Radix Fidem Blog

Obamacare: Better Without

Posted on November 12, 2009 by ehurst

We have entered the age when it won’t really matter what we are talking about; if the government is doing it, you won’t like it.

Consider all the parts of our lives where government has taken up the slack for no good reason at all, displacing something God had said was His plan. Marriage license? Marriage is none of your business Mr. Bureaucrat. Education? Nobody does it worse than a tax-fed busybody with zero accountability to parents. Besides, parents are so difficult primarily because they all went to public school, too. Labor? Nobody gets paid more for less work than a protected laborer, except for a government employee. The only reason anything at all gets done is most people still have a shred of conscience. On and on it goes. If it really has to be done, God forbid we let government handle anything, at least the way we do government in the West.

So now we are on the verge of Obamacare. Does anyone doubt the underlying concept is to completely take over the entire range of human medical treatment? In just a few years from today, you will see every medical decision made by some unaccountable bureaucrat who lacks the competence to put on his own band-aid for a paper cut. You will be told what your needs are, how they can be treated, and when. Further, you won’t be allowed to opt out. At all. You will show up for your appointments or face fines and arrest. Okay, so maybe they won’t go quite that far, but don’t be surprised.

We have gone long past the point when we should simply do all we can to withdraw from this poisoned system. Any day now, it will be truly the very best thing you could do for yourself to manage all your medical needs at home, using whatever you can learn for yourself. Even good doctors will be tightly constrained; you’ll never have a chance to get their honest best opinion on things. So at whatever cost it will be for long term health, you’d be better off with whatever people had when there weren’t many doctors around.

The problem is, our entire nation, the whole underlying system by which we breathe, eat and do anything at all, is seriously damaged and sickened — frankenfoods, pharmaceutical pollutants in ground water, air and soil loaded with God-only-knows-what, and all sorts of unknown electro-magnetic radiation. You don’t have to be a greenie to realize this is not what God had in mind. I’m not sure we haven’t so badly fouled our nest that it can’t be fixed any more. We are no longer willing to accept what God wants to offer on this human plane.

Whatever the solution, it isn’t Obamacare. You’ll be better off with nothing at all.

Posted in globalism | Tagged government, medicine, propaganda, survival | Comments Off

Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 4: Welcome

Posted on November 11, 2009 by ehurst

For once, he had actually gotten rather bored. It took quite some time before he saw the flying pod again, or one like it — most of a waking cycle and half the following sleep cycle. He noted the unremarkable repetition of the previous sighting, then drifted back off to sleep.

He barely ate anything for breakfast and immediately sequenced the ship to anchor and slip the south pole up under it. Immediate safety checks showed the air was breathable, a light wind with cool temperatures. The humidity was predictably high for a shrouded planet. There were no perceptible threats anywhere near, just a tent some distance away. There appeared some life, but the sensors had trouble getting back much more than white noise. The visual display seemed similarly afflicted, barely making out the tent before what seemed a fog bank enveloping everything.

There seemed nothing left but to don appropriate clothing and step out. The airlock had little to do in this case, and his exit was almost as fast as he could normally move. A built-in platform grating folded out from beneath the portal just before he stepped onto it. His first surprise was the view was much clearer than the sensors indicated, though the clouds hung quite low. The tent in the distance was sharply defined and the horizon swept away to some low humpy ridges in the distance. Glancing about, he noted one quarter of the horizon presented actual mountains.

The air tasted of the seashore, and a variable wind blew. The ground was rocky, but the stones were mostly flat and dark, like broken shards of slate. The ship had extended the landing legs fully, so he turned and backed down the ladder attached to one of them. The broken slate seemed rather packed and solid beneath his boots. His coveralls seemed sufficient for the ambient air temperature. As he strode in the direction of the tent, his hand checked for the tiny energy weapon in the low breast pocket — it was about the size and shape of any stylus.

As he approached the tent, a figure stepped out through the open doorway. There were as many protocols as there were inhabited planets, and many more which vied for the most common use in situations like this. For his own steady, faintly cautious gate, the fellow from the tent approached with some energy, though not quite in a hurry. Dr. Plimick stopped with just a few paces between them. The other fellow wore a light robe, falling just below the knees, over a comfortable looking tunic of the same length. The coloration was mostly brown and gray, but there were what appeared to be decorative patches and trim of dark red and green. The man’s bearded face wore a wide, toothy grin, and closed the distance to about arm’s length between them.

The man was a bit taller, clearly older, yet full of life. He quickly bowed slightly from the waist, then spoke. It was an almost musical, lilting dialect of standard galactic trade language. The vocabulary was fairly old, but Dr. Plimick had no trouble following it.

