Opera Browser 10 Unstable on Linux 64-bit

Posted on October 24, 2009 by ehurst

This happens often enough it seems to be trend. I’m not the only one who experiences this. I found complaints on forums at Ubuntu and other Linux distros, as well as the Opera forums. It appears on all sorts of hardware, and the only common thread so far is Linux 64-bit.

When running 64-bit Linux, Opera can freeze. Not just the application, but it locks up the X-server with it. This happened with older versions of Opera on Linux 64, both with me and others. Apparently this is something fairly random. For some, it’s so frequent, Opera becomes unusable. Others, like myself, can’t seem to find a pattern. Yet, it’s persistent, more with with 64-bit than 32-bit. Something about the way Opera addresses the X-server is different than most other apps which have ever troubled me. Suggestions offered don’t help.

In my case, this is a show-stopper. I can’t afford to have this happen. It raises the risk of having a lock-up when I am in the midst of writing something, and I have already lost material a couple of times. Given this is something going back to my experience with early Opera 9.0 releases, I suspect there is something Opera does which is not quite kosher with X and 64-bit. Until I learn something the Opera folks have done to address this, I’ll be avoiding Opera in the future.

Sure as the world, some smart aleck reading this will insist there is no reason to use 64-bit for anything except databases and heavy graphics rendering. My response is something I’ve read in a couple of places from people who know a lot more than I do: The reason 64-bit seems helpful only in those two uses is because far, far too many developers don’t yet think in 64-bit terms. Given it’s been around so very long already, and is now the standard, and we aren’t all that far from 128-bit hardware, it’s about time folks took this more seriously. I choose to run 64-bit, exposing problems on desktop apps (let’s talk about Motif, for example) until developers start getting used to it. I strongly believe it hasn’t been exploited fully.

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Net Justice

Posted on October 23, 2009 by ehurst

God’s justice assumes you’ll do your best to stay out of other peoples’ way, but that their way won’t mean harming you. It’s a never-ending tension and renegotiation. The biggest source of conflict is unrealistic expectations, particularly regarding what God considers just, and what is possible.

Perception of some things is buried under tons of idiocy. For example, the very nature of the Internet is poorly understood by many. They expect it to be like any broadcast medium, but more convenient because you get to choose the content and timing. While it does do that, it’s much more, and it’s the “much more” which makes expectations unrealistic. Most people have been conditioned to operate as if their perception of the world is the most obvious one of all. A different expectation is not just different, but somehow flawed by virtue of being different.

There are a lot of folks on the Net who do understand something of it’s true nature. While they chafe at restrictions arising from that nature, they at least understand it and what it takes to get around those limits. The Internet is wires and fiber lines running between computers. Because it costs money to put that hardware out there, somebody has to invest up front to get that electronic pathway installed.

It means crossing a lot of land owned by other entities, so legal access has to be negotiated under the assumption it’s a necessity. It becomes a necessity not when the folks who have to surrender access want the Internet, but under a much broader notion that, if enough people on either side really need it badly enough, the guy in the middle has to yield. If we didn’t have that notion, there would be a lot fewer roads, pipelines, wire networks, etc. Even paper letters in envelopes are included, because someone has to carry those things across someone else’s territory. All of those things are a form of “communication” in the broadest meaning of the word. Whether the folks in the middle like or not, human life is unnecessarily burdened if public access across their domain is not allowed, so it became a matter of law and government. The bottom line is if you don’t cooperate, people with guns will come and make your life miserable. There is a general assumption your right to your property is not quite absolute when that property is adjoined to others.

But the folks who are granted access can’t just do what they want, either. If the government does them a special favor, the government has to make sure they don’t go overboard. All the more so when the government presumes to operate somewhat according to the will of the people, or at least in their best interests. Somebody with no interest, or at least limited interest, has to referee between the two. The problem comes when that third party — government — is on the take from one of the other two. Getting your side of the negotiations heard becomes a matter of money, which can be a substitute for force, because it can hire the guns. Governments are made up of people, too, and they have personal interests. Welcome to the real world. So we discuss and debate what is fair and just, and sometimes money isn’t the only thing that matters to governments, since government people have been slaughtered in the past for going too far. We can make laws to protect access in the public interest, but you really can’t prevent someone destroying a means of communication crossing their land. It’s too easy to make it look like someone else did it, since there are plenty of folks willing to do it for their own reasons.

It’s a big mess, but so far things have fallen just above the minimum tolerable. All these things requiring access are classed as a “public utility.” It has to be regulated because, let’s face it, having free competition on access is not possible. A farmer can be forced to let a two-lane road cross his pasture, but he can’t be forced to let five competing companies each build their own road. And the same applies to pipes, wires, etc. So we have this commonly accepted notion you put in enough means of communication to anticipate future need for some time to come, and try not to repeat the process too often. That means making it low maintenance, which is more expensive, but probably worth it for everyone involved. Sometimes folks on the other end want it bad enough they’ll tax themselves to pay for it, because the folks who are best able to put the stuff in or on the ground may need a little convincing. By now, it’s become the norm, so that the Internet is really a public-private partnership of sorts.

