Transcending the Law Covenants

Posted on January 21, 2010 by ehurst

If I teach the Laws of God (Noah and Moses inclusive) and don’t live by them, I’m a hypocrite. If I teach the Laws and tell you I obey them, it would probably sound arrogant. So I won’t tell you that. I’m transcending the Laws by communion with the Lawgiver.

Most of the time we can ascertain without much difficulty the why behind some portion of the Laws. Moses warned about boiling a baby goat in its mother’s milk because that was a pagan practice, not because it was bad for you. He warned about sexual promiscuity partly because it destabilizes the community. It’s also something God takes very seriously, and has since the Garden. There were a lot of provisions which were almost entirely about respecting your fellow humans, about being civilized.

Other things are entirely fundamental to human nature. Torture is altogether evil, and nothing justifies it, even with lesser creatures. Homosexual relations fits in there, too. Nobody is surprised when a carnally minded fellow seeks his pleasure just about anywhere, but we still keep in our minds this truly threatens something fundamental to human existence. Promoting art forms which desensitize and expose us to repulsive and shocking experiences are also in that box.

If you don’t see it from the Lawgiver’s perspective, you don’t quite grasp how it opens the doors to the deepest darkness. Just about anything normally regarded as simply naughty can be taken to extremes, so that it becomes just downright nasty and evil. When you invite Satan to join your party, he will surely oblige you. God’s justice has bumpers laid out in the Law Covenants to provide some practical limits. It’s one thing to use good logic and education in ANE culture to deduce the intent of the Laws. You should certainly be doing that. It’s another thing entirely when you rise through mysticism to the level of consciousness which defies words and laws, to the place where a part of you simply knows instinctively when you, in that time and context, are too near the invisible spiritual bumper.

When you get there, something inside you rebels, and won’t go any farther without some effort to silence the warning. Most of the time, people are so wired into the obvious logic, they aren’t ready to be told something so apparently harmless is actually evil at that particular time and place. So they don’t hear the spirit cry out until, perhaps, it’s too late. So while you certainly train to think broadly in terms of God’s sense of justice as revealed, be aware you simply never will have a full appraisal of every factor involved. There are spiritual factors tied into the entire universe. They aren’t easily seen, even for people with a mystical bent.

It can’t be taught; it has to be caught. You have to hang out with people who tend to catch these things, and don’t react with mere superstition. We have a jillion religious idiots out there assuming they have this spiritual gift of discernment and it’s bogus. I can’t imagine what is driving their reactions, but in end, I am under no obligation to take them seriously. Too often they say things which are preposterous, usually to draw attention to themselves. It’s the old “follow the money” — see the trends, and you can usually figure it out when someone is full of themselves instead of the Spirit.

There are no shortcuts, no magic formulas, no books of rules. The Laws were written because the majority of humanity will never reach the spiritual plane of existence. Those who take Laws seriously will often be your biggest problems. Still, that’s the best they can do, so we try to avoid conflict. It could be a whole lot worse. But if you have any part of your soul connected to that other side, that Spiritual Realm, then by all means, it’s worth anything you have and all you are to make the most of it.

Evil days are coming, when just being spiritually honest is going to cause you trouble, and might get you killed. God’s wrath will fall on most of this world very soon, and that last dying spasm of sin is going to make an awful mess. Many of us will be caught as collateral damage, simply because we are called by God to be where the action is. We don’t fear that end, but we have to keep a spiritual perspective, keep seeing with mystical faith-eyes so we understand and can walk and talk according to the Living Lawgiver.

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Busted: NetBSD 5.01

Posted on January 20, 2010 by ehurst

No, there is nothing really wrong with the OS, but with me.

I’m not the hobbyist any more. Back when I first dove into FreeBSD I was determined to get it. I bought a couple of books, bugged some people on a forum, some Usenet groups, etc. I installed it several times on different machines. Eventually I got pretty comfortable with it, and wrote a series of articles about installing it for those who were even more clueless than I. But FreeBSD documentation is really good, and it’s promoters are generally friendly, and it’s not all that hard to do.

NetBSD people have said they don’t want me mucking about their OS. Their documentation is scant, and if you aren’t an experienced technician, it’s full of ambiguities which will drive you nuts. I don’t complain about the manual configuration, since FreeBSD was that way when I started back with 4.6. But the installation directions are not simple, just simplified. There is no simplified walk-through, and I’ve been told there will not be one. But I tried it anyway.