“Welcome to Dalorius Four, which we like to call ‘Misty’ for obvious reasons. I am called Elder Manley, but I would prefer you use my personal name, George.”

Old Earth names. Dr. Plimick quickly matched George’s bow. “My name is Doctor Plimick, and you can call me Fortis.”

“We haven’t had visitors in a while, Fortis. I’m personally very pleased to see a stranger to our planet, and I assure you that reflects the sentiment of those I represent.” He waved his hands to indicate the landscape around them. “It’s a rather dreary place to meet visitors, but it’s the simplest and best answer to a very complicated situation. I’ll be glad to explain more later. For now, I wonder if you have any traveler’s needs?”

The man’s bubbling sing-song enunciation was matched by wide ranging facial expressions and body language. On the one hand was the thoroughly trained wariness of any anthropologist visiting a foreign world, but this man’s mere presence was altogether disarming. Dr. Plimick tried to avoid betraying any of this, but George seemed too aware, almost reading his mind.

“Fortis, please, take all the time and precautions you need to feel comfortable. Here on Misty, you will find us altogether unhurried. It is not merely our culture, but the necessary nature of our existence under this white foamy sky.”

His hands indicated the billowing cloud bottoms rolling around above them, seemingly just a couple hundred meters from the ground. Here and there in the distance, an occasional wisp would drift downward to the ground. Then George crossed his arms over his belly and leaned back with a peaceful smile. Such an obvious gesture of patience made Dr. Plimick feel just a little embarrassed.

“My apologies, George. While the wars across the galaxy have quieted a great deal during the past decade, the relative calm seems always to be a hard, and brittle shell over something dangerous which never dies. To encounter someone who is utterly open is so rare, we have this gut reaction to be suspicious.”

“So we understand from our news gathering birds,” George answered quietly. Then with a renewed animation, “But I believe you will find I am a fair representation of what you’ll find on the entire planet. Unlike most worlds, we did not develop such a widely diverging mix of cultural array. The population is fairly sparse, we live a largely pastoral and agricultural existence. The original colonists were mostly one extended family with only a few extra influences married in, so genetic variation is fairly narrow. There are no urban centers to offer the breeding ground of highly specialized interests, and the resulting rapid shift in language and culture. You will find us quite boring as anthropologists measure things.”

Dr. Plimick’s eyebrows rose at the mention of his academic specialty. How did this man know?

Again, George seemed to read his mind. “Then you are an anthropologist yourself?” He took Dr. Plimick’s half-smile as affirmative. “We had anticipated something like that. Every time trade stops for awhile, and our birds pick up mostly encrypted traffic, we know there is war. Then, after the bloodlust has spent itself, it’s typical to see explorers of various sorts as the initial restoration of outside contacts. Surely you know there is a bit of the anthropologist in every explorer, whether his underlying motive is trade, war or anything else?”

Dr. Plimick’s smile was slowly broadening. “So you are the anthropologist’s reception committee?”

“It is among the responsibilities I bear. I was hoping to offer you a summary of things you are likely to find of interest before we go and visit the Old Ones — that’s what we call our governing council. We are eager to renew trade, but for us, eagerness means we expect things to get going again in a year or so.” He stopped and took on a solemn face. “However, it is my duty to ask you to ensure your ship’s computer is able to navigate itself back out past our cloudy envelope without the typical sensing measures. Once out of our atmosphere, everything will work as you expect, but inside the envelope, almost nothing works. Depending on technological specifics, your ship may have trouble leaving. We would be loathe for you to find yourself trapped here.”

Posted in fiction | Tagged culture, government, writing | Comments Off

DMV: Why It’s Broken

Posted on November 10, 2009 by ehurst

We all know what is meant by the nasty bureaucracy of any state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s a byword, and we can make jokes about it.

My old friend Jim Bennett of George Mason University traveled in the Soviet bloc in the early 1980s on an Agency for International Development junket (because of his position as an adjunct scholar of the Heritage Foundation, which was closely linked to the Reagan administration). I can still recall what he said about the Soviet Union upon his return: “We have nothing to worry about; the place is one big Department of Motor Vehicles.”

We gain an image of the old Soviet Union as surly, inefficient, and extremely frustrating to the most honest and patient of people, the quintessential essence of a government monopoly on any particular thing.

Of course, the website where this joke appears assumes the problem is government. That’s leaping over quite a lot of intellectual territory. The problem is way too many people want private vehicles for use mostly in tightly congested cities with all too many motor vehicles already. And because of the naturally resulting competition between the operators of these vehicles, far too many will not abide by any common sense behavior in regards to others. Those who do have common sense are forced to call for some sort of enforcement over those who would otherwise refuse to abide by any restraints. The Lew Rockwell gang tend to deny such a problem exists, in particular that so many people demand the right to drive their vehicles in such a dense, competitive environment.