Somewhere in the mix of all this, somebody has to broker access to the Internet wires. They put big expensive computers at the end of those wires, and parcel out the signal to lots of ordinary folks. You would hardly believe how many people think having a computer with a web browser entitles them to access that privately controlled Internet. Not only do they not want to pay for that access, they aren’t even fully aware of the physical necessity of plugging a wire into the back of their computer. If we add in a discussion of wireless, it changes things only a little. You can’t have two competing signals on the same frequency in the same area, but the air is hard to “own,” so the government manages the transmission spectrum on behalf of the governed. So access is still limited and somebody has to pay for the power to push those electrons either through the wires or through the air. At some point, you’d have to expect the resources for doing this to run into limits. As more and more powerful computers are sold more cheaply, and old ones keep working so folks can buy them used, more people want access. Worse, more and more of those wanting access have an increasingly poor understanding how it works and what they should expect.

As we debate some of the trouble naturally arising from disputes over limited supplies of what the Internet provides, it’s too easy to forget what happened just a few years ago. The unhappy customers today aren’t the same ones from yesterday, and the character of the average user has shifted to a lower common denominator. No one should be surprised when their demands are increasingly unreasonable. The nature of the Net makes it more and more difficult to give them what they want. The folks who use the Net to cater to those demands want fatter pipes, as do the new class of users. The folks running the Net can’t do it on current terms, with the current hardware. Part of what we have forgotten are issues germane to the debate for other reasons.

It’s gotten pretty tangled and messy. Nobody has clean hands here. Government people have been taking bribes from different sides at different times, though usually in forms which aren’t called “bribes” under the complex laws. The folks who provide the hardware and put it in or on the ground were paid a huge amount of tax money to do more of it as a public benefit, but now they don’t want to offer full access to it. There are vast stretches of unused cable in the ground, and the owners of the cables flatly refuse customer demands, and very few people are even aware of this. They want huge profits, too. The folks who are providing the stuff on the Net, which users demand, are aware of this, but if they have said anything, nobody has reported it. That’s because the folks who do the reporting are usually paid by the folks who own the wires in the ground. Okay, it’s more complicated than that, but it works out about the same. Then there are the big companies who have their market share in the computer hardware used by ordinary folks, and the market share of the software which runs on it, and the operating systems, too. Everyone seems to have a slice of the pie, and wants more, and fights for it — mostly by lying about what they can or can’t do, how much it costs, or simply preventing anyone from a fully informed picture of the debate.

Right now, government seems inclined to do what is in its own interest, which is opening new paths to control. That hasn’t always been totally bad, but it seldom works out as well as we hope. It may still be better than letting things run their own course. On the one hand, the Net itself is a powerful need of government, but broad access is their greatest potential enemy. More people know more things about the secret machinations of folks in government because of broad Internet access, and openness is not what government people like. The people who own the wires would also like to control what goes over them, because there’s big profits in content right now. The folks who simply use the Net to transmit their content are threatened, and want the wire owners kept out of that business. Or, they want at least a regulated “level playing field” for competition. So far, those providers are far more popular with ordinary users. Regular users are tired of being told what they should want.

That final group of regular users is a very mixed bag, indeed. Those of us who understand best aren’t in a good position to be heard. I’m not alone in wishing there was a totally separate consumer-oriented “Internet 2.0” for all this future nonsense. It’s not just old folks who pine for the Good Ole Days, but folks who use the Net as it was designed, who understand that design (to varying degrees, yes, but you have to draw your circles somewhere). I can’t estimate what proportion we are, but we are substantial. The Net is our work, or the best — even necessary — tool for our work. It’s not entirely a matter of how we’ll put food on the table and pay our ISP bill. There is no viable replacement, so much so many of us are preparing ways to keep it going through other means (like unregulated wireless meshes). What will all this do to us? Right now, most of us support Net Neutrality because we have had too much of the Big Network access providers pretending they are unaccountable. We know for a fact they are able to provide what we need, and can make a profit at it. We know for a fact they are growing more touchy about quarterly investor reports, and ignoring the long term opportunities, which makes them utterly unresponsive — even downright nasty and hateful — to serious Net users.

Finally, it was the government which gave us the Internet in the first place. Yeah, you forgot that, too. A collection of government owned science labs, government funded universities, and government funded programs at private institutions were the first Internet. Nobody else could afford it. Then, when some folks found ways to make money from it, the first corporate networks got involved. Now those corporate networks dominate, and they’ve been partially regulated for a long time. As always, regulation grows when people find new ways to break the old rules. Sometimes the rules are a good idea, and quite often they are not. To think this can somehow morph into something entirely corporate is fantasy. The wires have to go somewhere, and the airwaves are limited, too. It’s a give and take thing, and doctrinaire pontificating from any particular side is propaganda. There are no really good answers, and what we get won’t be pretty.

I’m fully aware of how government bureaucracy works, having been a bureaucrat myself. I’ve also had first hand experience with corporate bureaucracy. But what I can’t forget is how ugly the Big Telcos and network providers can be, how completely unreasonable and unaccountable they are after they have taken your money. Their lies have caused me more pain than government lies. I’ll take my chances; I’m voting for the FCC to enforce Net Neutrality.

