumbled across references to something called “Catalyst” — and I remembered that was the driver package name for the Radeon card in Win7. So I examined references to it under Linux. All this time I had thought ATI was no longer making the old flgrx proprietary driver. Seems to me I recall part of the reason for the X.org fork from XFree86 was the painfully slow adoption of Radeon code donated by ATI. So I had this picture of X.org working with ATI and no need for a separate package, as had been in the past. Wrong. Instead, I find ATI still has it, and it’s a whale of a lot better than ever.

Now, I had tried several distros of Linux on this particular machine. Several releases of Ubuntu couldn’t even identify the optical drive from which it was running and froze — the old SATA DVD-RW issue I ran into on the Inspiron 545, but with a different chipset (ICH9 versus MCP61). SUSE had no clue how to handle the video, reflecting the current state of X.org. But CentOS didn’t choke at all. While it offered only 2D acceleration with the old glxgears test giving me 300FPS, it at least allowed the monitor to run the native resolution (1920×1080). So I installed the Catalyst driver package from ATI and it worked just fine, with the glxgears running at over 3000FPS — a 10x improvement. Leaving Win7 on the one hard drive, still attached, I am running CentOS 5.4 from another drive.

On a purely experiential basis, I have found CentOS superior by far to other distros. I can’t pretend to know all the technical details. What I do know is CentOS is a clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux, and RHEL is the result of catering to the corporate user. Much as I despise the corporate culture, it isn’t uniformly evil. What makes Windows usable at all is the necessity of responding to the customer to some degree. What makes Linux so useless most of the time is the utter lack of customers, simply because developers as a whole have zero interest in any user who isn’t a hobbyist and fanboy. There is a sense in which there is never a finished product. No, not in the absolutist sense, because Windows is always being fixed, too. Rather, in the sense of a relatively stable API, a predictable experience for the user, something which doesn’t change dramatically every few months. When MS fixes something, they fix what is currently supported, and that goes back several years. Projects like GNOME and KDE can’t be bothered to fix something from last week. It’s always “fixed in the next release.” The mass of ordinary computer users, most particularly corporate customers, can’t tolerate that. The headlong rush forward, requiring frequent rebuilds and the attendant breakage is a hostile environment for most users. RH understands that, and tames the rolling-release beast by offering a Linux product which meets their needs, while the rest of the Linux/Open Source community belittles and dismisses such users.

By no means is the CentOS default desktop as pretty as Win7 or recent Linux products. I don’t care about that, nor do most ordinary computer users. CentOS uses a rather old X.org release which is pretty quick and light, and the “ancient” GNOME 2.16, which they have fixed and fixed and it’s now actually usable. No, I can’t get things like Xiphos (complications with the use of the EPEL repository) or Cheese ported back to it, but that’s because the developers are hostile to supporting older versions, taking their cues from the GNOME Project itself. But accepting those limitations with CentOS still leaves me with a very good, stable and trustworthy OS, and it’s more comfortable than Windows of any flavor. No, not inherently superior — all operating systems stink, but CentOS stinks less. If my needs change, it may become once again worthwhile to reboot into Win7.

Then there’s always RHEL 6 coming soon. When it comes out, I’m sure there will be a few issues arise and some immediate fixes. The point is, that won’t be the last fixes. RH shows consistently a careful maintenance of things the rest of the community has long forgotten. They do that simply because that’s what the customer demands. The rest of the Linux world can’t comprehend that sort of respect and care for the customers. It’s not morality; it’s entirely mercenary — that’s where the money is. Linux as a whole isn’t about money, but about the game science of fooling with computers themselves. Mac is about the cool-geewhiz factor, BSD is about performance measures, and so it goes.

You choose what you need for your emphasis. To the degree I haven’t addressed your favorite Linux distro, it’s because I find it too much work for too little return, or there really is something morally repugnant in it. Linux is not all one thing, as Linux itself goes, but the variations reduce in significance when scaled against the broader needs of humans. A computer is just a tool, not the mission. For today, the best way for me to meet that mission is running CentOS on this box. While I do admit to some sentimental attachment, watch how quickly that fades to insignificance if the situation changes.

