When It All Goes Away

Posted on May 15, 2009 by ehurst

I’ve had my ten seconds of fame. It passed almost without my noticing. All that is left here is mumbling to myself, which a couple of other folks tend to read once in awhile. Indeed, I won’t even make any money from it. I don’t have much of a copyright on my stuff. Mostly it amounts to, “Quote as much as you like, but cite my name.” Someday all this will be gone. People won’t remember very many of my words, if any. The computer on which I type them will die, as will the servers which host them. Eventually my name will be forgotten. I harbor no delusions about such things.

Even I won’t remember my own words. I’ve been writing stuff for so long, I can fail to recognize my own material at times. What I remember is what I believe, what I want to say about things. Most of all, I can’t forget what I cannot walk away from, my convictions. They will kill me some day, and that’s as it should be. Otherwise, what holds me is unworthy.

It need not be some SWAT team breaking down the door, nor wounds taken in a rebellion fire fight. Those things are increasingly likely, perhaps approaching even probable, but that’s not the point. Rather, I am utterly certain we are doomed. We have shook our fist in the face of God for so long, we can’t remember not doing it. Lately we’ve gone to sticking our national finger in His eye. He is not amused, and in due time His patience will end

We were never really half so noble nor important as we believed. For example, we’ve been torturing our supposed enemies since the beginning of our nation, and have never stopped. We’ve allowed our government to lie about the motives for just about every war. The last war actually thrust upon us was 1812, and even that may have been avoidable. In all the rest, we got involved in something none of our business. But war is where the money is, and we have always wanted money. We’ve wanted it far more than any of those noble things we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves.

Soon, we will pay the ultimate price. God will destroy this nation. It will be forgotten, just like my name.

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Fundamental Mistake

Posted on May 14, 2009 by ehurst

More of my calling for repentance…

Jesus said we could sum up the whole of written revelation at that time (the Old Testament) with two basic commandments:

1. Love God with all your being. That assertion has a particular flavor not easily caught by Western readers. Jesus is saying God is the ultimate Eastern Potentate, owning all which exists, since He created it. That means He owns you and me. Loyalty is not a matter of simply fulfilling obligations, but comes from a commitment of the whole self to whatever it is God wants. We ask no questions at all regarding His whims, only how He wishes them implemented.

2. Love your neighbor as yourself. Not more than, and certainly not less than, yourself, but a recognition the welfare of others is our welfare. Jesus noted this was the corollary to the first commandment.

Now, of course, we define “love” as the willful exertion of self in seeking the welfare of another. To love others is to love self, and to love self requires loving others. Both are the natural result of loving God, since He has indicated He loves all living beings. It’s not just acting in the interests of others, but committing the will (heart) to a life-long course. A mere warm personal regard is a symptom, but proves nothing by itself. It matters not a whit what you believe or claim about being “born-again” — this is God’s command for all humanity. He said this is the whole matter of justice as God sees it.

It results in a social system often called “civility.” You’ll notice civility as a body of principle contains more about mending broken relationships than it has about avoiding breaks. There is an underlying assumption we humans will fail the high standard, but remain committed. Personal warm regard comes and goes with the vagaries of emotional winds, but that commitment is the point. It is not wholly rational, either. It is a matter of acknowledged duty, with an assumption much of it will never quite make sense. It comes down from above, a partial revelation of God, in terms of what He demands. You don’t get there by constructing your own rational framework, but by accepting what’s given from the very authority which allows you to continue living.

This is all non-negotiable. Our silly notions about fairness and consent of the governed do not apply. God made you and offers one deal. Embrace it or suffer. You aren’t quite on His level of competence, so don’t pretend to question His decisions. Those decisions do have implications. You can seek clarification, but not on the grounds of what makes sense to you. Nor can you inquire by what authority He came to be in charge. If there is a higher court than God’s, it’s none of your concern; you are accountable to His.

The implications have at times been variously formulated and expressed. However, the summary remains a matter of personal commitment of the self. You cannot expect to substitute impersonal and objective performance for that. The fundamental sin of Western Civilization is depersonalizing, dehumanizing the structure of our social institutions. Objectivity is fine for examining the basic structure of matter, and will grant some hints of organic matter, but life itself is beyond such a framework of understanding. The very act of dismissing what cannot be measured and quantified by human intellectual inquiry is a sin. It is the anchor point for the damnation of Western Civilization. The other half of that sin is insisting the human intellect will someday obtain the measure of all things. God is not amused by that. Nobody is telling you to halt scientific inquiry, but to recognize limits.