Since restrictions only come via government force, it becomes a major element in police functions. Traffic enforcement, including heavy penalties for registration, insurance and licensing violations, is a primary government activity. Naturally, the same venality of human nature appears in the opportunistic politicians who make the whole thing rather profitable for themselves and, incidentally, government treasuries.

In other words, the big mess is entirely dependent on materialism. Too many people want the benefits of a condensed market, so they cluster in cities. Lots more folks are suckered into it for the sake of their own, lesser opportunities to rise above their otherwise boring and peasant existence. The boring peasant existence is actually fairly ideal for humans. It includes a lot of community obligation, but that’s life in this fallen world. No, too many want to be their own god, independent of all others. They want the excitement of constant buzzing hustle in the city, and they have to run around that city in transportation. They can afford to buy their own transportation, so they demand the means to use it, rejecting the concept of shared facilities. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. Out on the rural spaces, it might be easier to justify a privately owned vehicle, but when you embrace the urban atmosphere, you really ought to embrace the whole package, which naturally includes common transportation.

That, too, is never done right. Private providers are too exclusive, refusing service to many who need it, but don’t fit the proper profile for any number of goofy reasons. And government provisions are, well, a DMV on wheels. When American culture changes so that those of the prissy and prosperous middle class don’t act like demigods in hatefully excluding anyone they don’t like, we can trust private provision. Don’t see that? One item: Why do we have the prim and proper necktie as a requirement, a token of bowing to the middle class god of fakery? Nothing about the modern necktie makes any sense at all from the pragmatic standpoint. It requires all manner of empty posturing to defend it, yet you rarely see anyone without it who is taken seriously. For women there is a similar milieu. It is by definition prissy and silly, the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with modern Western Civilization.

The DMV is a natural outgrowth of what we are, and simply getting government out of it won’t fix anything. God’s wrath on us is just.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged culture, economics, government | Comments Off

False Divide: Right versus Left

Posted on November 10, 2009 by ehurst

From ancient times, we understand humanity lived first under tribal social and political structures. The first kings were actually warlords, men who gained authority because they were effective in leading during emergencies which threatened the community. Eventually the respect and honor granted them increasing authority over other aspects of life. Natural competition for resources brought about wars between tribal nations, but those most successful would enslave those they defeated. Particular genius at military and political activities created domains quite large, and actual slavery of a few eventually transformed into virtual slavery of one nation over another. The conquered could keep their land and nominal freedom, but had to fork over some of their product to the victors. Tribute became taxation.

Throughout history, as we know it in the West, there have always been some who voiced a concern for the little people who paid the tribute and taxes, such that their lives were actually worse than simple slavery. They were first heard as prophets and reformers. Eventually it became a reliable source of support for the next ambitious warlord who sought to overcome the current ruling regime. Wise rulers knew to avoid taking too much, and protected their subjects from external threats; there weren’t very many of them. Too many were overly ambitious about glory and gold. They often used God as an excuse for grabbing those things. Thus, we have the easily recognized God, glory and gold. Naturally, God was the first factor peeled away.

It was by no means pure hedonistic grubbing that drove such men for the bulk of human history. There was a consciousness of moral obligation, even if it was flouted. They didn’t fear death, for the most part. It was more about being remembered a certain way, and living splendidly until they that death came. It was all part of the noblesse oblige which was clearly stated many times throughout history. Those kingdoms and empires which lasted longest were those which maintained a sense of that obligation. Little else can be noted as the common factor in great enduring empires. Great military power lasted only so long as resources paid for it, or until someone with ambition decided to use some of that prowess against the throne. Truly beloved were rulers who managed to capture the imagination of the common folks, making them feel a part of something worthy.

Such goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel. National greatness against entropy or external enemies does appeal to the subconscious, even if it fails to win the conscious mind. We call it “a gut reaction.” We’ll face a lot of hardship voluntarily if we are convinced the alternative is worse, and that national pride is always a factor in the equation. At the same time, we instantly recognize there is no justice in deprivation which does not come from a noble cause.

In human history, one of the greatest changes in the human condition came from the revolt of the middle class. European feudalism carried the seeds of its own destruction, and that destruction ruined it for all humanity, for all time. The story is a bit complicated, because we had the long history of the Roman Empire, which raised dehumanization to a high art, and broke forever the idea civilized men could be tribal. It destroyed the personal ties in all things. But that movement was delayed a bit by good old fashioned conquest from a bunch of hungry tribals, while the empire was weakened by petty personal abuse of the original Roman vision. There was no going back to the glories of the past in Rome; that path was closed, and this had much to do with her collapse. The Germanic tribes invaded. Their culture wasn’t all that hardy, and it quickly absorbed vast amounts of that civilization they had tried to destroy. The bastardized result was what we call the Middle Ages, with European Feudalism. It was brutal and hateful, and much of what was noble in ancient feudal structures was gone. Worse, it was greedy and ambitious. The business of God was almost always pure facade, while the gold and glory was what really mattered. It was the nature of Germanic culture to drift into such a petty and mean, hedonistic mockery of of things. So when kings and emperors grew ambitious for God-on-their-own-terms, they were ripe for the revolution of the merchants.

