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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No, I Don’t Hate Linux Now

Posted on February 18, 2010 by ehurst

A few questions I’ve gotten privately seem to call for a generalized response to save time.

I don’t hate Linux or BSD. Actually, I still love Linux — on the CLI. Indeed, I’m currently negotiating a trade for an old server box on which to run a Linux CLI installation. No GUI. The one thing about Linux I hate is the X server. It used to be pretty useful, but it has become such a huge mess. So it now auto-configures and all that? Yes, but not if you are using certain common video cards from a major player they haven’t bothered to code for since they came out two years ago. Of if your monitor happens to be just a little unusual. The X server development has gone entirely in the wrong direction, in my experience.

Linux has by far the very best framebuffer display system of any OS I’ve tried. It’s fully mouse-able (with clipboard) and some of the best applications exist for the CLI. Very important tools for things which Windows cannot do, nor be made to do, are what calls for me to keep a Linux terminal somewhere nearby. Insofar as I might be trying to obtain computer hardware in the future, the ability to run Linux as an optional OS will always be a factor in the decision. But I will never give thought to the Linux GUI any longer, because it will not ever meet my needs.

That’s the one major flaw with Linux and anything else Open Source — it’s all about the developer. Sometimes you’ll find a decent guy behind the project, and he’ll accept input on features, etc. Mostly, I find they not only don’t care what users want, but are openly hostile to such input. This is the sort of personality which creates Open Source software; it’s a feature built into the very soul of Linux. If you don’t write code, shut up and stay out of the way. If you dare to want some feature not included, you are evil for daring to want it. Yeah, freedom. Thus saith the Code Gods: “Write your own *&%#$%& code, slime!”

This is why Windows and other proprietary systems will continue ruling the market, and Linux will never find wide adoption on the desktop. The profit seeking motive of corporate software development lives or dies on pleasing the buyer, and there’s only so much you can do with marketing manipulation. Some of the biggest hype was wasted on products which never left the shelves. To the degree you can get that customer seeking ethic insinuated into the development process, you’ll get a product consumers might buy. The problem is keeping the zealous hobbyists from crippling it with insane requests for which the market is truly minuscule. Trust me, the most mundane and unexciting desktop GUI which provides the basic functions would sell better with just a little marketing savvy. All the fancy you can buy means nothing if it doesn’t actually do something useful.

Thus, every OS sucks, if you’ll pardon the crude vernacular. Most of them do something useful, but none of them can cover all the bases. Open Source never actually releases anything; it just dribbles out in a constant stream. To actually release a product implies you plan to support it for awhile as users adopt it and get used to it. No, rolling release is simply proof of the developer-centric nature of things, and users be damned. Unless they happen to be devoted hobbyist fans who never actually use anything, but keep looking for the next fix. And Windows will continue to manipulate, leverage, buyout, destroy and do whatever necessary — including satisfy the customer — to stay dominant until something happens and they have to close the doors. And Mac will continue pretending to be really cool, but only if you are willing to be even more manipulated and harshly controlled by a fascist slavemaster named Jobs. It’s a really good Unix distro, though, and the GUI is vastly superior to anything you’ll ever see on Linux.

I don’t hate any of them, but don’t particularly like any of them. Should something appear which actually tries to serve the customer, keep supporting the product more than two weeks running, and allow the maximum freedom for the user to do what they darned well please with the stuff they bought, support the common applications we all expect to see, I suppose I’ll actually become a fan. Right now, it doesn’t exist.

Update: If I could get CentOS 5 to work, I would use the GUI. For some reason, it has been by far the most reliable at detecting and configuring graphics and display hardware. It seems ATI still makes a proprietary driver for Linux, called “Catalyst”…

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Clumsiness Is a Disability

Posted on February 17, 2010 by ehurst

I break things, spill stuff, and generally make messes every day. That has nothing to do with my habits of cleanliness, since I’m actually a neat-nik. It’s just I have to spend a portion of every day cleaning up after myself. Some days are worse than others, but that’s just random.

By definition, most clumsiness episodes are a miscalculation. It’s not ignorance, nor lack of concern; it’s being unable to properly calculate the placement of hands, feet, etc. with the proper timing. With one hand I hold a cannister of some dry, powdery stuff, and with the other I reach for some implement, but miscalculate and pull the can downward and sideways, spilling the contents. The path of my free hand failed to clear the edge of the cannister. See? I understand perfectly, but it’s an actual motor disability.