It took me two tries to figure out how to make the partitions. I thought it was nice you could just dump it all in a single partition, with a swap on the side. I did manage to install, but it failed to write my network settings. That was a bear. In fact, I never did quite understand what was required, and didn’t get it working. It didn’t help I had to make out this tiny 80×25 display in the center of my screen. Finally, after looking all around and discovering I would have to rebuild the kernel to get a full size display on my laptop screen, I gave up.

Before I did that, I realized it was pretty snappy on my Inspiron 4100 laptop, at least as quick as CentOS 5.4, and boots a lot quicker. Still, I’m just not interested in digging and experimenting. It’s not worth it any more. I think I’m going to try QNX.

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Anarchy Is Logical

Posted on January 19, 2010 by ehurst

After all I’ve written about the Covenant of Noah, the requirement for a civil government, you’d have to know I’m not anti-government. Actually, I’m anti-state. That is, I find the Modern State, born and defined by the Treaty of Westphalia, is utterly abhorrent to God. Westphalia was an arrow aimed at the heart of God’s Word, and is one of Satan’s greatest triumphs in human history. So the term “anarchy” typically means anti-state, not anti-government.

Even among those who embrace Aristsotelian epistemology, you can find plenty of good logic to back up this position. Take a look at this older article from 2002, by Joseph Sobran: The Reluctant Anarchist. He tells how he slowly came to that position by conviction, not by choice.

So the people are bound to obey the government even when the rulers betray their oath to uphold the Constitution. The door to escape is barred. Lincoln in effect claimed that it is not our rights but the state that is “unalienable.” And he made it stick by force of arms. No transgression of the Constitution can impair the Union’s inherited legitimacy. Once established on specific and limited terms, the US Government is forever, even if it refuses to abide by those terms.

As Hoppe argues, this is the flaw in thinking the state can be controlled by a constitution. Once granted, state power naturally becomes absolute. Obedience is a one-way street. Notionally, “We the People” create a government and specify the powers it is allowed to exercise over us; our rulers swear before God that they will respect the limits we impose on them; but when they trample down those limits, our duty to obey them remains….

For most people, “anarchy” is a disturbing word, suggesting chaos, violence, antinomianism – things they hope the state can control or prevent. The term “state,” despite its bloody history, doesn’t disturb them. Yet it’s the state that is truly chaotic, because it means the rule of the strong and cunning. They imagine that anarchy would naturally terminate in the rule of thugs. But mere thugs can’t assert a plausible right to rule. Only the state, with its propaganda apparatus, can do that. This is what “legitimacy” means. Anarchists obviously need a more seductive label.

“But what would you replace the state with?” The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be “replaced.”

He shows it’s only logical to realize the bludgeons used to keep Christians in their place — “render unto Caesar” and “the powers that be are ordained by God” — can’t mean what most people assume they mean. The people who spoke these words defied their governments and died in the process. If we assume the Son of God suffered the same intellectual inconsistency of most fallen humans, then we have nothing to discuss, and the world is a very dark, dark place indeed. Don’t forget He openly claimed to be the Son of God, so you can’t cherry pick and say He was pretty smart, just mistaken on that one point. Claiming to be God Incarnate is either madness or pure hucksterism, unless it’s true.

Sobran came to the same position as I on government — in that the modern state is illegitimate by definition — even without the benefit of biblical epistemology.

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Generous Considerations

Posted on January 18, 2010 by ehurst

Who wants to be regarded unfeeling and selfish? I won’t say it’s all a band-wagon effect, but there is a ton of stuff about aiding the Haitians on blogs and news sites. I will say far, far too many of them are self-serving, but when you deal mainly in public notice of things, it’s part of the baggage you bear. So the best we can hope for is something honest and fitting in how they cover the story.

The whole thing is one mixed bag of truly insane behavior. First, we have this Western obsession with extending help from the ivory tower. We want to do good things for the people, but we don’t want to actually have to experience part of their misery. “I need to keep my Mercedes for a run to the first class meals offered only to us aid workers.” I don’t get that at all. You can’t lift the fallen if you don’t get down next to them where they have fallen. At a minimum, your feet and hands will get dirty.