Those limits include His demand you take humans as seriously as does He. Any thing you construct which serves to dehumanize people is just begging for God’s wrath. You should not imagine He will fail to grant that request. It might not take place on the time scale of any living human, but it most certainly does come as a result. God has revealed all too clearly there are no two people alike. To the fullest extent of your ability, you are obliged to Him to treat every human individually, as a unique expression of His divine image. Bureaucratic regulation is sin, by definition. You are expected to use your individual wisdom to discern when any supplicant or applicant is lying and trying to manipulate your performance, but when providing any good or service, exceptions are the rule — God’s rule. Within the constraints of resources, talent and skill — whatever it is you can’t change in any given situation — you are required give full time and attention to making your efforts fit the unique needs of the individual before you. Dealing with masses as a single whole is simpler, because it reduces your burden. The more people we have to work with at a given moment, the more formalized and structured it has to be. However, we are not permitted to artificially aggregate individuals in how we treat them. God holds us accountable.

It pays to seek with all your abilities to comprehend the implications of God’s command to love. It is the foundation of every promise He ever made for meeting human need. Peace, prosperity, health, security — He concretely promised all these things were available to anyone willing to walk in His commandments. He also warned a failure to try, for any reason, guarantees you’ll see none of those blessings. His Creation — the Universe itself — operates on the basis of those two commandments Jesus explained. It responds directly to living justly by love. That’s the real secret to all things, to matter itself. You can’t hope to measure and quantify love, but without it, this world will never yield its secrets, as it were.

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Celebrating Doom and Gloom

Posted on May 13, 2009 by ehurst

I’ve got to say it: It’s time to repent.

We are in trouble. We have numerous natural disasters already, and many more to come. It’s not for nothing those are called “acts of God.” However, it works better if we understand them as the the promised results of ignoring God. He promised other things for ignoring Him. We have lots of purely evil people in our government. While some of them really are directly and intentionally immoral, that’s not the point. They are evil because the net results of their governing is evil. They pay no attention to God, either. Thus, we now have a global economic crash, a rising police state, several major efforts to provoke widespread racial conflict. Very soon, we will have serious bloodshed in the U.S.

When these things happen, it won’t matter much of the nation, in effect, refuses to acknowledge there is a God. It won’t matter the vast majority of those who do believe in Him have no clue why, what sins are the cause of these things. I really don’t expect to be heard, in that sense. But I have a duty to speak, so no one has an excuse before God.

We sin in supporting the modern nation of Israel. More so, we support her without the least concern over her sins.

We sin in ignoring the ancient design of God for human society. God designed us to live tribally. No one has any business governing you who isn’t related by blood or marriage.

We sin in using credit to buy today things we haven’t earned. Credit as we do it in modern society is inherently evil.

We sin by promoting profligate flouting of God’s ancient provisions for satisfying sexual appetites. Sex is not inherently sinful, but we go about it all wrong.

We sin by spending vast sums of borrowed money to destroy the lives of people who never did us harm. It’s called “war.”

We make it all worse by refusing to correct these things, and by protecting those who lead the way in sin. We protect them because we don’t bother to correct them, not even within the limits of non-violent protest.

The rest of it you can figure out for yourself. We are in deep trouble. I am saddened beyond words for the countless sorrows heading our way. Yet I am celebrating God’s handiwork, because when He acts, He reveals Himself. The best thing to ever happen to anyone in this world is to get a better glimpse of God.

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Questions for Authority

Posted on May 12, 2009 by ehurst

Someone very close to me shares one critical trait: We both question authority. However, we do so in very different ways. This other fellow has been to prison more than once, still engages in things which could bring more prison time if the wrong people notice, and is easily more intellectually developed than I. I ended up working a few years on the opposite side in law enforcement, and only saw the inside of a prison when I went to visit him.