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Accidental Conformity

Posted on October 22, 2009 by ehurst

I can give only what I have. Some say I am able to package it nicely, and it is surely a pleasure for me to do the wrapping. But in the end, it’s what’s inside the packaging that counts.

It is my nature, built into my very DNA, to avoid conforming. It would be easy enough for that to become an excuse to make trouble for everyone else in the world. Lord knows, I’ve done that enough. Sometimes I’m really surprised I made it to 53. Somewhere back at the beginning, I managed to obtain a healthy fear of letting people know I didn’t accept their ideas about the world, and simply pretend for their sakes. That’s probably the reason society didn’t steer me into a life of crime. Instead, I managed to masquerade my non-conformist nature and learned about tactics for expressing it.

In these latter decades of life, I’m in a better position to avoid conformity with a purpose. That is, I set aside the junk I’m fed on just about anything, examine it from other angles, seeking particularly any angle not already covered. Sure, it all depends on how important I sense the thing is, whether I really dig into it or just take a quick glance. Still, I’ll probably be one of the last to buy into anything, if it matters to me at all. Right or wrong, I have a powerful sense of when something matters, and can decide instantly if circumstances demand it. The root word for “radical” is Latin radix — the root of a thing. To be a radical means someone who evaluates critically the nature of the thing, with a tendency to dismiss all the layers of social investment on top. I want to know the root nature of something, and the herd’s feelings be damned; I’ll rip it all off and decide for myself what I need to do with it.

Sometimes the functioning of the social structure does matter. It’s that I reject the most common assumptions about what matters, there, too. I have this notion about Eden being a paradisaical ideal, what God Himself intended. When something is offered me as a reflection of that, I have an obligation before God to investigate by His revelation whether it’s a reflection of His paradise or just some mythical nonsense being sold that way. Very, very often, I reject the sales pitch. A critical element in what drives me is setting things right, and irreverence about the great social standing of this or that person or idea is part of what makes it fun. But I don’t do it simply to reject and shock, because that serves no purpose. I’m a radical root-hunter, not a destroyer. Society does some really stupid stuff which hurts people, and it makes me angry when someone is being squashed unjustly. If someone has to get hurt, let it be the oppressive cattle prod wielding agents of brainless conformity. That’s the reason I retain some little element of violence in my nature, because I can’t just let the innocent suffer. Sometimes the oppressor won’t listen to anything at all, so it’s simply a matter of stopping them. I don’t pretend I can change anyone, but I am darned sure going to change situations if I have the power. Fixing the hurts of society can mean simply pouring the inevitable Pandora’s Box of evil consequences back into the laps of those who keep opening the box.

Sometimes no one is at fault. Once in awhile I can see where something fundamental in the social structure is itself the cause of human misery. At the same time, I have to realize this may be the best we can expect. I don’t forget what I preach, that Eden is a symbol of some deeper desire of God to bless His Creation, but that we are the ones who got ourselves kicked out. Eden is gone from this earth, and you can only go back there by dying. The whole thing is wrapped up in symbolism, so it has different meanings on different levels, but the point here is you should want it, even while you know you can’t actually have it. Instead, you do what you can by trying to bring pieces of it back to your world, fresh glimpses of Life as God meant it to be. It’s in the striving, not the achievement, so some misery is entirely the norm for our existence here.

It’s the madness of rejecting the just misery of our common human condition which makes things so bad in this life. God created fire for our use. You have to get close enough to cook with it, but avoid stepping in it. The instinct for building fences and barriers to protect people from themselves does not come from God. The only truly effective safety barrier is the one built into the soul. That’s not to say we don’t snatch our children back from walking into the fire, but we have no choice but to let them get burned just a little, or they’ll never really understand the danger. It’s a sin against God to be over-protective, as if there is something virtuous in abundant caution. Super-caution only works when the situation is utterly unknown. You can have people die by taking risks, or you can kill everyone — a living death — by making risks impossible. People have to be able at some point to choose stupidity, particularly as long as it hurts only themselves. To the degree they externalize that hurt to others, we do what we can to limit them, but we cannot possibly stop them and call it “justice” — God clearly says otherwise.

Conformity has limited utility, but does have some.

So when I seem to conform, it’s because I sense that matter is tested, tried from every angle, and I cannot contribute anything new. I adhere as much as I can to good rules of English grammar, but not the strictest regime. It’s just a good way to get things done; it’s practical. I vastly prefer the staid and stable corporate RHEL brand of Linux over all the flashy eye-candy of Ubuntu, but I can’t get CentOS (a clone of RHEL) to run on my hardware just yet. I get more done with CentOS than I do with Ubuntu, but the difference isn’t huge, so I compromise and run Ubuntu until CentOS catches up. I don’t eat everything my appetite calls for, but observe some flexible limits. On the other hand, I utterly reject conventional American notions about nutrition, for the most part. I rarely eat out, and I’m very picky where I go when I do. I’m hardly an athlete, but I do athletic stuff so I don’t have to live with high blood pressure. Besides, long solitary walks are one of the best ways to clear away the rubble of human interaction and rediscover who I am, with some hope of seeing who God intends me to be. So some of what I do seems conventional only because once in awhile, convention stumbles on what is right.