Second, look at how other nations handle similar emergencies, and how they recover… or don’t. Can we examine the results with an eye to underlying conditions, and come up with a workable explanation of how it ought to be done? I don’t have room to write a long dissertation on it, but I agree loudly with those who remind readers we are going about this all wrong. What is going on with foreign aid in Haiti right now is just more of what has been going on there for several generations.

There have been all sorts of aid agencies there for quite some time. I keep running across the number 10,000 in reports. That’s one for every 1000 residents of Haiti (10 million). It’s a veritable sink hole. Yet, on the other hand, the God of Heaven says you had better care, so don’t act like we can’t get involved. But obviously in our zeal — the US alone has given something like $30 per Haitian in the past year — we have failed the mission. But the aid establishment is deeply entrenched, and I would say precious little is actually making life better in the long run. It’s not as if nothing grows there, nor is the issue purely one of population pressure, though we note Haiti’s population has tripled during my lifetime, while the world’s population as a whole merely doubled. If whatever it was which encouraged having babies went away, so would having babies.

But you won’t find any simple formula for that, either. Mission work? Most of the people claim Christian faith, something like 80%. Just because Voodoo is an officially recognized religion doesn’t make Haiti any less civilized than Americans, who often recognize Jedi (from a movie, for goodness sake) as a valid religion. No, the problem is we have never allowed Haiti to leave the plantation. We keep sending troops every time things don’t go like we want, and we force them to accept a communist thug as their ruler, a guy by the name of Aristide. Just as here, popular vote means nothing, given election processes with rigged voting, manipulation and bribes are so common. So instead of real aid by genuine disaster recover experts, we send in the Marines!

Jarheads are fine people, for the most part, and will work hard at what they can understand is the mission. But because it’s the easiest group we can assemble and move quickly, it shows we haven’t planned very well for such things in the first place. So the best we can do is going to look about like the aftermath of Katrina. Massive organizations with massive budgets do not automatically result in good assistance. Here in the US, it almost guarantees a disaster will be made worse. That’s because nothing — nothing — in our system of government is ready to do good or right. We could teach the Haitians a thing or two about banana republic corruption. The only bright spot in this whole fiasco is the Marines are less likely to complain and whine about conditions they way the UN folks do.

How come we don’t have an industrious Haiti simply seeking temporary assistance? Why is it such a mess we just brush aside their government and do what we want? It’s because we have been doing that for so long, it’s just our customary response. Everything we do in that country is carefully calibrated to prevent any change in the situation. We need Haiti to be pitiful, because it allows us to cover up so very many sins. I can’t pretend to calculate numbers on this, but the vast majority of what you will see and hear about efforts to relieve their suffering is pure grandstanding, propaganda, a way of diverting attention from gross and unconscionable sins here at home, or in other places from which some pittance of aid is sent.

You want to solve Haiti’s problems? Leave them alone. Not just in their suffering, but in their relative good times — leave them be. Let them fight it out amongst themselves what they will be and what they will do. As long as we keep them as a plantation of children and slaves, we will always have this pitiful disaster in the Caribbean backroom to trot out when we need a diversion.

Private aid is another matter entirely. Any time any organization with the least little tie to any human government anywhere gets involved, the process is property of Satan already. Get the governments out of it. Governments are not simply unable to do good; they refuse to do good. None — not a one — will do what’s right or even harmless. This is not what governments are supposed to do, and they should never, ever try. Don’t you dare call for governments to do anything about this. For those who give, you had better check carefully the agency you trust with that money. Red Cross? Forget it; they consume more than they pass along, never you mind the official lying numbers. No, look for someone who was there before, some private group who is still there, hasn’t fled the scene of chaos, but lives right there with the people. Of, something like Doctors Without Borders, or other organizations which have actually earned respect by their record of conduct and accountability. Not a single government on this earth has such a record.

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More Death-of-the-Net?

Posted on January 16, 2010 by ehurst

As more of our economy is pulled in under the corporate and government controls, we risk a form of utterly heedless oppression. It’s called fascism — government operating on behalf the soulless corporation. We have gotten to the point the two are hardly distinguishable.