Questioning authority arises from a thousand other questions. Given none of us are God, we tend to make plenty of mistakes in arriving at answers. That some of us happen to hold positions of authority even while we come up with wrong answers means somebody else suffers needlessly. There is enough suffering from honest mistakes, but the very act of rejecting questions almost certainly implies we question our own answers. When I saw how much pain there was from my very human mistakes while wielding authority, it not only compelled me to leave that position, but to question the very necessity of such a position existing. Perhaps the real difference between my friend and I is I know: The deepest scars on my soul are those I caused to others. What began as sorrow from my own suffering is now an even greater sorrow over the suffering of others, because I know what sorrow is.

That has led me to more rejection of authority over the years, not merely questioning it. It’s not about just me, but everyone else. I’m not convinced the suffering resulting from authority is random in every case, and it is certainly seldom necessary. Yes, the world is fallen; the taint of Adam from Eden remains with us today, and nothing we can do on our own will ever break that curse. I’m pretty sure my friend also rejects that notion, too. But for me the question is not ending all suffering, but reducing it. We can’t get perfect, but we can surely get better; on that we agree. The lack of interest in getting better is the primary red flag calling for rejection, and there’s an awful lot of it.

Of all people, I realize there are costs for every benefit. The point of debate is seldom about what is better, but bogging down over the details. We get bogged down because of too many unspoken assumptions. Those assumptions always bring us right back to authority which will not be questioned. It’s always, “Well, everyone knows…” No. Not only does everyone not know it, but it’s probably a lie. The assumptions you won’t discuss are the ones where you are most likely wrong. Granted, if you’ve spent a chunk of your life hashing certain fundamental issues, you probably aren’t eager to go back and justify it every time a two-bit idiot wants to reopen the debate. You don’t have to; you only have to realize your position is not universally accepted, and make allowances. My assumptions about God aren’t universally accepted by a long shot, but I have examined it enough to know I don’t have any choice about them.

Not having a choice about certain things in your mind is associated with the Christian doctrine of “conviction” — there is a Higher Power which has closed the debate. You can question Him if you like, but I’m not in a position to do that. If you assume I’m just being truculent and close-minded, I can easily turn that around and accuse you of having a closed mind on the subject, as well. So I operate under the assumption there is One Authority which made us all and no one has standing to question Him. By His calling and commission, I am called to question just about everything else in this world, and certainly everyone else. The difference here is, I deny having any particular authority to harm you by my closure of that debate. I’m altogether willing to negotiate everything else, and coexist in the real world with your different assumptions.

That’s the best I can do. I lack the power to go any farther. Somewhere along the way, I have to drive down the limiting stakes and say, “This far, and no more.” Funny thing is, the only people who insist on crossing that line are people in authority who care nothing about the sorrows of others. Take for example the nit-picking Linux fan-boys who argue with my choice of Etch. If their approach is, “Let’s talk about this,” they don’t presume any unjust authority. If their approach is simple rejection before they start typing in the comment block, they assume an authority they don’t have. Sure, they can type all the nastiness they like — and I can delete or edit their comments as I see fit. This is, after all, my blog. It’s inside the virtual border I am permitted to draw, my private space from which I am permitted to exclude all and sundry. You can well ask if I know what I’m doing, and offer advice, but your spiteful rejection is a waste of time.

The same authority-bearing attempts to invade are seen increasingly in government officials. It’s the nature of government to stake out an ever-widening circle of ownership, and the people who occupy those offices buy into it, often without thought. Worse, far too many appear to buy into it with malicious delight. They are little different from the jerks who slam me for sticking with Etch, because I dare to question their “authority,” or the authority they presume to accept on behalf of the experts who continue the development of Debian. Those developers surely know what they are doing, but the fan-boys might not understand, and surely too often don’t accept, what I must do.

This is the stuff of revolution and rebellions. With Debian aficionados, I do them no harm, and simply turn aside their attempts to compel my conformity with their program. I won’t upgrade. If my system then suffers from some insecurities or bugs, it won’t affect them at all. Their noise here is a the response to some imaginary insult. With religious leaders, it’s easy enough to ignore my ranting over on my ministry blog as I reject their authority and their orthodoxy. I’m not hurting them in any way, and only those who find themselves somehow insulted by my different views have ever tried to engage me in debate. Just label me a “radical” and get on with your life. Sadly, that doesn’t work with government. If the only consequence was a loss of support and protection, I coud live with that. No, the officials take that as a demand they intervene, presuming to say it’s for my own good.