Should it surprise anyone that particular merchant civilization aborning should be of the same essential nature? It was greedy, petty, but lacked the noble fearlessness in facing death. So it was fearful, too. First God, then glory was peeled away. What had once been a fearfully oppressed minority became a fearsomely oppressive ruling minority — yet always claiming to be a majority because they co-opted the poor. There was a pretense of kindness, but only if you bought into the cultural loyalty. Things were even more dehumanized and depersonalized. Now it’s all about property. And the fake god who served the noble property interests of the lords became the fake god of who protected liberty and property in the middle classes. That is, liberty to do whatever it took to get more property, and the liberty of forcing their burger-burgess-bourgeoisie morals down everyone’s throats. By no means did any of this bear more than a superficial resemblance to the God of the Bible, and His outspoken concerns for the little people.

By the time the poor realized they had been suckered by a grubby materialism, it was too late. The ruling middle classes were brutally efficient, like the Rome of old. All their charitable works came down a particular narrow chute which required you pretend you wanted to be among them, to be like them in every way. “Validate our imaginary godliness or starve.”

The early middle class were simply a replacement for the noble classes, pretending to be as good, but certainly lacking in any sense of noblesse oblige. It became a doctrine their material success was God’s will, because they had obeyed God’s Laws to gain His blessings of prosperity. Meanwhile, their success was precisely because they leveraged and controlled commerce, in the same spirit of the feudal lords before them. So while at one time Conservative meant “royalist” and Liberal meant “merchant class,” eventually the Liberals found themselves defending their foothold, and became the Conservatives, while the defenders of the restive poor majority became the new Liberals. From the French Revolutionary assembly came the designation of Right for Conservative and Left for Liberal.

We can see those defenders of the poor grasped at all manner of straws in seeking a means to fight the bourgeoisie. The biblical social structure of the tribe was long, long forgotten, despite how tribal the poor tend to be. It’s an instinct which is entirely correct. So the Marxists capitalized on that (pun intended), and exploited the solidarity of condition as the means to identity. Virtually the entire range of political activity on behalf of the poor is some flavor of socialism and communism. While there are plenty of fakers running the show on this new Left, opportunists who typically rise to the top, the underlying traction of the leftist appeal remains one of human decency. The only sin is the method of righting the wrongs.

To further confuse things, a great many grubby materialists in the middle classes have learned how to make a living using a perverted socialism to support their businesses because it can be argued it’s good for the poor working class. Few will take the time to grasp the sharp divide between the working class and the poor peasantry. The former is an artificial construct, and dependent class suckered into clustering in cities for improved material conditions which never come, at least not for very long. But it does create a whole class of people with some brand of middle class prosperity tinged with socialist controls. What we see today is the cyclical death of such a monstrosity.

Unionists know there is something unseemly in management, because there is no such thing as a large corporate entity with good morals. They may well be lawful and ethical, but most laws were shaped by their paid henchmen in Congress. Actually caring about people? Nah. They remain utterly cynical about their customers, would gladly manipulate the whole world in buying stuff no one could possibly need, if only government didn’t restrain them from using various means of hypnosis. They settle for legally permitted forms of lying and tort protections.

Modern Western Civilization is devoid of morals. The very concept of what is good and right before God has been so twisted and perverted, it has become a mere petty dispute between a left and right who aren’t all that different. Neither cares a whit what our God and Creator has said on the matter, because they refuse to approach the question from His perspective. A concentration of wealth and power is inherently sinful. That was a part of the forgotten lesson of Babel. There is no means to justifying it before God, because there is no means of restraint for the fallen soul. The best protection of all human life on the planet is to ensure no one person or group ever holds enough of anything to threaten anyone who outnumbers them. The only proper defense against a bigger opponent is God, the One who promised to defend anyone who obeyed His Laws, regardless whether small or large. Righteousness by His Laws of Noah is the only acceptable path to His promises for prosperity, social stability and security.

That backing of from concentration of wealth and power surely means we must reduce our material standard of living should be obvious. What no one wants to admit is much of what we have now is so utterly superfluous as to be hedonistic by definition. We have gained so very much so very quickly, no one has any time to evaluate the moral implications over the long term. The utter lack of a long term view is another way we defy God. If nothing else, it acts a drug, a false god of progress, an means to distraction which keeps us from ever stopping to consider. So we have this constant blaring noise in ears and in our minds, and God is not heard.