So when the FCC says it wants more say over the Internet, and the courts look askance at such a thing, we should not imagine either the courts or the FCC are looking after out best interests. What appears to be a very good thing by the FCC slapping Comcast for something which every technician knows constitutes a violation of the open protocols which make the Net possible, is probably a set up. Let’s face it: Comcast lied outright about this business of throttling BitTorrent connections. That should be a crime if it’s not, but this will surely be the lever government uses to throttle free speech.

The World of Ends is going away, in one sense. More and more of the Net is owned by corporations. They will be held back by the geek gatekeepers, but for how long? We already know the current ruling regime intends to shut down all dissent, even if oh-so carefully to prevent appearing to do so.

This matters to me because the Net is my primary outlet right now. I have a message, and a mandate from God to share what He has given me, to participate in His revelation. But for now, I have a tiny audience for that message. When I write about Linux, I get tons of hits. When I write about mysticism and faith, I get almost none. I’m not subject to much overt monitoring right now, and certainly precious little interference, because I’m not making enough noise in the sense that it would draw attention from anyone, good or bad.

At the same time, it is wholly unlikely I would try to hide behind pseudonyms and proxies. I take no effort to hide the pertinent facts about my existence, nor about what I teach. I’ve never hidden my contempt for the US government, as well as every other Western government. I’ll say it again: Not a single government in the modern world, as far as I can determine, is legitimate in the eyes of God. As a matter of conscience, I proclaim all who follow Jesus are free to disobey anything which hampers their calling from God. As long as your conscience is clean before Him, do what you must. It will not be counted against you as sin.

But the underlying assumptions are not to pick a fight with anyone. We don’t have a crusade to tear down any human government, but we ignore them all. Not blithely and stupidly, but wise as serpents and harmless as doves, in the final analysis we discount the worldly consequences as a part of the Cross. I can’t predict if those consequences will include a need for seeking ways to bypass all the Net controls planned and plotted against common users. As I survey the situation, I realize so long as God sees fit to keep me in the background, it simply means I don’t have to sweat learning more about networking and clandestine communications; I don’t have to worry about a bunch of off-shore shell accounts or whatever.

Yet.

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We Are Not In This Together

Posted on January 15, 2010 by ehurst

The first and most important signal of impending oppression is alienation from the enforcers.

To the degree you find yourself in a community where the police tend to view citizens as the enemy, you are in a police state. It matters not how benign their actions may seem on the surface; the state of enmity means you are de facto an occupied territory, held by a foreign enemy. We are there, America.

Let’s clarify this further. This is not a matter of whether the local citizens have been cowed into compliance and doctrinaire love of the enforcers. No, the burden of community spirit is upon the enforcers. It is their responsibility to represent the community which pays their salaries. It is the responsibility of the police to seek peace with the citizens.

Law enforcement was never meant to be an absolute. In a fallen world, crime is simply a fact of life. There must be an expectation of unsolved crime, simply because making it possible for police to always solve crime is itself a crime against life. It is not possible to give police the upper hand without making them a threat to the people they are supposed to protect. Law enforcement was never meant to protect government privilege against the rabble, but to become a part of the community and balance things out. Their presence minimizes crime to the degree possible without oppression, when done right.

Accountability is key. If there is no accountability, there is total freedom to screw up, and screw up royally, without any thought of possible personal consequences.

It is not being done right any more in most places in the US.

As one who adheres to the full meaning of Christian Mysticism, I notice on the one hand these insufferable violations of God’s Laws. On the other hand, I am commanded by God to be reluctant to take action against anyone for any reason. First, there comes the necessity of discerning whether His divine justice, as expressed in the Law Covenants, grants anyone the justification for armed resistance. It’s not a simple question, and any answer must be equally complex. Note, please, it has nothing to do with any constitution or written laws of men, because God’s Laws trump all of that. Also note, the entire mess must pass through the filter Jesus set for these considerations: (a) unlimited devotion and loyalty to God and (b) proper respect for your fellow humans. Jack-booted thugs are people, too, even when they forget you are, as well. Theoretically, at some point that can still place upon some individuals, possessed of full spiritual awareness, the necessity of taking up arms against unconscionable oppression.

Second, such action must be consistent with your calling. Whatever you may believe about your calling, it remains rooted in revealing God. Whatever you do must be a revelation of God, consistent with what He has commanded of all mankind. John the Baptist did not stop preaching the truth when he was in prison. The Apostle John did not stop writing Scripture when he was in prison. Their particular callings placed them in a passive resistance mode. What got them in trouble was expressing the truth of God, but the means of enforcement did not stop them doing it. This is the default mode of Christian service. You are bound by the weight of apostolic example to consider this first.