Government assumes a monopoly on force. If someone else were able to wield some measure of force, it would mean they could claim some authority in governing. That was the point of the 2nd Amendment — giving the governed some option of force to have their say in how government acts. But government rejects any notion of limit to power. Sure, we have all these nice words which presume to limit the power of government to act harmfully, but we all can see where that leads. They simply inject exemptions into the paperwork and act as if those limits don’t exist, except on paper. That’s all it is — paper. It may represent some noble sentiment, but in the end, it’s the threat of force against government agents which limits government. There can be only one motive for reducing the threat to government agents — naked tyranny.

You might say another word for that is “hate.” And that hatred most certainly means to hurt you. When you are in a position to shrug it off, that’s the right course. I don’t see a need to debate the Debian fan-boys. I will gladly clarify my position for the sake of other readers, but I won’t debate things which appeal only to idiots. Let them scream impotently; I’ll generally approve such comments for honesty’s sake. When the representatives of authority are in a position to actually cause you suffering, you’ll need a means to limit that harm, a means to resist. The best resistance denies them the one thing they most want, the one thing without which the whole exercise deflates into parody. We need not list the variations of passive, aggressive, redirection, etc., in responding. You are an authority for those things which you must do, and you should feel free to creatively and intelligently make the punishment you offer them fit their crimes.

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Back to Etch

Posted on May 11, 2009 by ehurst

It seems Lenny’s LXDE is broken enough to be unusable. I also had trouble discerning what sort of junk I could remove with the LXDE when I replaced it with IceWM. It wasn’t what I wanted, wasn’t what I needed to use. Just for fun, I tried AntiX, a branch of MEPIS. It ran okay, but there was some breakage there, too. I was really disappointed at how they had so jazzed up the themes for IceWM, they had completely taken away the vanilla stuff I liked. Though pulling the less rowdy themes from the source package worked, I couldn’t get the video portion of some WMV files to play. Had the codecs, had the support libs, had both Xine and Mplayer, but no video. Gave up.

I returned to Etch. The basic reason is always the same: It works better on my old Inspiron 4100. That’s hard to beat.

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In the Garden Patch of Wisdom

Posted on May 9, 2009 by ehurst

Facts can be encoded and saved on any computer. They can even be manipulated, but that usually requires some form of creative intelligence as yet unavailable to computers. Presentation and portrayal require an active intelligence which serves a purpose — good or evil — interacting with other minds via some estimate of what it takes to get a reaction.

So we have a story of particularly egregious uproar over government abuse which may not have been exactly accurate. This requires a bit of mea culpa. You can chase the links on your own, but I counsel you to at least skim the comments on both.

It requires seeing there are more flowers in the Garden of Wisdom than a few gilded lilies. Let’s expand this to see what I mean.

Using the term “The Feds” is almost dangerous these days, unless you provide a context to sharpen the meaning. For example, my own take on this story is to see multiple levels of dirty-do. First, the good soldiers of the Empire aren’t always bumbling idiots, but their intelligence is focussed on their orders. That means they tend to miss things they aren’t required to know for their jobs, and perhaps the accident of some private hobby. Supposing the FBI actually did their homework with some intelligence, they would probably easily discover someone using either botware on Ashton’s computer, or spoofing his IP address. If they don’t know enough about these things, it may not prevent Ashton’s prosecution and incarceration. Think about Julie Amero. Once that bulldog seizes upon a story, all the universe is a liar for contradicting the private truth of that little clique of government thugs. It’s possible this is at work in Ashton’s case, but maybe not.

American justice, like it or not, assumes if Ashton is not guilty of the particular charges at hand, “The Feds” have really messed up. It matters not a whit what else we may allege Ashton to have done, because then we move over into Roman style justice, anathema to the cold logic of American legal history. Charge him with stuff you can prove, and all is fair and just.

However, the good soldiers of the Empire are hardly the only players here. The sacred masters of the Empire are most certainly cynically using the soldiers. Whether that is at play here will probably be impossible to prove. However, having been privy, via abuse against myself, to such cynical manipulation as a former foot soldier of the Empire, I have no problem seeing the strong likelihood here. Those popular conspiracy movies and books don’t tell the half. The real stuff is nastier than words can describe. Again, this is my own personal experience from the days when I was a true believer in The Cause of the Empire.