That is, He is not heard as He prefers to be heard. We have demanded He not speak to us in gentle loving tones, under the false assumption we can declare Him non-existence. Nice try. Since we will not hear Him willingly, we will hear Him in destruction. It’s not just America — the entire facade of Western Civilization is collapsing, and it will hurt. The wrath of God isn’t simply fun and games, and we have earned the full measure of it.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged culture, government, propaganda, survival | Comments Off

Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 3: First Contact

Posted on November 9, 2009 by ehurst

Caution, indeed.

His data indicated the most common name for the star was Dolores. For a moment Dr. Plimick’s mind chased several humorous threads from that name. Ancient literature brimmed with associations. What brought him back quickly was the utter failure of the ship’s sensors to detect anything useful about the planet. He checked visual: a fuzzy white ball. Great; a cloud world.

The planet spun retrograde to Terran standard, and the gravity was just a tad light at 0.93. It was the fourth planet from the star, which was marginally larger than Sol, but well within expected habitable standards elsewhere. It’s year was a few days longer, so it’s orbit was just a bit farther out than Sol-Terra standard. Energy absorption from the star would make the planet a little warm, but the distance made it a little cooler. The magnetic belts were almost invisible.

The ship’s sensors were fully automated, of course, and he could see the computers trying different ways to get some readings. Eventually what took shape on the console before him reminded him of the earliest spool sets in the academic library back home. The data was copied from ancient sources in other formats, and on some of it, the spooling enhancements were more prominent than the actual information. Just so, the data on the planet was sparse.

The computers ran more checks to ensure this was the right star system, the right planet, etc. Eventually, the console reported with some moderate probability a wide equatorial band of nothing. That is, no apparent activity which could be interpreted as humanoid. The northern hemisphere was relatively quiet, and most of the active signs were in the south, ranging from sparse at the middle latitudes to fairly active in the far south, and tapering off some toward the pole. Extrapolations would indicate a moderate climate under such dense cloud cover, so polar regions might not be too harsh. There didn’t appear to be any actual cities, and most of the land was probably in the southern hemisphere.

This was just a bit more detail than he already had from previous surveys.

By now, most planets would have noticed the scanning and hailed his ship, or even fired on him. The planet below him remained quiet. The ship had also been attempting various forms of signaling, but so far nothing resembling any known signal came back. Then the ship’s sensors spotted a tiny artificial satellite, very close in to the cloud cover. It was almost flying as opposed to actually orbiting, since it was bouncing in and out of the thin outer reaches of the atmosphere, and hardly as large as a human body.

He watched the ship’s system track, then try to contact the thing. It was part metallic, along with plenty of organic materials, with wings of fabric. The ship guessed the fabric included some sort of passive solar energy conversion. He watched it for awhile, using both visual and sensor displays trained on the thing. It was very slow, very small, and didn’t seem to respond. Just as it began to approach the dark side of the planet, the little craft let loose a single squawk of radio signal.

The ship’s computers processed it quickly, and noted it was tightly compressed coding of an older standard communication protocol. It was terse, though not exactly dense in terms of language use.

Welcome to Dalorius Four. Safe landing at our southern pole. Please forgive the lack of guidance beacons.

He knew the ship could program itself to cross hyperspace and drop out on the surface at the south pole without the usual landing beacons. He decided to wait one more lap from their flying message pod. Meanwhile, he tried to research the name spelling, and found one peculiar reference to something about a religious group, something unsavory. However, the context was itself a little unsavory, coming during the last attempt at creating a galactic empire. An incredibly intelligent dynasty of some three men and one woman had managed to gather influence and power. But when the woman took the throne, she decided a means of better unity was religion. It was fairly open, pulling in a broad menu of current and ancient ideas. You could choose just about any flavor you liked, as long as your flavor didn’t include teachings contrary to certain imperial doctrines regarding interaction with political rulers.

While the whole thing collapsed in the usual ugly ways all empires fail, one of the episodes of decline included purging dissenting religious groups. The Imperial troops hounded some conscientious objectors, which naturally drove a fresh wave of colonization. One particular group was labeled with all sorts of hideous moral crimes, in a time when such was increasingly the tactic of unreasoning oppression. While every mention of this group was tinged with revulsion for their moral depravity, historians were pretty sure at least some of it was sheer propaganda. The group disappeared from the records just before the empire collapsed into the first of three, truly wide spread wars.