Please note what Jesus said in a very pragmatic warning to His disciples regarding the coming dark days when Rome would lay siege to Jerusalem:

Then let those in Judea flee into the mountains. Let him on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house; nor let him in the field turn back to take his clothes. And woe to those who are with child, and to those who give suck in those days! But pray that your flight is not in the winter, nor on the sabbath day; for then shall be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world to this time; no, nor ever shall be. (Matthew 24:16-21, MKJV)

There comes a point when you realize your best bet is to flee the situation. Prepare your minds well in advance to seek refuge in places where the power of the state is weakest. To the degree possible, prepare your body and your possessions for such an event. Prepare your mind to dismiss anything which is not necessary for your clear witness of God’s truth to this world, and leave it behind. (Note: If you are a dogged literalist, you will completely miss the point of this passage.)

All the while, the fundamental fact remains: The police in particular, and the state in general, are not your friends. They are not an extension of the combined public will, nor have they been since almost the beginning of our constitutional republic. Rather, they have quickly taken the position of manipulating the public will as those who simply know what’s best for us. Sure, the idea of a republic is that we should choose wise servants and judge the net results of their service at regular intervals, to prevent the madness of direct public rule. But because those in power have by long custom taken advantage of their position to ensure you cannot possibly know the truth of their doings, nor even the truth of what their doings do to us in the long run, we have ample proof these noble ideas were pure manure from the start.

God made it abundantly clear His original intention is that all mankind was meant to live in the extended family, tribal setting. The only people with any just authority over you must be related by blood or marriage. Otherwise, you have no reason to expect they spare the least concern about your welfare.

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The Ice Man Cometh

Posted on January 14, 2010 by ehurst

I take the position most of the Al Gore brand of AGW is merely a fraud, a way of scraping off a few billion more from the people who generate wealth by actually working. Yes, the climate is changing, but we are headed for an Ice Age. So it behooves us to think along those lines.

This would be easier to explain if I could put on a visual demonstration, but sunspots are critical to our winters. That is, if they are missing, then the energy which tends to warm the world does not moderate the build-up of the polar heat sinks. When vast cubic miles of air cool off over either pole during winter because of tipping away from the sun, that air spills down the sides, giving us the Polar Express cold fronts. It tends to fall over continental land masses, because oceans have much more stable temperatures, and tend to be warmer longer than land. Cold air is dense, and when it expands so far, it warms up. Bumping up against the warmer equatorial air will speed things up a bit. So it eventually weakens. In places like Siberia, the more land extends farther north and farther south, and a massive mountain range tends to block the equatorial warmth, so it stays colder longer. The missing sunspots allow the temperatures to drop farther on average, so the permafrost spreads southward.

As the normal rains turn into snow, and cooler summers melt less of it, the ice fields we see in Greenland or Antarctica spread toward the Equator. Northern cities near the center of any continental land mass will tend to disappear soonest under the ice, but eventually the northern oceans will ice over permanently and give the ice fields a solid footing everywhere. Records indicate it comes rather quickly, requiring only a decade or two to chase human occupation south.

I’ve over simplified, of course, to offer a bigger picture.

An interesting rabbit we can chase here is the conflict between the Young Earth Creationists and everyone else. Overlaying our current best dating of biblical events with apparent scientific understanding, we see the last Ice Age ended about the time when the Bible says Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden. The conflict is more conceptual than anything else. There are two items we need to consider.

One — We cannot pretend our Western rational cultural heritage prepares us well to read the most ancient Hebrew texts of Scripture. Much of what we believe the Bible says is actually a matter of us reading our biases back into the text. The language of the early chapters in Genesis is parabolic, and someone from an ancient Hebrew culture would be exasperated at how Creationists read things. It’s not all that hard to find out at least some of what Ancient Near Eastern epistemology was like, but no one wants to try too seriously among the Creationists.