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Somebody Has to Die

Posted on February 22, 2010 by ehurst

There will be blood.

When I see people in pain, I hurt. Just being in the same room with angry arguments is sometimes more than I can stand. My empathy is extremely sensitive, even if I sometimes miss things which hurt. Once I notice there is hurt, I hurt. If there is the least chance I am part of the cause, I hurt more than I have words to say. I am the last person to call for human suffering.

But I know God’s Laws. They demand recompense. On the one hand, He does take His time getting around to it, and under His Laws specific individuals may appear to us to have escaped justice. Rest assured, everyone faces Him sooner or later, whether you know about it or not. So on the other hand, God does bring wrath upon sins as defined by His Laws. When people transgress those laws, there is bloodshed and death.

Never mind the hideous lying wars the US pursues around the world, we have serious trouble here at home. The pretense of accountability is sloughing off in huge layers. People in government have this vast infection in their souls which causes them to assume no one has a right to resist their will. It’s as if someone drops this neural field over them upon vestment of government authority, and suddenly they cannot even imagine they might be wrong about something. Never apologize, never back down, just crush anyone and everyone. If necessary, decimate the entire population, but don’t ever turn from the path of tyranny. At every level, from dog catcher on up to president and future global government figures, something goes =click= and they are suddenly the biggest threat to human life, safety, sanity and comfort.

You can probably think of counter-examples, but they are the exception. It’s getting worse.

Here’s a concrete example: Canyon County Commissioners Against Emission Testing. Best I can understand — I could be mistaken, since unlike bureaucrats I don’t take myself too seriously — the state DEQ in Idaho has said whatever they say is good evidence is the end of the discussion. If they tell the counties to do something, DEQ will tell them not just the answer, but will tell the counties what the science behind it will be, and no one is permitted to contest it. This, even though it’s probably even more shoddy and unscientific than the IPCC lies about climate (“Climategate”).

Now, I happen to know the theory behind the relationship between states and counties, and counties aren’t in a good position to argue. But that’s not the point. The Idaho DEQ folks just don’t care about this thing called accountability to the governed, and I suspect the state legislature supports this arrogance. Once in office, representative government becomes utterly elitist and dishonest everywhere I’ve ever been in the US, at every level I’ve seen. Even if I’m wrong, let me assure you most Americans think this way. That’s the point. Things like TARP was rammed through against the overwhelming resistance of the entire voting public. It was naked defiance of the will of the people. This health care boondoggle will be the same. Nobody in DC is listening to the folks they govern, and just about every state government, most city governments, and all too many county governments are the same.

Right now, most people simply roll over. But that has already begun the change. You may have heard of some fellow named Stack who crashed his private plane into some IRS offices. Such incidents are increasing, and it’s all too likely the number of them will simply explode very soon. The presumption of government officials that the only sane course is for people to lie down and play carpet is completely out of touch with reality, and certainly not in accord with God’s Laws. But because of this craziness which seems to inflict every bureaucrat in the entire nation, from the highest to the lowest, the course is set for inevitable collision.

I’m weeping as I sit here thinking about it, because a whole lot of people are already hurting, and soon they’ll be able to take no more. Lots of people will die. It’s only right and just the bureaucrats be among the dead, but when it’s done by the hand of man, it seldom comes out even. You can tell government is not going to stop until there is no one left to govern. That’s intentionally ambiguous — either the government folks will be dead, or the folks they govern will be. But that’s not my point.

Somebody has to die. It’s already started, and it’s only going to get worse. God help us.

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Archaeology: Not Bothering to Check

Posted on February 21, 2010 by ehurst

We have all sorts of crazy, outrageous, and inevitably silly stuff said about early humanity. The most recent controversial find — Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey — threatens to force yet another crazy rewrite of the narrative.

None of this threatens the positions I’ve taken in the past. First, I avoided investing too much in detailed guessing. By no means would I claim the biblical narrative is the whole story, precisely because the Bible itself never makes that claim. Indeed, the underlying assumptions of ANE Mysticism would preclude such an arrogant viewpoint. Instead, the Bible is following a rather obscure thread of human history with a very narrow application. It is the story of God’s revelation, which came to a precious few, a highly selective group.