The official name was the Smiling Death Cult, but Dr. Plimick was pretty sure that was part of the propaganda. They didn’t seem to have a name for themselves. There were no overt connections to the star’s name, but he assumed either one of the leaders was called Dalorius, or it was a word with some peculiar religious significance.

At any rate, he settled back into his intuitive mode while waiting for the ship’s sensors to detect the flying message pod again.

Posted in fiction | Tagged computers, culture, survival | Comments Off

Fog in the Mind

Posted on November 7, 2009 by ehurst

Today we got away and drove the Talimena Highway, or more accurately, the Winding Stair Mountain Trail. It follows a ridge top path between Talihina, OK and Mena, AR, in the Kiamichi Mountains. We were just a little late to catch all the foliage colors of fall. Still, it promised a picturesque drive with wide high views of the valleys on either side, and the mountains beyond in each direction. It’s quite popular, especially with motorcycle riders.

So we climbed toward the sun, starting on the west end in Talihina. As soon as we got to the highest elevations, the clouds rolled in over the ridge. Thick clouds. At the Wilhelmina State Park Lodge, visibility was less than 100 yards. We still drank in some history lessons, then drove on down to Mena. As we turned north to find a parallel route back the way we came, down through the valley on the north side, the sun came back out.

The view from the valley was far more interesting. No, not because of the clouds up on top blocked the view, but because there is only so much you can see from up there in the first place. You are looking down into the valleys, but by the time your gaze moves up the next slope, it’s just distant green humps. The view of the peak itself was pretty monotonous. From the valley floor, you see up, but you also see the very many lovely details. Rocky creeks, green waters, mixed forests and far more color below the tops of the tall pines. I will remember the valley view far, far longer. I’ve already seen the view from the top when it was clear, and it doesn’t stick in my mind.

Indeed, I now wish I could find a place to live down there. I want to pass through there again sometime soon. Did not the fog roll in to tell us the things we really wanted and needed for our souls were down in the valley? You can’t buy land on the ridge, because it’s all government owned. Food and drink are pretty high-priced, and very limited. It was entirely too crowded with tourists. In the valleys, there is land for sale, a great many homes and shops, and the prices more — ahem — down to earth. We weren’t boxed in by the filthy rich flaunting their toys.

I love the mountains because they make the valleys so beautiful.

Posted in personal | Tagged nature, oklahoma, psychology, travel | Comments Off

Trusting Microsoft?

Posted on November 6, 2009 by ehurst

Dana Blankenhorn asks What Would Make You Trust Microsoft? Good question. I’ll apply the same standard here as I do to everything else — God’s sense of justice.

First, I suppose we should note, as one poster did, there are several different major parts to the Evil Empire, and they aren’t all evil. I agree the computer accessories are some of the best. Upon pulling my Dell Inspiron 545 MT out of the box, I immediately replaced the mouse with a Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse 2.0. I absolutely hated the Dell keyboard, because they have done insidious things like moving the 6-pack around to vertical, and I can’t touch-type any more, so as soon as I could afford it, I got a Microsoft ComfortCurve 2000 keyboard (I hate wireless). Good hardware. The rest of the company I don’t trust.

What would change that?

1. Fess up — It would take a huge fat book, but all those times they bought, stole or simply squashed a better product by someone else. It’s okay to buy a competitor out if you don’t orphan the loyal users. To this day I hold a measure of genuine hatred over the loss of certain favorite products, vastly superior to anything MS has ever had or ever will produce. They are gone forever because MS broke the law, and God’s Laws, in destroying the company that made them. Don’t tell me this is “just business” — humans are not machines, and God requires everyone to respect their needs.

2. Drop the Arrogance — This is actually the most hateful thing of all: The company takes itself too seriously. The moral high ground is to admit mistakes with good humor, and openly confess when someone else has a better idea, and then promise to compete honestly. “We honestly believe we can come up with something you’ll love, so give us a chance.” Think what that says to people about the personality of the company. Instead, MS spokesmen try to deny reality itself, working to construct a false propaganda world-according-to-MS. “We will tell you when to think and what to think.” This is the underlying evil which foments such things as the arm-twisting of hardware makers about monopoly installation of Windows, etc. If you never experience anything else, how can you know if Windows is really the best?

3. Culture war — To a large degree, what makes major corporations a very serious threat to humanity is embodied in, and derived from, the actions of MS. That is, what makes it all so ugly can be blamed partially on MS. The unconscionable denial of accountability has made MS tactics a household word — “clickwrap.” Greed and unreasonable profits are a sin, for all you capitalists out there. God is not a capitalist, nor a communist. He’s a family God, and both of those -isms are a sin against God’s intent. So we have a huge body of civil legal expectations shaped by MS, and it is distinctly a turn for the worse.