I don’t get too excited about the messes these days. I may utter something ugly under my breath, depending on how much I valued what I just destroyed, and I may still weep over the loss at times. I’ll get over it. Still, it’s a feature of my life which has not changed since childhood. Having taken all the advice I’ve gotten over the years, and it making zero difference, I no longer get angry with myself or with God, or anybody else. I just clean it up.

If you observe someone in such a fix, the most hateful thing you can do is castigate, and the second most hateful thing is to give advice after the fact. The clumsy person is as much a victim as anyone else. Frankly, if the victim reacts violently, you deserve some of it. You are being socially clumsy, and you do have the means to fix it. Hold your tongue. Unless it’s an emergency, the right thing to do is watch and see if the clumsy person can digest and handle it. If not, stay out of the way. They are hurting bad, and you have to acknowledge that, or you sin. Obviously, shame and embarrassment is the number one issue here. If they act any other way, simply help. You can even ask what they would like you to do, in the “what do we do now” tone of voice. Even if it is an emergency, recriminations of any sort are simply wrong. By the way, laugh if the victim laughs.

Yes, these things do inconvenience you, or may even ruin your day (or week, month, etc.). Yes, their involvement is what made it costly for you. Unless you watched them gleefully destroy, don’t assume it has anything to do with moral failure. If you do, that is a moral failure. What you see as an external observer has little bearing on what the clumsy person experiences internally. Your ability to measure the miscalculation cannot be translated into an instructive guidance. If the thing is a routine which must be repeated, then your observations might be useful, because even a clumsy oaf can learn a physical routine. However, most spills and thrills take place outside routine and repetitive tasks.

For someone who is typically clumsy, keep in mind it is something built into the eye-hand-awareness matrix, and nothing you say or do can fix it. Treat it like a disability and you’ll be a lot closer to God.

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US Military Uncovered

Posted on February 16, 2010 by ehurst

The US military machine is exposed. While your mind may read that in terms of exposé, I am referring to the biblical meaning: US troops have no covering of protection from God.

Consider the logic offered in Scripture. What happens when the nation is faithful to God’s Law Covenants? You get such as the time Israel conquered attacking armies with a choir marching in the vanguard. They came over the crest of the ridge line and found their enemies scattered on the ground. Or consider when Hezekiah humbled himself before the Lord and the besieging Assyrian army was slaughtered in the night. While you may believe America would not be so literally protected by such dramatic miracles, one thing is certain: The underlying principle remains. When a nation obeys the Covenant Laws which apply to them, God favors them.

And when that nation departs from those Laws, God does not favor them. There is no middle ground by which we can assume God simply stands back and watches. Either we are on His side, or we are His enemies on earth. It is true He does allow a lot of stuff to happen for reasons He never bothers to reveal. He is Lord and retains the divine prerogatives of Creator. We rightly regard them as the exception, because the principle remains consistent. The nation which rejects the terms of God’s favor will not long prosper, nor remain stable and safe.

The US was built on false principles of the Enlightenment, so that weakens our status before God. On top of that, it has been a long time since our rulers were honest, and did what was right in terms of foreign policy. Lack of transparency is a sin, period. It is a particular sin for nations to say one thing and do another when dealing with other nations. Not only to they stop trusting you, but God removes a part of His protecting hand, as He puts it. So far, not a single war we have fought was honest or just, despite propaganda to the contrary. Our current warfare throughout the Middle East is wholly based on lies, and carries not a shred of noble purpose. God did not appoint any nation in human history to set right other nations, as if they could be a policeman. Further, our fetish with the vote — which has never really meant anything in our own history, to be honest — and other earmarks of “modern democracy” are all contrary to God’s Laws.

Finally, those nations have not done anything to us, but have simply exhibited the gall to not kiss our national butt, as it were. By no means can we justify being there, as far as God’s Laws are concerned. Nothing about them justifies our military invasion — zero, zip, nada, zilch. We are wrong. Imaginary ghosts of terrorism are every one of them the product of our clandestine services; until our CIA got involved, there was no such thing as Muslim terrorists. They are entirely the product of our own government meddling.