So perhaps they noticed this wild tale of Ashton and his mom’s propensities, and took advantage of them. As one commenter on Grigg’s blog notes, perhaps there was some high-level steering to bring a half-truth to the notice of those of us who howl about the evils of the Empire. It happened to Dan Rather (I was no fan of his, but that’s another matter). Feed them enough half-truth as bait, drop in the complete lie, then expose it. Voila! Dead credibility. Grigg surely makes a suitable target for such schemes.

His willingness to make amends proves at the very minimum Will knows what really matters to his core audience of truth-seekers. Of course, it is also the primary mark of spiritual maturity: truth is bigger than any one of us. This is wholly unlike the Alex Jones types. That latter is pure huckster. While he may well serve a useful function in providing investigative leads, that man does not care about truth much at all. He wants to make a sale, and make it today. The very worst you could say about Will Grigg is he is smart enough to make his profits later, quietly, by building a stronger market based on long-term credibility.

On yet a higher level, we should have learned long ago the arms industries, a primary source of profit for what the Apostle John called Babylon, is the real winner here. Those of us caught in the middle between rapacious imperial power, and the indolence of the masses, have little choice but to spend on arming ourselves. If we do not, we cannot claim to stand for justice before God. At the same time, the Empire spends even more on arming, and makes noises about taking away our arms. When the king is horny, he wants all butts bared to him, not to mention hands and feet prevented from moving to escape or resist his pleasure. The soldiers of the Empire refuse to admit there’s anything wrong with that, since their narrow focus makes government their god, at least unconsciously. They find in such raping “the will of God.” They are the ones who will share in spilling blood, including their own.

The masters of the Empire will surely lose less, but at some point, some of them will bleed, too. Babylon’s yet higher elites will assume they can escape all that blood-letting. They have, so far, it seems. Our lack of leverage against them does not make immaterial our study of their ways. While they are not delivered into our hands, as it were, they will surely become the Devil’s food in the end. We rest in knowing our struggle against the foot soldiers, and their masters in the Empire, is not wholly in vain.

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Reducing Baggage

Posted on May 8, 2009 by ehurst

When you really need it, you try to make a way to carry it. Otherwise, you try to pick out the one best of a collection and stick with that. I’m trying to unload things which, in my best estimate, aren’t really necessary, don’t fit my needs.

Today I sold my Trek hybrid bike. It rode better, and had less roll resistance for long rides, but it’s not suitable for all the other stuff I need in a bike. The way I have to ride keeps breaking it. Since I had the mountain bike, too, that was what I chose to keep. I’ll just make some small modifications to make it more versatile: tires less knobby with a solid tread center line, better wheels, better derailleur sets. It has to do more. For cycling, it’s worth it to me to accept doing most things well enough, even at the price of doing nothing exceptionally well.

I reduced my collection of text editors to just one (Joe). I use only one graphical web browser (Opera). I have only one Window manager, no desktops at all (IceWM). As I study the situation more, I keep find things I can delete without missing it at all.

I’m dumping some of my assorted gadgets not really necessary. On the other hand, I decided to order the pack straps for my Alice pack (military rucksack). It will be turned into a “bug-out bag” for things like that batch of wildfires which came so close to us, or some tornado. Clothing I haven’t worn in the last year is due for elimination. Some items I keep around are meant to be disposable. I’ll use them while I’m here, but if I move, they don’t.

I’m praying for a vision, for guidance, as we prepare to become more mobile. I’d love to find a home on wheels, though I don’t yet know what sort. Something in my future will require being able to move it all on fairly short notice, and perhaps with some regularity.

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Liberty: Self-Contained

Posted on May 7, 2009 by ehurst

Very few people actually want liberty. Most of those who talk of it won’t do what it takes, but frankly expect it will be handed to them. Liberty unearned is just another nuisance in the long run.

Earning liberty is not necessarily a matter of killing tyrants and their lackeys. That’s really a very small part of a much bigger picture. Liberty is living self-contained, reducing dependency to a minimum. Not necessarily to control all the variables, but to minimize exposure to outside forces. For the most part, those outside forces invariably aim at reducing our liberty. We can’t prevent the necessity of living with the rest of the human race, but we can be more of a giver than a taker, and that’s what “independence” means.