When I conform, it’s only because conformity has conformed to the Truth. That’s pretty rare, but it does happen.

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Do This First

Posted on October 21, 2009 by ehurst

We are under a dictatorship. It’s a tyranny we Americans tolerate for now, because we don’t have what it takes to resist. Red Dawn? Nah. We aren’t like that; we aren’t that strong. Worse, no enemy is going to make it that easy. For example, we seldom see dissent silenced by brute force, notwithstanding the criminal behavior of police in the recent G-20 protests in Pittsburgh, or similar actions here in the US. Rather, dissent is controlled by making it socially unacceptable. Dare to dissent from Israeli control of US government (no, it’s not total, but very obviously present)? You’re denounced as an anti-Semite with no recourse or defense. Dare the suggest the president doesn’t know what he’s doing? You’re a racist reactionary. The enforcers don’t wear uniforms like the Brown Shirts, but they serve the same function.

How to defeat it? Tyranny’s greatest weakness is whether individuals yield to the common conscience. That we even have a phrase “common sense” which serves as a cover for mere convention is proof the biggest weapon is not really language, but the unwillingness of most to face any significant social pressure. The weapon is the herd instinct. Attack that and you win. It crumbles so easily under the most insignificant assault, you’ll laugh when you finally try it.

The founding principle in tyranny is ownership of the self. Really; that’s the whole thing. The reason tyranny works is because everyone — “common sense” — assumes an obligation which is not supported by God. In the Laws of Noah, there is a generalized assumption you won’t seek harm of another, but may not always be able to avoid it. So we justly deduce the general obligation called “civility,” which permits us to live with others and avoid unnecessary hostility. The weapon of tyranny is to extend that principle far beyond God’s design. You are under no obligation at all to make your neighbor happy. Their feelings are by no means any concern of yours. You might read their emotional reactions as the means to tailoring each encounter, but that’s only a matter of convenience. In the final analysis, God does not grant to anyone the right to terrorize the rest of the world because of how they feel. You are under no obligation — absolutely zero — for how your neighbor feels about anything. Your only obligation is the degree of justice in your power, your choices in actions and words.

We could spend days and weeks untangling what it means to be just in your words. Words are a form of behavior, and while they do not break bones, they do cause great harm via manipulation and deception. You are obliged to be honest, but you are not obliged to reveal every private detail of your life. It might be an esoteric art form for many to discern between secrecy and privacy, but the principle remains. Indeed, civility assumes not every detail of your existence is worthy of note (but don’t tell that to the idiots who live on Facebook or MySpace). You inform folks voluntarily of things which could affect them, and of which they may not be aware. Otherwise, you mind your own business.

You owe them that much under the Laws of Noah. Anything more requires a covenant or family ties. Where nature and circumstance do not bestow a family linkage, it can be emulated via covenants. You can choose to become “family” in effect, with the expectation of God’s enforcement, by a covenant. Marriage is the primary example, where two lacking a family tie consent to become family. There are complications regarding how that commits others to whom you are related by DNA, but that’s another matter. For the sake of this discussion, please note you bind your relatives in certain aspects when you marry someone, because your covenant with your spouse makes them kin to your family. How you come to the decision won’t matter; you have to agree in advance, with properly informed consent, to such conditions as covenant includes. Covenants are sacred; God becomes a party to them, since the theory is all covenants are submitted to Him for ratification. You’d be surprised what He will back, but the point is He backs solemn covenants. Nothing under God’s heaven justifies the assumption a civil government can intrude where family or covenant fails. Keep in mind, no civil government is truly legitimate which isn’t constrained by family or covenant ties. Which brings us back where we started: No one should assume you are bear a burden of responsibility more than mere civility, unless there is a family or covenant relationship.

No political entity on earth can justly assume a covenant authority over you simply because you happen to stand on soil they claim to rule. And it should be painfully obvious no one has a right to control how you think or feel about anything, regardless of kinship. Family can require you to act in certain ways, as if you believed or felt as they wished, but cannot pretend to mess with your head. (Hint: All forms of manipulation are inherently evil.) God reserves to Himself alone matters of what’s inside your head. If you hate me, that’s your problem. If you act unjustly toward me, that’s another matter. It shouldn’t bother me how you feel, and I should strive to overlook all outward expressions of those feelings, so long as they do not hinder me in obeying all the Laws of Noah myself. In other words, annoying someone is no sin, and only a small consideration in civility. You shouldn’t want to, but sometimes higher considerations demand it.

What are those higher considerations? Things are a little fuzzy there, from our human perspective. We can state certain general principles, but they must of necessity be expressed through individual humans. Nobody living on earth is the ultimate authority, nor can any group of humans claim to speak conclusively on every detail. The whole point is the tension and constant negotiations are the norm. It’s the nature of things; there are no short cuts. Deal with it. The whole problem with tyranny is someone or some group refuses the burden, seeks an escape God does not allow. That’s why we can point to this or that government or policy and claim it’s not legitimate in God’s eyes. Most tyranny rejects Him in the first place, though it may be a rejection via rejection of what He has revealed of Himself. It won’t matter if you say there is no God, or you make up your own fictional version of Him — it’s the same sin of rejecting Him. Tyranny by definition is someone usurping God’s authority.