It’s certainly true individual servicemen can obtain God’s divine favor, and they would see commensurate protection and favor in terms of the Law Covenants. It would be rather like the personal covenant of Jacob’s Ladder — if You’ll act the part of my God, I’ll worship You alone. God accepted that, and still does today. But as a whole, the US troops are not under God’s protective covering. There may well be reasons for Him to prosper that warfare, but in the final analysis, it has nothing to do with the Laws of God. Therefore, we are wholly justified, by the logic of the Bible, to expect any time now for the US military to lose. Not just individual battles, but at some point have to disengage, retreat and leave the theater, as we did in Vietnam.

While we do have some of the same stupid tactical and strategic mistakes made in Vietnam, and massive command idiocy on the same level, that will be only the apparent cause of failure. The real issue remains God will allow our opponents to win, by whatever means. We’ll take a butt stomping. I suspect, given the current decline we suffer nationally, it will signal the end of the empire. Our time in the sun is past.

Our boys and girls in uniform sit unprotected by God’s divine hand. We have foolishly sent them into harm’s way, and it shall not prosper. Maybe not this very day, week, or month, but all the prayers of all the Christians in America cannot turn this evil into good. All the solemn pronouncements of all the preachers and teachers cannot change the ultimate truth. His hand is against us, and His patience is about to run out.

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Church Polity Is Politics

Posted on February 15, 2010 by ehurst

The biggest barrier to understanding the Bible is built on the foundation of false Western epistemology. Getting your head inside the biblical epistemology will help you understand a whole raft of issues far more accurately. The greatest barrier built on that false epistemology is conflation of spiritual and earthly things. It requires a living spirit (Jesus used the term “born again”) to handle spiritual issues. There is a degree to which some parts of it can be understood intellectually, but the full meaning is a matter of imperative, and dead spirits cannot process a spiritual imperative.

However, there is an earthly element to revelation which is enshrined in the Law Covenants (Noah and Moses) as something within reach of mere intellect. You can’t really get the finer points without the spiritual capability of symbolic logic, but you can still manage to obey. You can obtain the lower covenant blessings, which include social stability, reasonable prosperity, safety and security from most threats, etc. Only those with living spirits can see how those things symbolize a higher spiritual reality which cannot be put into words. The Bible is the written expression, mostly narrative, which serves to point living spirits to the unspeakable and ineffable spiritual truths. Do not conflate the ultimate truth of things in Heaven with the contextual manifestation here on earth. They are related, but hardly identical.

Every human organization is just that — a human organization. One person can freely operate according to his own convictions, but involving two or more people always requires coordination, negotiation, and some surrender of prerogatives and freedoms. All churches are human organizations. They should serve a divine purpose, but you cannot conflate the two. A church is a political institution, and nothing about the thing itself is divine. The commands regarding how we operate within that organization are not spiritual, but a matter of Laws. Not in the sense we slavishly obey the Law Covenants, because that was never the intent. It’s a start, but the whole idea was to steer you to an awareness of higher things, things which cannot be enshrined in holy writ, since anything you can touch with hands cannot be truly holy (divine), but can only be ritually pure. Ink on paper, even with a leather binding, is not spiritual. It’s just a physical object with a specific economic value. Nothing in Heaven can be valued in human economic terms. So, any church is merely human politics as the framework in which we attempt to live by divine imperatives.

The Pharisees made a serious mistake of conflating spiritual and worldly things like that. To them the physical structure of the Temple was itself sacred and holy, like touching God’s own face. That was a heresy, one of the things which caused them tremendous grief when Jesus used proper symbolic language in saying something about tearing down “this temple.” The living human as temple is a parabolic image, and was closer to the ultimate truth than the image of an inanimate structure as God’s home. Likewise, they were absolutely certain money offerings to God were concretely sacred, and that all real property in Jewish hands was somehow too good to taken as Roman taxes, that it was somehow obscene. It might be wrong in terms of the Law Covenants, but that was of little importance when viewed from the mystical, other-worldly viewpoint Jesus taught. The Law Covenants had limited application, and as the Son of God, Jesus was the true expert in such matters.