By now it should be obvious most humans don’t want that, aren’t ready for it, and can’t be gotten ready for it. The American Colonists were, by most estimates, one-third loyalists, one-third didn’t care, and one-third were willing to fight for a different system. Despite all that rhetoric about liberty, only a precious few actually wanted it. Most of the rebels were simply looking for a different brand of dependence.

It’s easy to live-and-let-live when you aren’t entangled in the affairs of others. Since living in isolation is hardly a solution, we should rather choose our dependencies very carefully. You have to realize there are trade-offs, and those pure visions of full liberty won’t ever happen in real life. Since it is necessary to live in some form of community, let me suggest the one with the least danger to liberty is blood kin. Not perfect, but better by far than any other situation when you contemplate the long term. At the same time, kinship can be measured in different ways, depending on the context. However you define it, kinship-based community is your best hope for maximum independence.

An example is my much beloved Linux in particular, and Open Source in general. The whole issue revolves around “do-it-yourself” (DIY). The Linux Community is pretty much a hobby group, but the aim is to cut unnecessary ties to the commercial offerings. Sure, plenty of the Linux users are just “me-too” hobbyists trying to be cool with the gang. These are the users who are such noisy fan-boys and fan-girls, because they have no interest in your independence, nor their own, just trying to be a member of their own favorite club. They are very dependent. And all too soon, many of them will wander off, looking for their next social dependency fix. That there are so many passing through is what makes Linux discussion forums so noisy. It’s a high turnover, and each one has to pass through the same stages. Meanwhile, there remains a core of those who actually use this stuff.

The whole concept of Open Source is pretty much “have it your way.” If you’ll take the time to learn, like a real DIY survivor, you can change a lot things to make yourself comfortable. Those of us who understand will be glad to teach you so you don’t need us as much. Poke and explore on your own, because I might need your discoveries some day. The only real difficulty is there are so very many options, it’s pretty hard to find the right combination, and no one of us ever really knows it all. So we keep in touch. And as your needs change, so will your evaluation of what is comfortable. It will never be perfect, but adapting to the underlying system is the best hope of liberty.

We could do that with a lot of things. Can you grow your own food? Can you fix your own shoes, or make new ones? Do you know anything at all about vehicle maintenance or home repair? How much of your daily life would be in real trouble if most of the commercial activity around you goes away? Can you pick up and move to a better place?

I remain convinced we are seeing the end of Western Civilization. No, not in the catastrophic sense of everyone dying and taking it with them to the grave. It’s dying in the sense it can no longer adapt, because it has chased itself into too many false corners, trapped and struggling while the backside is being eaten alive. Vestiges of its influence will be found here and there in future civilizations, but this one as a whole is dead.

As the system around us shuts down, it will scramble for more control, more resources, more of everything. It will make demands which cannot possibly be met, then punish everyone for failure. Western democratic government is a mindless beast. And your greatest sin will ever be rejecting its demand you plug into it for full dependence. Those are don’t need government are the greatest threat to it. If you plug in, it will kill you, sooner or later. Sure, you’ll recognize all the images from popular culture: take the red pill, use the force, go west, liberty or death. You might get yourself killed that way, but you’ll die all at once, not slowly bleeding away into nothing.

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Lenny LXDE: I Can Be Told

Posted on May 6, 2009 by ehurst

One of those who disparaged my choice to run Etch mentioned LXDE. Frankly, I knew nothing about it. So I did some reading and it sounded almost useful. Given I live in a somewhat fluid situation at the moment, my estimate of my needs could shift a little now and then. My estimate of LXDE and of my needs made them appear close enough to try it. So I installed Lenny from the XFCE/LXDE disk. I already know I don’t like XFCE 4, so that’s not an option.

To be honest, LXDE looks like IceWM-GNOME. Only it appears less configurable. Aside from my preference for a darker hue (Dirty Ice) I prefer fairly vanilla stuff. I removed the wallpaper and other decorations. Why LXNM is not installed by default is a mystery and a mistake. However, I can understand the hesitation to bundle Wicd. However, I think if the installer knows we are doing “laptop” and LXDE, excluding Wicd is almost stupid. It’s possible to live without a power manager, simply because I seldom have any use for it, actually. My laptop is most often plugged in, and I already have suspend modes working to my satisfaction.