Two — Why does everyone assume God had to create the world all fresh and new? Do we suppose He lacks the wisdom and imagination necessary to create it in a mature condition? Why is it necessary for He who created matter itself to wait a billion years or so to make use of the Universe? In other words, Western bias is also a sin of the anti-Creationist crowd. If God wanted to create an already ancient world, it would be no more difficult than creating anything else. You may say that sounds like God deceiving all the scientists, but I don’t recall too many of them giving a rat’s patootie what He thinks in the first place. They didn’t ask Him, didn’t seek His revelation to understand what is going on, so they can’t assume to know, and surely can’t assume to question God.

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Net Security: Nuisance Abatement

Posted on January 13, 2010 by ehurst

Aside from sections of wire and other hardware owned by government agencies, the Internet is entirely private property. A rather loose coalition of folks connected by cables and such have decided upon a common set of protocols allowing shared data. It’s that old World of Ends business. And while that is shifting somewhat as time goes by, the nature of the beast yet remains pretty much the same. This is one of the few accommodations in communication which cannot be wholly owned and controlled by any single party.

So a couple of interesting tidbits in computer security caught my attention today, by way of Sunbelt Software’s blog. In the first, a botnet is taken down. This looks on the surface like cooperative vigilantism, which is not inherently sinful in itself, but this is the Internet we are talking about. You are allowed to connect by common assent, not by rights. There is no inherent right to connect. So if you can’t make your systems behave by commonly assented rules, you don’t get to play. So this sort of activism is probably a good thing, in the long run. It’s not just trashing the commons, but trashing someone else’s private property when registrars and major providers refuse to play by the agreed rules.

Second is open publication of security flaws in commonly used software. For quite some time, there has been a debate about what researchers should do when they find a security flaw. Economic rights would suggest they ought to coordinate with the folks who wrote the software, and give them a reasonable chance to fix it first. It would appear most still do that. Sadly, far too many software making companies are unresponsive, not fixing the software. Some are downright hateful in attacking those who are actually helping them by finding problems which could adversely affect the paying customers.

There is the rub. What about the economic rights of the paying customers? If the manufacturer refuses to do what’s right, what recourse do you have? Security flaws leave these customers exposed to attacks. If a white-hat security guy can find it, surely there is at least one black-hat security guy who can find it, too. Given most software houses flatly deny any fiduciary liability for their products, the only choice you might have is migrate away. If you bought a lot of their stuff, that’s no small task. All the more so if there are overlapping dependencies between multiple products.

In the long run, I agree with the rather mercenary exposure of flaws. As more and more software makers appear to be hostile to the notion of correcting flaws, it makes sense to look for a stick to hit back against someone who clearly has the upper hand. While there are major software companies known for doing the right thing, I’m not sure a mere handful of folks are in the position to assess the reputation of everyone, since quite a few have an undeserved good one. The corporate world is notorious for inflexibility simply because it’s convenient for the folks at the top. Anyone with more power and money than you is a potential threat, and that fact scales quickly, even exponentially. Don’t trust them unless they have earned it.

I suppose I could easily add some caveats, or defensive first strikes on some arguments raised in the past. Would the Net be so large if bloodthirsty commerce were not so deeply invested? Obviously not. That’s not the point. Money and power do not give one the right to bludgeon the little people — something God Himself made clear too many times. Given the merchant culture is so utterly without morals, it becomes necessary to instill some fear and respect. So for those who respect the Laws of Noah, this open release of exploits is a good thing, given the context. And every effort to lobby government for more corporate control should result in some form of harsh reprisal.

Of course, we know it is corporations who own most of the Net. Oddly, those corporations seem to know, despite propaganda to the contrary, they can’t really win control because there is no practical means for bringing all the owners together in a more formalized agreement. There is one fundamental reason why: The people who make it work will refuse to do it. Corporations are forced to employ the genius hackers, most of whom will not under any circumstances allow the fundamental nature of the Net to change. If that ever changes, look out!

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Actionable Evil

Posted on January 12, 2010 by ehurst

You’ve seen the horror films, or read the horror stories, wherein someone finds a way to measure criminal intent directly. It is as if there is some activity in the human mind which can be read from the outside, correlated with known patterns of bad guys.

God’s Laws say that’s none of your business.

The assumptions behind the Law Covenants is not what you might surmise a person is likely to do, but what they do. Yes, we know mystically hearts are evil, but if you ever for moment forget you are fallen, too, you will have crossed the line into blasphemy. Because your heart is also given to evil, you cannot possibly prosecute based on what you might know beyond all doubt an evil man wants. As long as he manages to restrain himself, he has successfully wrestled with his demons.