That we cannot all possibly agree, at any one time, what it is He demands of us means facing negotiation and tension is utterly required of us all. No role on this earth is so great, vital or important as to justify escaping it. If you deliberate negotiations on behalf of a vast family or covenant nation, you are bound by the same principles, and you cannot assume everyone will be happy. You cannot assume everyone has to keep their objections to themselves for your convenience. You cannot use the intervening household, clan, and tribal leadership (or equivalent civil jurisdictions) as a buffer to avoid facing them. The purpose of rising to such prominence is facilitating their combined wishes, along with your best understanding of their needs. If you can’t do it right, there’s a good chance you are trying to do too much with too many people. The greatest failure of all government is taking authority over more people and stuff than can be managed justly. The greatest sin of government is insulation from the governed.

How can you hope to work toward correction if you don’t understand what government is doing wrong? How can you possibly suggest better ideas if you don’t know what God intended? How can you begin to know what God intended if you don’t even know what’s inside yourself? The starting point is not correcting this very obviously broken system under which we live! The starting point is correcting a very broken understanding of things — your understanding, my understanding. And we cannot hope to work on that if we let someone else tell us what is supposed to be inside our hearts. “The number one problem in American today”® — too many Americans don’t know who they are. In this, the mystics are altogether correct. If you don’t spend some time alone with yourself, in a quiet place, doing the work of introspection, you will have no ground to stand on for pushing against injustice. It does take time. If you have the added advantage of being able to pray when you do that, all the better. But lacking that, at least get to know yourself and your own heart on things. It takes time. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking God won’t support this; if you do this, you are obeying His Laws.

So whether in prayer, meditation, or whatever you call it, you should have started this years ago. Not emptying yourself, but finding yourself. Pour out all the stuff other people have put in there and find what God planted there as Creator. It’s not that hard. Find a place where you aren’t distracted and look inward. Do it daily if you can, and give it time. I care not a whit about differences in personality, or all those psychological inventories, and so forth; people who never bother to look inward are dead men walking. That’s what rules America, in that all those who lend their approval, via voting or simple acquiescence to tyranny, are dead. They might as well be, since all their actions sum up to letting tyranny proceed unhindered. The one key to reform or revolution or just surviving is coming to life in knowing yourself. Do this first and you’ll have reason to hope.

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Swine Flu Shots: Propaganda versus Propaganda

Posted on October 20, 2009 by ehurst

On the one hand, there is no doubt the most obvious factor in the Swine Flu hysteria is the profit motive for Big Pharma. We know the World Health Organization (WHO) is run by and for Big Pharma. Any pretense of scientific objectivity is plain and simple lying. Worse, or own FDA is similarly compromised, and Congress is even worse. So at the very least, this whole thing is just a matter of money in the pockets of some big and powerful folks, and truth be damned. Need data and facts? Google is your friend, and there’s way too much already available.

On the other hand, the opposing hysteria is no better. I have no doubt Jane Burgermeister has seen the worst of this fraudulent “get your vaccine” propaganda from the belly of the beast. However, her website covering this fiasco is loaded with overstated headlines on the articles. The term “hype” is an abbreviation for hyperbole, and there is plenty of it. When anyone dares to mention in comments the articles don’t quite justify some of the blaring headlines on her site, they are shouted down as shills for Big Pharma. Same result if you dare to ask from links to missing references or some sort of evidence.

I’m not sure which side is more dangerous, but the latter hardly helps those of us who try to resist on sane grounds. So let’s cut to the chase: There is no such thing as a safe vaccine. The human body was not designed to handle inoculations without problems, and side effects are often ignored in official reports. When you bother to study this at all, you find the modern medical establishment has been hijacked by pseudo-science and profit-oriented industrial medical sales long ago. Acting as if little slices of human knowledge is all it takes when addressing very complex biological organisms is simply stupid. Yes, it’s a full case of intellectual dishonesty. Start here. If you suffer from a short attention span, at least look at this one. It’s not just the current Swine Flu vaccine, but all inoculations are highly suspect.

Whether, as alleged, there will be any attempt to force mass vaccinations remains to be seen. We have seen where Sarkozi’s French government announced it would happen there, but apparently most physicians and other medical specialists have said “no” in the strongest, most raucous terms you can imagine. Germany is facing similar popular resistance, along with other European countries. It’s a popular revolt by any other name. Despite the despicable mainstream media lying here about it, there seems a significant level of resistance in the US. We have no doubt some elitists would certainly like to make it mandatory. They are not a united block, because some are honestly deceived, some refuse to give opposing viewpoints a fair shake, and some would gladly see you and I dead or whatever, as long as their authority is not questioned. It’s not easy to profile them on this, because the mixture seems present in every identifiable group you could conjure. Some states will have to fight their officials, some perhaps quite literally, but most state governments are probably too smart for that.