I have no bone to pick with the big push against piracy. While I do find it an utterly foolish, dead end business policy, it’s legitimate. So, to some degree, I see this as the seed of their own destruction. The future for software viability as a market is recognizing you cannot possibly control the bits and bytes, but you can control the support system which keeps them useful. RedHat is the future of corporate computing, and Canonical does best at reaching the common user. What the latter now needs is to slow down and stop catering so much to the hobby users, and focus on the needs of the much larger market of ordinary home users. Their LTS releases are almost there, so they only need a stronger emphasis and a fair market entryway.

Mac can never displace the Linux market, because Apple holds little appeal for the more staid average consumer. Besides, they are hardly more honest than MS in how they handle consumers. Both MS and Apple are guilty of cynical abuse on a massive scale, so I don’t trust them, either. To the degree any entity adheres to the hobbyist, rolling-release, never fix anything or produce a stable product, I don’t really trust too many Linux operations, either. So I don’t trust the GNOME or KDE projects, for example. They might be open, but they are utterly heartless. What makes them usable at all is that you can fix their stuff if you have the resources, so it justifies RedHat’s default choice for GNOME.

Posted in computers | Tagged culture, linux, mac, propaganda | Comments Off

XFCE: Less Is More

Posted on November 5, 2009 by ehurst

GTK is a very nice GUI toolkit. GNOME is rickety and parts, if not the whole thing, tend to crash way too much. You may have gotten a stable implementation on your Linux system, as CentOS does, but that’s only because you got one which was somewhat older and had been fixed. It’s the nature of GNOME development to ignore bug fixes, per se, and simply include fixes in the next release. That’s the next release which has lots of new features and lots of new bugs. The whole project is marked by an open hostility to fixing any previous version. Indeed, the developers don’t even want to discuss it. We could say the same for Qt and KDE; it’s a mess because nothing ever really gets fixed. Both desktop environments simply keep rolling forward, at a breakneck pace.

Let’s face it — that’s the way it is. Open Source tends to operate that way because most of the developers are hobbyists working on their own time. Hobbyists tend to obsess over new features and flashy stuff, and have no time for the drudgery of making it actually work. The Linux kernel and some of the essential subsystems receive a tremendous amount of corporate care, so they tend to work better, but the desktop environment (DE) is always broken. That’s in part because they do way too much for something which is never really fixed.

Many of the complaints about Ubuntu’s recent 9.10 release (Karmic Koala) seem tied to one or the other major DE, GNOME or KDE. That’s my own experience. Quite some time ago, I gave up on KDE. All the lovely promises, but it never really worked well enough. With the new 4.x series, they destroyed one of the few real advantages by reducing the configuration options. I began using GNOME simply because it was the default on CentOS, and RedHat had taken the time to fix almost every bug you might notice — but it was the ancient 2.16 release. The KDE version for CentOS was unfinished, but about the only hope for better is the KDE-Redhat Project. There, it’s all or nothing, since they can’t maintain your preferred select release. Also, it’s nowhere near as polished since they merely build the upstream supplied code from the KDE Project with RedHat branding.

On a philosophical level, KDE is simply the Windows GUI done right. GNOME is some of that, but takes more from the Mac GUI. As noted, both simply do too much for the amount of bug-fixing they get. What if you offered something a little less all-encompassing? Can we get good function without going too naked — like FVWM, IceWM, etc.? If a DE does less, there is less to go wrong. How much is enough? You can surely find many in-betweens, such as Enlightenment and XFCE. With the latter, you get the consistency of the GTK GUI, but little of the crashing you get with GNOME. I’m not aware of any similar projects with Qt, but I haven’t checked lately. In my case, XFCE does enough.

I miss the window event audio cues which came with XFce 3.x. The older style toolbar was adequate. If you needed extra widgets, you could run them separately as dedicated applications. With the recent 4.6 release included in the Ubuntu Karmic series, you get all the best and latest, and it’s configured by default to look very much like the GNOME DE. That is, you’ll see a thin toolbar top and bottom of the screen. The widgets are considerably more limited in types and function. Again, you may not like the limitations, but there’s less to break. Over the years when I’ve played with XFCE, I’ve typically preferred to run GKrellM to satisfy my urge to keep an eye on things, and allowed the toolbar(s) to be just a menu holder, and later a window-tracker. I’m not a genuine devotee of any DE, simply because I can adapt to most of them with enough use, and get what I need from my computer with just about anything. I can almost run console only, if it comes to that. Still, I want as much convenience as I can get without the complications.