By the way, for the Inspiron 4100 using the Radeon M6, you add these lines to /etc/hibernate/suspend2.conf

USuspendRamForce
RadeonTool yes
EnableVbetool yes
VbetoolPost yes

Suspend (s2ram) works every time, and Hibernate (s2disk) does without tweaking.

I’m still poking around with this and will probably find more things which could have been done better. Also, on a low power laptop like mine, it makes no sense to use a heavy browser. Opera gets just about all my graphical business, but the heavy lifting is with the latest Elinks (0.12pre3). Unfortunately, Blogspot and WordPress require graphical browsers with JScript and so forth or you can’t access all functions. The former uses a popup window for comments and the latter throws up errors when you try to post or comment. That’s using Elinks with SpiderMonkey built into it.

See, I can be told, and I can learn from others. I’d rather not have to bother with a GUI in the first place, but there are too many things which just can’t be done… for now.

Update: The LXPanel is broken. I made some changes to replace LXNM with Wicd and it went into race condition. Because of all the other little annoyances in LXDE, I tossed it. It’s been replaced with IceWM. I’ve used it far longer, know more about configuring and fixing it up, and it’s less likely to go nuts on me.

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The Holy Grail of Linux Is Shattered

Posted on May 5, 2009 by ehurst

Let’s tie things to the real world. Were computing no more than a hobby, it would not have gotten much past the Altair. It would remain a very expensive toy, with only occasional use in discovering useful things. Someone found a way to make the computer, and the software, a commodity. That is, it provided a use which actually compelled early adopters to pay the high prices. Early spreadsheets, databases, and word processing is what sold them, until demand and production rose to the point the price could scale down. Now it’s considered a necessity for education, at the least, because PCs are ubiquitous in the world of commerce, as well as academics and government where it was born.

Linux is one giant hobby. The day it is owned and controlled, even if only in fiction, in the eyes of the consuming public, is the day it ceases to be Linux. There are thousands of genuine academic, government, commercial and consumer uses for Linux, so it’s leaking into the public. Still, it’s not a commodity, because it’s never really going to be a single “thing” people can point to and say, “This is Linux.” You and I know what we mean by Linux, but the mass of users will never see that meaning. It requires too much time to grasp it; it’s not something easily inserted into the existing culture. So it remains the domain of those who feel driven to check it out, and those will never be the average Joes and Janes of computer users.

Surely, we have come close in some ways. We have good ol’ RedHat out there as the primary symbol of Linux for industrial use. Novell is trying, and may yet some day remember SUSE should mean high quality with lots of testing — as RedHat does — and still prettier, so as to offer a competing product. These two have an inkling of giving the CEO what he wants so he can sell it to the investors. Then we have a very popular public face for consumers called Ubuntu. Honestly, Canonical is struggling. Users and devoted fans love Ubuntu, but the consuming public are not impressed. Canonical doesn’t listen very well to that audience, just yet. It’s still too much the hobby Linux and not quite the consumer Linux.

It’s very hard to have a foot in both worlds. To commoditize Linux would require someone becoming accountable to the commodity buyers. RedHat and the like have worked out how to listen to industry and government, but listening to the consumer is a lot more work. In fact, it’s an art more than a science. A serious Linux hobby user is, by definition, ill-equipped to hear from the public. Developers more so. If we understand Linux as the mass result of everyone doing their own thing, pursuing some vision of excellence — and often reaching it — developers must surrender any pretense of caring what users want. And if the developers scratch that itch so as to have energy enough to listen to users, they still aren’t going to hear from the commodity crowd. They’ll hear from hobby users, because those know just what they want. Commodity users hardly know, and won’t bother to tell you forthrightly. Indeed, by their nature, they can be sold something they didn’t know they wanted.

I suppose as the commodity culture drifts, it could embrace Linux more readily, but we still have that problem of the commodity buyers who, by their nature, will never quite know how to say what they want. They will know only that they want. Already, they don’t want PCs any more. They want “devices” mostly for entertainment: cellphones, media players, game consoles, and somewhat of the computerized home entertainment system. Getting work done will remain something job-oriented. The PC will become the dinosaur in the homes of the aging Boomers (in the US), and the equipment for information-oriented industry, and little else. About the time Ubuntu figures out what they are doing (if they ever do) they will become much more the darling of those places in the world which haven’t yet had time to grow weary of the PC — the “developing countries.” By then, smart money will be in the Netbook market, because this is the epitome of the commodity PC. Even poor folks can afford a relatively new one. They will be glad to have anything at all, so Linux could find a home there.