The vaccines themselves are untested, and we can be sure quite a bit of it will be completely experimental. Big Pharma as a whole could care less if most the earth’s population dies, as long as they get their money. There is some semblance of effort to make this stuff work as advertised, but this whole racket of protection from tort claims proves the worst allegations are not unreasonable. At the very least, this vaccine should be rejected on the grounds of untrustworthy manufacturing procedures. The added ingredients are probably the biggest risk for human health, and Big Pharma knows it. However, I find it hard to believe, upon consideration of the bigger picture, that the shots will contain anything which functions as RFIDs. There are nano-particle versions of them these days; no longer are we restricted to the big fat “grain of rice-sized” objects requiring a special hypodermic device. But these newest tiny flakes don’t appear to offer the same function, and certainly not the same range, as far as I can tell. Further, the particles are still too large to pass through most common medical injection needles. They would be visible in the fluid as sludge in the vials, requiring a vigorous shaking, so victims would be able to see it too easily. At any rate, the companies involved in contracts under the WHO and FDA have horrific track records doing nasty and utterly criminal things to whole populations, but you won’t easily find those records.

Again: The history of vaccines is a timeline loaded with major disasters. It’s simply not good medicine. That’s all the reason you need to seek information on nutritional defenses against any flu or other communicable disease.

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A Generalized Theory of Conspiracy

Posted on October 19, 2009 by ehurst

It must be understood all government is conspiracy. People conspire together to gain power over others. You can say all you want about the nice theories behind democratic republics, but you can’t prevent a conspiracy of individuals from hijacking the whole thing. In the case of the US, the Founders’ fancy thoughts may have been sincere, but pure motives have never controlled much of human behavior since we left the Garden of Eden. You cannot design something which someone else cannot break. Our system was broken before it started, so the hijacking came before it actually left port.

But the conspiracy wasn’t that solid. The hijacking was almost a matter of blundering into success. It’s not as if the members didn’t actually plan to seize power, but their plans were fuzzy, more about ideals than actual plans. There were competing ideals, but the most dangerous ones were seldom spoken. The unspoken assumptions were the results of this new national birth should produce something which insured folks like them were in control. It was the one thing on which the majority could agree, so that’s where the conspiracy went. The vast majority of ruling conspiracies which actually gain power to rule do not arise from a clear and precise plan, but are the net result of seizing sufficient opportunities, with only some limited assertive action to make things happen.

Every theory of conspiracy, to have a foot planted in reality, must take into account basic facts of human nature. Theorize all you want about Satan or satanic intelligence, but getting any two humans to remain in lock-step for very long simply doesn’t happen. People don’t have the ability, even if they intend it. A theory which assumes any conspiring group with a single-minded purpose is a broken theory. Have you not noticed God Almighty can’t get it from His own best servants? How can Satan do any better? Any storyline which includes some version of the Borg is fiction.

A pragmatic extension of this takes into account a lack of uniformity in method, as well. The global elite are humans, and there is no power acting on this earth which will make them act in concert more than once in a great while. That they conspire to take over the world is quite obvious, but to assume they themselves can bring about the most effective nefarious plans with any degree of certainty is a delusion. They will most certainly accomplish things, but this reality makes it highly unlikely setting dates will work.

That I was suckered into believing folks who did set dates only means I wasn’t really paying attention at the time. Once I actually pulled back and considered it, I realized it could not have worked. Any particular event coming according to planned timing is an accident, and I should have remembered that.

We can predict broad trends.

We know the American economy will die, and probably rather soon. It is not simply ill, but terminal. God only knows how long it will take, because any number of little things could shatter the most intelligent human planning. The mere existence of humans congregating in any place will create an economy. Things will be exchanged because no two of us can or will do what it takes to provide all human need and desire. The act of exchanging anything of tangible value is economics. That we tend to find common means of exchange is natural. Politically corralling humans and mandating a means of exchange simply makes it more convenient to spread out that activity to a larger economic base, because the business of cooperation becomes centrally controlled. If that means of exchange is shifted to something with imputed value, versus intrinsic value, it creates a huge point of failure. Sooner or later, someone in power is going to pervert the value of that instrument of exchange. In reality, the process of perversion is the net result of many individual attempts to profit from that control. What you and I see today is not some grand and precise schedule of failure, but the accumulated result of mercenary choices going back to the founding of the nation, which was itself a series of mercenary choices.

The collective linkages of mercenary choices have doomed the current system. Some parts of it will survive, since they reflect the nature of human action itself. How it affects you depends on how you act. If you do not account for actual human nature, particularly in the aggregate, you’ll miss. Your theory of this conspiracy, your mental map of reality, must include all the roads, not just those you have used. We can deduce some of what the elite hope to accomplish, in part because they keep telling us, though typically with a great sales pitch about how wonderful it will be. That part is a lie. The best this life can possibly offer is very, very far from what most people are trying today. They keep trying other things because that best existence wasn’t all that wonderful, but of a surety, everything else will be worse.

That it takes awhile to see that is what makes it so hard to keep track of the failure. What we have now is broken, because it assumes things about people which are utterly false, and it won’t matter if almost everyone accepts those same broken assumptions. Just about everyone is in on the conspiracy, but with widely varying degrees of success (as measured in how happy they are with the results). That is partly because everyone has their own version of the conspiracy in mind, and the degree of perceptual overlap, and the degree of shared actions, is what makes it seem less conspiratorial. The portion controlled by the elite is keeping the masses from grasping the actual plans, however chaotic and disjointed, of those with genuine power.