You see an image. An adult man picks up a young girl, tickles her and then even bites her playfully, making her squeal with laughter. Or maybe she screams and cries. Child molester? Father figure? Both? Don’t pretend you know, because what you might think you see is merely the reflection of your own evil heart.

Do you know how to fake a personality inventory? I do. It’s easy, because I learned to write them myself, and I’m not all that brilliant. What I do know is the major element of our Western Civilization is utterly broken, hopelessly sold out to Satan because it assumes to know and quantify some legal fiction called “intent.” The Laws of God do distinguish between intentional and accidental crimes. It also recognizes your best efforts are still guesswork. Furthermore, the sentence is limited to actual harm, and on top of that, mercy. There has to be some real proof this person intends to do this, or does not take sufficient care to prevent accidents, before you impose a heavy sentence.

Our justice system, as it currently operates, is shot full of arrogant state officers institutionally incapable of admitting error. That itself is a fundamental insult to God.

Do you know why Lex Talionis is so important in ANE cultures and in the Bible? To prevent revenge. If all you can take from someone is what they took from their victims, at least symbolically, then it prevents overzealous prosecution. Boy, do we have a problem with overzealous prosecutions! When their employment rests on fickle popularity, they will always cultivate an image of being tough, not fair. And in pursuit of that, I know of not a single one who would be unwilling to play games with the facts to hide the truth, if it would make them look good.

We have cultivated a fearful society. Fearful people, as a whole, have always in history been the worst of societies, always unconscionably unjust and dangerous. We refuse to trust in God’s justice, so we pretend to be God in taking extreme measures. This is not a just society. God says so.

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Praying for Syllable

Posted on January 11, 2010 by ehurst

It’s no secret I use Linux. Indeed, I write here about how openSUSE 11.2 crashed on me and took a bite out of my desktop configuration. So I gave Ubuntu 9.10 another try. But this time I ran it from CD first. It did a much better job of setup this time. I have no idea what difference it makes, but for the first time every a Linux distro gave me the proper resolution on the console without prompting from me. So I was wondering if it did make some difference, and installed it from the live CD session. Works okay.

But it could be better. A lot better. I have come to utterly hate the X server. I don’t care why they do it, for desktop use, the thing should be fully integrated with the OS. And it should not be so doggone fat. Nor should all the world be fighting over whether they will use GNOME or KDE, when both are as about as fat and cluttered as can be. Massive huge collections of overly-complicated libraries and heaps of idiotic dependencies. I hate them both. Not in the sense I refuse to use them, but in the sense there isn’t anything better right now, when either of them could easily be much better, and any number of other things could also be better.

Haiku OS is coming out soon with the 1.0 release. There is a substantial community of developers and users held over from the BeOS days. That’s good, because it’s apparently pretty tough to port stuff over from the Open Source world. After looking at the list of ports, I’m disappointed by what’s missing, and by what is so very far behind the curve. Still, it’s up and running, and it’s not Linux or Windows. Congratulations.

Still, I find the philosophy and structure of Syllable is much better. It’s far tighter, much lighter on the resources, and is also independent of the old cobbled together systems known as Linux and BSD. Syllable is all one thing, with ports carefully selected to fit the philosophy.

No, it’s not there yet. Currently they are on release 0.6.6, and you can find a developer’s pre-release of 0.6.7. Some things don’t work. If it did, I’d be running it right now. There are just a handful of people working on it. After reading some of the ideas and playing with the Live-run CD, I realized this was what I had been wishing for all along. Frankly, there’s nothing right now to write home about. I’ve been hanging out on the forum and just trying to absorb the atmosphere, the basic assumptions and concepts.

Frankly, I’m praying for the folks who work on it, and I’m praying the project not die. So many very good ideas collapsed in the past, and I’m sad to see them go. Other really good ideas simply took off in the wrong direction for me. Understand, this is not really about what is best in all the world of computing, but what works for me. Millions of folks love Linux, and X, and GNOME and KDE… fine. But those aren’t for me. I tolerate them until something I like better is available. I really like Syllable, and I’m hoping God is at least amused enough by it to protect it and keep it going.

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