My disappointment with Karmic’s GNOME was enough to prompt a change. I kept running into a problem with something so silly as Aisleriot. I’d be playing away on Freecell and suddenly the GUI would crash and log me out. I chased down every log I could find, tried various tweaks, all to no avail. I realized whatever it was, it didn’t hit the logs, because after testing different attempts to fix, the contents of the logs kept offering totally different clues, none of which seemed connected to my experience in the voluminous bug reports one finds in the Ubuntu community. Sure, I could have simply chosen another card game set. The point is I play such games to allow my brain to process in the background something important enough to refer it to the mystical processes. The card playing redirects my conscious mind while the subconscious carries on the important work. (Yes, I’m a complete weirdo, but it works for me.) This bug stood in the forefront of other things I didn’t like about the way GNOME was working. I’m tired of distro-shopping, and this was as close as I could have gotten so far on this machine, and still have some hope of eventually having a very stable, long-term OS and desktop. So I installed XFCE, essentially shifting my system over to Xubuntu.

Because my screen is so wide, using GKrellM in sticky mode is perfect. I can afford to “waste” lateral space. I’ve loaded it with all the monitors I care about, and still have some empty space below it, but I don’t feel the urge to fill every available pixel of my screen. There is a lot of empty space on the two panels, but I’m not too concerned right now. I like keeping various functions in certain corners to maintain old habits, and there’s really no compelling reason to change. XFCE offers just enough adaptability I don’t have to waste time retraining myself. I can simply do my work the way I prefer. For now, it’s a keeper. Just to play it safe, though, I installed my old favorite XPat2, since I like how it works better than Aisleriot. I can keep my preferred color scheme, which is Dirty-Ice; I use the old Trench window style, and the Blue Steel theme on GKrellM. I end up with something far less Windows-like, and more in the Unix style. I’m sure I could get by with my other old favorite, IceWM, but I have gotten into some less Spartan habits.

For the most part, I’m tired of testing and poking. I’m not a hobbyist; I’m just a user who prefers Linux and BSD and won’t consider using Windows without a gun pointed at my head. Okay, I suppose if I was restricted to hardware on which Linux simply would not work at all, I might be stuck with it, but God has been gracious to give me something just inside the circle of hardware compatibility for Linux. There are several threads of working habits, but I’m trying to reduce them to save time. I’m getting older and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. At this point, I can no longer consider KDE, and I’m about to drop GNOME. If XFCE continues to offer just enough of the DE continuity, and I don’t have to fight obscure bugs to use it, that’s one less issue I have to consider when the inevitable upgrade comes.

Xubuntu it is.

Posted in computers | Tagged debian, linux, psychology | 2 Comments

Ron Paul Proves It’s Pointless

Posted on November 4, 2009 by ehurst

Hats off to Ron Paul. From within the system he has striven to make things go right. He preaches the Constitution, does everything he can to get folks to abide by it, works to restrain or remove anything in government which is not in accordance with it, and shows in every way possible the whole thing is so utterly broke, it can’t be fixed.

During the election, the party apparatchiks pulled every possible crime — I saw reports at least one of his delegates was murdered — to prevent him having a fair shot at the nomination. If you still support Republicans, you are no better than a communist thug. We already know Democrats are avowed communists, they just don’t call it that. So we have a complete and utter coup from within, and few people notice. Think about it for just a moment: How utterly shameless are the powerful insisting they do nothing wrong; they won’t even admit it’s possible they’ve done wrong.

Still, the mere fact Ron Paul keeps trying, and it keeps failing so splendidly, shows it can’t be fixed. It’s all the proof anyone needs. Once you accept that, you realize several things are possible, and some quite likely.

There will be an attempt to dissolve any semblance of national sovereignty, surrendering us to some global governing authority.
There will be a matching attempt to dissolve the nation into individual states and sections, wresting sovereignty back down to a smaller level.
Police agencies refusing to abide by sane limits will provoke increasing armed resistance from very ordinary people. The entire facade of protecting the public will be ripped away in naked oppression. We are already seeing this some, particularly in major urban centers.
Anyone actually capable of changing things for the better will be marginalized, silenced, and if necessary, murdered, to prevent the current ruling elite from losing their franchise.
There will be major armed revolts in scattered places, with serious loss of life among government officials and law enforcement.
Government officials and their friends in corporations will work together more and more in the most egregious farcical schemes to take all we’ve got.
There is a very high likelihood of military mutinies, and some stand to succeed in some measure.

The point is, we have gone past the safety line. There is no going back, and no amount of reform will stop the momentum. At every level (though not quite yet in every place), government has become the biggest threat to life, liberty and property. In a broad sense, your government is the only real terrorist organization you have to worry about.

I’m making preparations to avoid being sucked into this mess. My commitment is to remain aloof from the very public folly, since human government has never been good or right for more than a few seconds at a time. The only way to live sanely in this world is to cling to a higher plane. Don’t take this madness too seriously.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged government, resistance, survival | Comments Off