The Holy Grail of the consumer-popular Desktop Linux won’t happen in the US, and may not happen anywhere in the Western world. That is, unless some very radical changes come which compel an interest. There are several factors, and they all pertain to the impending economic collapse, and any of several types of civil unrest. To the degree they can, folks enduring big changes externally try to keep things the same internally. As the economy grinds to a halt, those who can will maintain their previous lifestyle. The loss most likely inescapable would be access to new hardware, which would severely limit the uptake of, say, Windows 7. Even if the finance hucksters on the news channels are right, and we are staring to recover, that recovery will not bring back previous profligate levels of consumer spending. Those who still have usable systems will want very much to keep them working as is.

There is a high probability many of them will find a reason to migrate to Linux, provided the Internet survives. Windows and Mac development require money; Linux development might slow down without it, but hardly stop. Nobody expects The Borg of Redmond to simply open their source, though it’s vaguely possible Apple might. A stagnant economy is not a good place for either of them to stay as they are, and I am utterly certain this current economic malaise is long-term. Assuming I’m right, they’ll be lucky to keep the doors open. Even if they do stay alive, most of the folks who have one of their OS products will not be upgrading anytime soon unless it’s cheap. Meanwhile, the threat environment continues to develop because it works off crime profits. Crime profits might drop in terms of buying power, but won’t drop enough to halt crime until long after all the likely prey are dead. So long as there is a way to extract profit from virus and mal-ware production, they will develop apace.

At some point, the patching will stop, if for no other reason than the money to pay the patch makers will go away. Systems such as Linux, which don’t actually require money for patching, will continue to advance. Folks won’t have any place else to go, if they want to keep their systems working and stay on the Net. But what if the reason for those systems dies? Right now, I can’t imagine how the bulk of home PC users will remain interested if the Internet dies or is restricted. The same conditions which crimp the economy will crimp the Net. When the lights go out in the big corporation, they take down their servers, too. The network of networks will most certainly thin out some in the coming months. Worst of all, the consumer bill-paying which supports line maintenance for the Telcos and Cablecos will drop. So the endpoint delivery will thin out inevitably, too. A wifi mesh can replace some of it, if folks have enough hardware on hand, or can get it cheaply enough, to make that happen. It will depend entirely on the random nature of location whether any given average home user will be close to a live mesh. If there’s no Internet, there’s precious little threat from malware.

Worst of all, governments have long made signals they intend to take more active control, never mind economic and social distress. I don’t know all that much about likelihoods in the rest of the world, but in the US this cannot possibly turn out well. The beginning of failure is the utter incompetence of bureaucrats in dealing with something they don’t understand. Just bureaucratizing the system dedicated to understanding the Net (ICANN) has made some mess of things; think what it would be like when you add layers of truly hostile bureaucracy. The very nature of government is the opposite of what makes the Internet possible: a world of voluntary peer communication. Any action at all by any government agency in the US will virtually guarantee the Internet will suffer, particularly in the sense of user experience.

Everything points to a vast swathe of computer owners no longer using the Internet. The ultimate commodity purpose of a PC takes a major hit. Whatever work-arounds arise from these and jillion other factors will once again push it into the hobby/academic/government/business realm. Even those will experience a radical shift with the loss of the current Internet landscape. Linux will survive, may even prosper in a sense, but it will never reach the pinnacle of dominance, or even strong presence, on the consumer desktop. That window is closing fast (pun intended).

Where Linux will prosper, aside from the workplace desktop, will be the underground uses. The line between hacker and cracker has seldom been clear. The kind of people who explore the limits and craft all these amazing advances are typically the same folks who aren’t interested in rules and limits of meatspace. As governments and their proxies here in the West attempt to tighten their grip on all things, they will redefine useful and creative souls into criminals. It is government which will move the boundaries. So long as there is hardware to support networking, networking will be, whether “legal” or not. The heart and life of Linux never quite left the anarchy world, and any mainstream acceptance was mere fashion. To the degree Linux continues to live, no matter who else scrapes off their own brand of product from the smorgasboard of code, it will be the domain of hobby users. Yearning for mass acceptance is little more than the socially awkward geek hoping to impress his “cool” classmates. Is it really worth it?

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