Further, Genesis takes the line those who carried the true knowledge of God were seldom movers and shakers in human society at large. Indeed, the earliest divergence between those who called on His Name, and the vast majority who did not, indicates the former didn’t bother building too much, weren’t deeply concerned with material progress, and had very little interest in political organization or dominance. Finally, my resounding claims are the ANE culture was not really interested in clinical descriptions and factual history, but spiritual narratives. They told the stories with an eye to meaning, loaded it with symbolism, and could care less about our preferences for precision.

Whatever the find at Gobekli Tepe turns out to be, it’s probably of no significance in terms of Christian faith. Right now, it’s most likely a representation of that other, larger thread of human development long after the Fall. Those whom the Scripture calls “Sons of God” in Genesis would not have bothered much with extensive temple and monument building. The people of God, aside from the narrative heavy on symbolism, hardly left any mark on human society. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been descriptions of a Flood, nor a Tower of Babel incident, etc. Most of humanity ignored God’s will from the very beginning.

Archaeologists keep trying to twist typical human monuments back into the biblical narrative, or lacking any way to make it match, use it to debunk the Scripture. They don’t bother to check whether they even understand what the Bible has to say. They just assume they do, often very dismissive of alternative explanations. I’m not the least bit shaken, since such finds seldom have anything to do with God’s revelation.

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Humility and Arrogance

Posted on February 20, 2010 by ehurst

Nobody has to tell me I’m just about useless. That’s one of the primary pillars I use in my personal model of Christian Mysticism. The true Christian Mystic is committed to Truth, convinced that the Truth of all things is far, far more important than any thing else, including the self. Through the eyes of mysticism, I see my sins and basic flaws and wonder how God did not remove me from earth long ago.

If you insult me, I won’t react with very much emotion, except perhaps mirth. Want to splash into the very public eye my very darkest sins? Let me help you, because I will freely admit to things I’ve done wrong. The pain I feel is still quite fresh for a lot of it. If what you say is simply not accurate — say, you want to allege I rob banks — I’ll deny it on the obvious grounds of alibi, since I’ve never done that. It’s too easy to prove the lie. If it’s just a matter of opinion, I’ll probably seek to clarify that point, but may not argue against your assessment.

I’m not impressed by folks who take themselves too seriously. I consider most efforts at reputation building and protection to be arrogance in disguise, a very denial of the principle of putting Truth first. People who seek reputation are up to no good.

How do you react when someone wants your sympathy, but will openly attack anyone who suggests it might not be fully deserved? How do you react when someone engages in cover-ups, angrily and shrilly demands their friends beat up on anyone who dares to speak ill of them? How about if they insist on controlling the very terms in which we speak of them? We call them petty, childish, arrogant, etc. Mostly we would avoid them.

Sometimes personal conduct and rules of civility do extend from the personal to the national. Not all of them, but some concepts do apply. How often do nations own up to the wrong they’ve done? Not often enough, we would say. How often do nations demand someone or some other nation grovel over the smallest things? Too often. My first serious writing effort in support of a thesis statement made this very point: When a man thinks of himself as part of a nation or other identity group, it has historically changed his character for the worse. Individual folks are generally decent, but man in concert is always unspeakably evil in the long run. Yet our Creator holds forth some standards which apply equally to both the individual and the nation.

And arrogance is one of them. It’s one thing to be proud of your accomplishments, prospering when the odds are against you. There’s not much to be proud of when you came in like a tsunami and crushed your enemies, be they human or otherwise. Sure, folks with the upper hand can still suffer a few deaths and losses, but overall, when someone has more money, better weapons, and better organization, you are surprised when they don’t win. That’s not an accomplishment, just a victory. If their enemy wins, that is an accomplishment.