The Hebrew culture assumes you will read Scripture spiritually, reading between the lines, and not cripple your understanding by insisting on a pedantic literal rendering of everything. When you approach things from the proper epistemology, you realize there is only one possible way to satisfy the demands of the Law regarding human government: all people had to belong to a tribal-extended household social structure. The spiritual truth is it need not be a matter of DNA or marriage — that was symbolic — but the way humans relate must of necessity be within that sort of structure. The first church in the New Testament was organized around the standard extended family household, and each was led by an elder. The meaning of the term is rather flexible, because he was seldom the oldest living male in the group. He was presumably the most able to provide the earthly leadership, keeping things reasonable and stable, and holding the whole thing together in close familial ties. He wasn’t an autocrat, and fairness and equality as we think of them would be sinful intrusions. No two people in any family are alike, so no two can be treated the same. And so it goes; we can easily understand how the Jerusalem church was simply a new clan, and quickly became big as any tribe, artificially constructed across bloodlines, but still very much of that structure. Even the first “deacons” were actually appointed elders over disassociated foreign-born households lacking the local native natural ties. Since elders were the means by which the church was governed on the human level, this gave the non-native families a fair representation in the councils.

It didn’t seem necessary to tell us concretely, but wherever the gospel went across the Mediterranean Basin in Acts, this was the way churches were organized. They became households, with elders. The roles were fuzzy to our minds, because elders might also be preachers and teachers, but not necessarily. Pastors were never elders, but distinctly spiritual leaders with no real say in church government, per se. They surely held a somewhat prophetic office in addressing conduct, but didn’t govern. Their function was more priestly in that sense.

We make a grave error when we assume any other structure, regardless of our cultural orientation. There is one correct polity for the church and it is tribal. All others are perversions read back into the Bible, typically from a false — even Pharisaical — epistemology. God’s ordained proper human political structure is tribal in all things, including civil government. That’s how humans were designed to associate. Everything else is a rejection of God.

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Not the Apocalypse

Posted on February 14, 2010 by ehurst

We are facing tribulation. The West in general, and the US in particular, are under God’s wrath. Things are going to get rough.

But this is not the Apocalypse, not the Great Tribulation, and certainly not The End. Those terms do not apply to specific events in the sense we might expect. Rather, they describe something which transcends history, and come to us as symbols of God’s judgment against sin in general. That is, if you read the Bible with its own cultural and intellectual assumptions.

The banker elites rule the world, but we must note they do so only insofar as it can be done by any human agency. Their mastery is incomplete, and it may even be doomed. Either way, the point is they don’t hold all the cards. God is in control, and they simply imagine they are. I am no prophet, just a Christian Mystic who sees things from a different perspective. As a servant of God, I don’t have any dog in this fight, as it were. I have no significant loyalty to any human government, since not a one in this world is legitimate before God. They all reject His demands, as far as I can tell, so there is none to whom I owe any allegiance. I’ll cooperate when it suits my calling and mission, but otherwise will sidestep, ignore, and evade human law enforcement. If they catch up to me some day, that’s not really an issue, since all such things are under God’s control. It’s His problem, and so are the banker elites.

I don’t believe they intend to crush humanity completely. Right now, for example, they are plundering the US economy. They are bribing government officials to let them get away with it. Most likely, the US federal government will default. But that doesn’t mean the economy will collapse completely. Banks will still exist, and how they relate to you and I as individuals will no doubt change, but will not end. I figure the US government will probably cease to exist as we know it. Whether there is some bigger replacement or simply some pretense of it, I can’t say. Actual control over the people is not a simple matter. Rather, I suspect we will see a break up of the federal government, probably without too much bloodshed.

Meanwhile this part of the world will enter a serious depression. Not everyone will be out on the streets. There will be too many vacant facilities which will not be patrolled and controlled and ownership may not be so clear and precise, and most certainly will never be absolute. The system by which law is enforced will probably suffer some pretty wobbly times, change a whole lot, but it won’t keep going the way it is right now. Too many parts of the current system will break down, but it won’t be total collapse. It will get pretty hairy, and some parts of this continent will see some serious unrest and bloodshed. But plenty of places actually have some sensible folks in the game, and they’ll do what they can to keep things working, so some local governments will actually prosper to some degree. Much depends on the local civic culture and so forth. One good thing will be a lot of pretense and fakery will be exposed and collapse.

It depends on when we reach that invisible breaking point whether we actually go to war on Iran. If we do, the breaking point will probably come very quickly afterward. I’m hoping and praying we don’t get there, because it’s just one more lying excuse to murder folks who have done nothing to harm us. And I’m quite sure whatever bad stuff comes our way will most certainly be a lot worse for each bogus war we engage.

I feel quite certain an awful lot of people will be surprised by how this all turns out.

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