In the long run, all conspiracies fail, which means all governing regimes fail. How they are replaced is as varied as the circumstances in which they exist. We have a governing regime with a particularly nasty bent to hiding the facts, even when there is nothing to hide. It also has a nasty bent of self-delusion about making the world a better place. Motives are never simple, and the delusion includes the idea the members of the governing class can also profit individually without any real harm. The revolution has already begun, at the top. There is yet another conspiracy to replace what rules our lives with something else. But that actually works out to several competing conspiracies, and God alone knows which will win, or what mixture will eventually come out ahead.

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Halt, Reconfigure, Restart

Posted on October 19, 2009 by ehurst

In English, we call Him Jehovah.

You can quibble all you like about proper Hebrew spelling and pronunciation, but if you don’t also adhere to the Hebrew world-view and intellectual assumptions along with it, you’re just making noise. If you truly embrace that Hebrew perspective, you’ll realize the common English version of His name is just fine.

He created the Hebrew culture as the very best setting in which to reveal Himself. A critical part of His revelation is laying out His requirements for the human race. You cannot possibly expect to understand them very well if you don’t attempt to first grasp the cultural background. Upon that foundation, you have some hope of building a morality which works. If you truly want to understand Him, it will require you wait for Him to grant you a living spirit so He can link you directly to Himself. Otherwise, you’ll have to content yourself with at least knowing what He demands.

Those demands are very much accessible to every breathing human soul on some level. Going forward from here, the purpose of this blog is to discuss that Hebraic grasp of what He demands on the human level. This blog is not about spirituality, but human morality. We will pursue the few things in this world I understand from that perspective, because the basic assumption is the totality of Creation includes a moral element. It is not possible to discuss human behavior without including moral considerations.

Nothing here pretends to pontificate for you what you must do, but is merely a statement of my own analysis. One of the basic assumptions in Hebraic culture is truth makes its own path in the human heart — if what I suggest is an accurate depiction of God’s viewpoint, He’ll make sure you can embrace it. I will surely get some things wrong, since earthly human perfection on this side of the Fall will not happen with any of us. Take my words with a grain of salt.

The record of my past mistakes here will remain posted as they are, simply for the sake of honesty. This post anchors an attempt to correct some of those mistakes.

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Hiatus Is Here

Posted on October 16, 2009 by ehurst

So, no mass of bank closures, no bank holidays, no chaos — just more of the same. I was wrong, and so were those I followed. Eating crow — pass the salt.

It’s a cautionary tale. By no means do I doubt the US economy will still collapse. We are in deep trouble. There are many sinister things on the horizon. However, the folks who produced so many of those “inside reports” are clearly not on the inside. I’ll have to step away from those sources and identify the ones to dump. So I’m going to spend some time working on other things, and reevaluate the purpose of this blog. Barring unforeseen catastrophic events, this will be the last new post for awhile.

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Progress on the Upgrade

Posted on October 15, 2009 by ehurst

Reference this post about praying for a computer upgrade: I received a promise of assistance in purchasing, to be paid back at a comfortable rate. This allows me to be just a little more aggressive about selecting something powerful enough to run like new three or four years down the road. I’m currently leaning toward building my own, perhaps something in a quad-core if I can get it cheaply enough. I have a couple of folks helping me look.

Right now, a major challenge is getting hardware with a video chipset which X.org can handle. Lots of current Radeon stuff is still not fully implemented, and I’m trying to avoid nVidia because they are so arrogant toward consumers, and refuse to cooperate much with Open Source. So far, only Intel chipsets seem to be fully covered among current offerings. Perhaps in a few days I’ll be able to report a purchase.

I would like to thank those praying with me on this.

Update: A donor came forward today who purchased a retail system for me, with the understanding I can pay them back later. I now own a Dell Inspiron i545. The specs include Intel Dual Core 2.7Ghz, 6GB RAM, and a 23″ LCD monitor. The Intel graphics chipset is quite recent, and I found the standard Xorg for CentOS was unlikely to support it properly, so I’m installing openSUSE 11.1 for now. Should it work as well as I hope, I’ll probably upgrade to 11.2 after the first rush of downloads has tapered off.

Historically, something about SUSE and the old RedHat was how the last incremental release in any series (X.2 or X.3) was always considerably better than the next series for quite some time. It appears this is no different, considering reviews from those who have kept track, and tested the pre-release for 11.2. At any rate, we have desktop, and I’m truly blessed.

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Dating and Courtship: Doing It All Wrong

Posted on October 14, 2009 by ehurst

Western Civilization is in collapse. In a very short time, as such things are measured, it will be gone, forgotten.

So don’t waste time mourning. We should have never been here in the first place. The best of what we gained could have been gotten some other way. Meanwhile, we have this huge mass of idiocy bullying us around in our daily lives. That includes the business of human mating and building a family. Everything important in Western Civilization regarding that business is pretty much garbage.