When any nation demands the world play be certain rules, then acts as if no rules apply to themselves, insist on telling the most outrageous transparent lies, we tend to run out of words which mean some sort of hyper-arrogance. If by God’s standards we don’t condemn that nation, according to Scripture we are considered their enablers. It’s not necessarily talking bad about the people when pointing out the flaws in their actions. When Christ rose from the grave, there was no long any nation with a unique status before Him. From that day forward, with every possible symbol and sign He and His Father could offer, Jesus made clear the covenant with Israel was closed. To this day, no nation has any special standing before God; it’s blasphemy to say otherwise.

I am no better than any human on this earth, and considerably worse than a good many. Because God has been so patient with me, I’m striving to walk away from that, striving to establish a record of improvement. But given the sins of my past, it would only be justice due if God called my number, at least in the sense of His Laws for fallen mankind. What stays His hand is a purpose which trumps those Laws, a purpose which is spiritual by nature, and cannot be put into words directly. You can probably see some evidence of that spiritual factor in my current existence, if you get to know me. It’s a complete and utter miracle, because not a thing I could do or say would warrant that spiritual factor in my life; I could not even have wanted it. So it’s the least I can do to manifest that miracle by taking no credit, by denying there is any justice in my continued presence, only grace. I realize my hideous shortcomings and overwhelming incompetence is often trumped by grace, which makes things somehow come out right.

How much grace do you see in the current actions of that modern state called Israel? How does white phosphorus (a war crime by definition), land theft, mass punishment, dumping your sewage in houses, provoking everyone in the world you don’t like and refusing to play by the rules you demand of all others — how does that resemble God’s grace? It’s not as if graceful actions aren’t within the reach of Israel. It’s not as if she couldn’t decide to act graciously when folks ask questions. Yet, we know the only reason this blog isn’t shut down already is because I don’t get enough traffic to be noticed by the Friends of Modern Israel.

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Good As Gold?

Posted on February 19, 2010 by ehurst

Has it occurred to anyone gold is fully vulnerable to market manipulations, just as with any other “money”?

Let’s start at the beginning. Humans have basic needs: water, food, clothing, shelter, etc. For now, the first on that list is not a global problem. But we have to find something we can eat, then we need something to cover us against the climate and conditions, then we need a safe place we can sleep. It’s altogether possible each of us could find a way to provide with our own hands sufficient to get by. But if any one of us becomes particularly talented at one thing or another, we are in a position to trade with others who may have a different talent. We end up both having a little bit more. What matters is the stuff we use, not how we get it.

With more people, we gain a more complex menu of things we can trade. Distribute the various tasks of producing between a larger group and we can get much greater output for the same amount of effort, which equals more stuff distributed between the same number of folks. Add transportation and we extend the size of our trade base. But when direct exchange becomes too complicated and time consuming, we all agree upon some item of exchange. At some point in human history, we adopted gold for that, but just about anything will do if we can convince everyone else to use it.

But before you take it any farther, the point is not the means of exchange, but the stuff we all want and need. We’ve been using paper money and coins which have no intrinsic value, and it has come under a lot of attention as the source of trouble. So we have endless advertisements, sometimes disguised as article, about buying gold, silver and other precious items. But you can’t eat gold. You may believe the historic value of gold, jewels and other high-value durable items will protect from total loss of your accumulations in the coming economic troubles, but the same folks behind the manipulation of the markets and debt can manipulate gold. You’ll still have it, and your immediate neighbors may be willing to accept it at the high value, but only as long as everyone has stuff to exchange. If everyone is scratching for the same small pile of necessities, your gold will lose its value. And if the manipulators suddenly dump a bunch of gold onto the same market, you really will be hurting.

It’s a trap. Gold bugs, knowingly or not, are trying to sucker you into sinking your accumulated wealth into yet one more manipulable medium of exchange. If you are going to buy something compact and high-value, how about arms and ammunition? They at least have a use.

So do tools and various types of hardware and supplies for building, farming, fixing, etc. The most valuable thing you could possess is some skill which can be used as a survival advantage when things are really tough. Writing computer code, analyzing stock trades and writing ad copy won’t be worth much in a world where most people are scratching to eat. Skills first, then the means to employ them, are more valuable than gold.

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