First, we have the major problem: Men are fallen, and males want all the wrong things. We are up against a massively destructive force which is hardly unique to Western Civilization, but the latter simply makes it worse than ever. When you accept the reality this thing isn’t going to go away, it’s easier to negotiate your best chances for peace and happiness. No amount of cultural conditioning will change the fundamental nature of humans.

But cultural conditioning has surely aggravated an already serious problem. Women demand what God has said they should not want, and cannot have. They rightly want a man who is faithful, devoted to them first among all other humans. Because men tend to fail this, women want controls not available, demanding a fantasy world utterly self-serving. Our modern messy culture flatly denies we are stuck with this situation, and demands God get out of the way while it fixes things He created, but didn’t break. Instead, modern culture is broken, but refuses to see that. So it’s no surprise the result is far worse than it has to be.

You can’t control fallen men, but you can offer an incentive for self-control. Ancient Near Eastern culture did that. It’s the best you can possibly do. Making little goddesses of every woman is not the fix. Men rule poorly enough, but women are inherently worse — God’s facts, not mine. So we start with the first assumption: Don’t give men very much control. That doesn’t mean give it all to women, but simply don’t give anyone much control. If people insist on destroying their own nest, you cannot stop them. You can only forcefully deny them the opportunity to ruin yours, too. In marriage, that is compromised, because otherwise it’s not marriage. You have to entertain the notion things won’t work out, and such is the averages you play with in living in a fallen world.

Notice the utterly schizophrenic nature of modern Western culture here. We seek fantasies in human sexuality. In our desperation, we convince ourselves this or that person is that fantasy. Once we have them, we find they aren’t so fantastic. So we readily exchange this one for the next. We are quick to marry on the worst terms, quick to divorce on still worse terms, and never try to figure out what we are doing in the first place.

Rather than wade through a complete remake of Western Civilization, let’s just work on side-stepping the worst of it in a search for personal sanity. Sex and marriage are not a drug, but the fantasies regarding them can be. Ditch the fantasies and see it all for what it is: The one greatest possible bright spot in an otherwise miserable existence. Remind yourself orgasm lasts only a few seconds, then reality comes back. Putting that orgasm in a proper framework can enhance life; serving it as your god will be Hell. You can ignore it only if you continue the drug-induced euphoria (with or without mind-bending substances), but it will make you miserable in the end. Enjoy it, but put it in proper context, which means rejecting the underlying messages regarding sex in our culture: TV, movies, magazines, books, etc. The entire crop is pure nonsense.

Your best hope is finding a partner, in the fullest sense of the meaning that term implies. It requires having some wisdom about your own nature and personality. Lacking that, borrow some from those who know you best. Take their advice what sort of mate you need, unless you have spent considerable time looking in the mirror of your own soul, and know a good deal about the reality of how humans live together over the long haul. Don’t fool with this thing, dating around and sampling the fare. That’s the first trap. Take it seriously from the start: You need a partner who will be the one last person on this earth to abandon you, so you need to be that sort of person, commit yourself to that image before you even begin.

Dispense with all that silly social maneuvering. Don’t date. If he/she is worthy, court them right off the bat. Again, having folks who know you and love you help in match-making is one of your best bets. If your family is nutty, cultivate really good people as your friends, people who can be trusted to see you rather clearly, and tell you honestly where you are weak. Expect some failures in courting (your own as well as theirs), because that’s the real world. You are in control only to the degree your “target” yields it. That’s a big kettle of fish of its own, but that should be obvious at this point. You’ll have to cultivate a sense of what is too much too soon, and what is dangerously close to none at all. Marriage is surrender, but getting there should be fairly orderly. That’s not to say you can’t hit it off right away. Take enough time to make sure, but at some point you just have to jump. If your support system is strong enough, you really don’t need that much courtship, but that sort of situation seldom exists in America. Arranged marriages are very difficult here, because it represents most of what our culture rejects about God.

Don’t be surprised if your best hope is someone from a totally different background. In many cases, you’ll find people from more Eastern cultures are pretty good at this stuff. Frankly, the vast majority of Western gals are completely messed up, having bought the feminist lie to varying degrees. By the same token, most American guys are too much metrosexual (neutered and useless) or too retrosexual (juvenile fake manhood). You can find idiots of any gender from all parts of the world, but if you are serious about making this work, it’s worth taking the time to investigate and peel back the fake fronts to see what’s inside. Again, this is where match-making can serve well, because your social support group will prevent you diving into pretty waters which hide crocodiles. People need to be exposed, seen at their worst, so we can estimate whether it’s something we can tolerate. Marriage is less finding perfection and more about finding the least insane pairing available.

One last point: Never assume your best match is close to your own age. There are a million complications, but in an ideal world, the man will be a decade or more older than his wife. Given what have today, let’s moderate that, but five years is hardly too much. It’s worth whole books to explain why women tend to be ready for marriage much earlier than men, but the fact remains as a general note on human nature.

Know this one thing: God has promised there is in this filthy disgusting world one best chance for sanity in marriage. He will surely work with you to make that one thing tolerable, even good, if you willfully pursue it with His provisions in mind. He has promised if you do your best going into this, regardless of how much your prospective mate lacks in shallow external appeal to your visual and hormonal tastes, it can eventually build into a romance which exceeds even the crap sold by Hollywood.

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