PC Study Bible: Ripoff

Biblesoft sells a boxed entry-level Bible software package called PC Study Bible. It’s junk.

The library included is fine, but the the software is just atrocious. It hogs the CPU, offers very slow screen repaints, and generally dogs down the system. I’m running a very fast dual-core Athlon with more RAM than I’ll ever use, and it runs slow on me. This, when it has a primitive Windows 3.1 style interface. I am deeply disappointed. It also offers no obvious way to move copied Scripture passages from the internal clipboard to the system clipboard. Half the reason for buying such a package is to save time with cut and paste from selected verses.

If you want something actually usable, try eSword or The Sword Project.

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XP: Making Me Sick

Just on a lark, I decided to drag out my XP disk and install it on my main desktop system. It took quite a while to get all the updates, because many of them were strictly sequential.

Every piece of my hardware works better in XP than in Linux — any Linux. That’s what makes me sick. You and I know it’s because the manufacturers of hardware aren’t exactly friendly with Linux for the most part. Even those who are, and who allow the specs for Open Source developers to write drivers, still can’t solve the problem. The drivers for the most recent distros of Linux don’t work as well. Let’s face it, many Linux drivers are marginal.

For example, the GUI. My monitor gives less flicker, and everything renders quicker. The same Firefox renders every page quicker and with fewer errors (mostly I no longer have missing images, something all too common under Linux). Regardless how I tweaked my X settings, it never looked this clear and sharp.

It reminds me just what a boondoggle we have with the X server architecture for the GUI. It drives me nuts I can’t find a good multi-view desktop driver for XP, and that’s about the only thing X does right. Otherwise, it’s still ten years behind, if not more. That is, ten years behind if one looks at it from the common user’s experience.

That’s what hits me the hardest. If I were a non-techie testing all this out, I would never use Linux. It’s better at some things, without any argument, but those are things I do as a techie, not as an ordinary user. This worries me. When I compare how it works under XP with everything else I’ve tried, I can’t make it work this well under Linux. They don’t care why, they only know it’s not the same.

More: webcam, sound, printer, mouse, power controls… everything works better. My ancient Panasonic KX-P2123 prints so neat and clean, I forgot how bad Epson emulation could be under CUPS. Further, it hasn’t locked up on me as it often did under CUPS. Granted, that may have been an issue with the mobo chipset and the printer port, but I’m using the same BIOS settings and it’s never a hiccup (so far).

This reminds me the one time I loved Linux printing was when you could still get drivers which would print in character mode, instead of graphical rendering. The one time I loved using Linux most was on the commandline, on a laptop too old to run X. It reminds how much I really wish there were a framebuffer interface, a TUI for Linux. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single developer interested in pursuing that, but I’m not alone in wishing for it.

Now, granted, most people who have messed with Vista would prefer Linux. I suspect Windows 7 will be no better. Still, I am beginning to think I’m going to check out ReactOS and pray it gets solid real soon.

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Trail: Nearly a Mile

Oklahoma is mostly laid out in a square grid, with some tweaking to account for the curvature of the earth at this latitude. Each square is theoretically one mile on each side. Most of the state is criss-crossed by roads which follow these survey lines. We call them “section lines.”

Took a second look today and realized when I crossed an open area, I was quite close to the next section line north of the woods. It required recalibrating my estimates. By the way the crow flies, the trail is now about three-quarter mile, but if you account for all the twists and turns, it’s just about a mile.

Today the trail turned east and crossed the open area just exactly where I planned, entering the largest wooded section again. I probably made about 100 yards in three hours. It was slow going because I had lots of dead fall to move. If I can’t feasibly get on the other side and pull it off my intended path, I am forced to chip away at it until the path is clear. I few more yards east and I’ll turn back north for the last loop. I’m watching the terrain and trying to avoid any significant declines.

I estimate when the entire trail is finished, it will easily cover two miles. I’m looking forward to it, because lately my knees have quit hurting so bad, and I’m able run a bit.

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Can the US Economy Be Fixed?

In a word, NO.

I’ve already explained previously the fundamental nature of economic activity within a community. I also explained when you centralize the controls and the ownership of economic activity, you destroy it. If you operate from a fiat currency, it is only a matter of time before it crashes hard. I also said I am utterly certain this was planned by high-level international bankers.

A friend of mine asked what the government might do in the short term. The answer is “nothing.” Yes, we know people will probably starve, crime will soar, violence in particular. It’s too late to stop that; it’s going to happen anyway. The only difference the government can make now is simply stop and dissolve itself as quickly as possible so individual states can address the problem, themselves devolving controls down to the lowest level.

The only correction possible is to rebuild the local economy of each community. That means start from scratch. Yes, that would be painful, but this idiotic bailout stuff will only prolong the agony, and it will guarantee more people dying from starvation than if it simply stopped now. In a sense, the federal government has already signed a million death warrants, or more. It did so by choosing to hide the problem, by deficit spending, by not closing down The Fed and by not returning to the gold standard.

This wasn’t simply an economic decision to bring wealth and prosperity, it was a decision to grab a bunch of it on the front side and leave nothing for the end. Even before the creation of the Federal Reserve, economists warned it was handing the bankers a sword to kill us. There is a natural cycle to economies based on fiat currencies and we are at the end of ours. Too much too soon means building a habit of conglomeration, and that cannot but be deadly. Having huge multinational corporations could never have worked without eventually enslaving millions and starving them to death. That is inherent in the system.

So within a year or so, the incredibly wealthy will still be incredibly wealthy, while the vast bulk of the human population in the world will starve, succumb to diseases, face social breakdown and chaos, etc. This is what happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. That stuff about a growing economy lifting all boats is only true when it grows off savings, at a natural pace, not off mass credit. Fiat currency fundamentally is mass credit. Credit guarantees wealth will not lift all boats for very long. The commoners are hitting bottom now.

Update: A little support for my contention.

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OS Agnostic?

I’m trying to become more agnostic about computer OSes. I know what I like and what I want, but I also know the rest of the world, particularly those whom I help, just don’t care. All my effort in the CentOS meta-distro is probably not going to fly very far. I accept that. As I’ve already told people, most of the world is not involved in computer hobbies.

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Windows (Ugh) 2000

Well, I had to put Windows 2000 on one of my machines. As is always the reason, there are a few things I have to run which only work properly under the Windows environment. Since I know how to make it work the way I like (read: less hassles than XP or later), and have a good copy for my use, I run Win2K as the least of evils.

Actually, it’s not all the awful, but it’s not Linux or Unix, and can’t be made to work like it. I’ll tolerate it as long as I need those old DOS programs to run properly. I’m getting grief from DOSEmu, and there’s no good solution for it. As a bonus, a handful of hardware issues disappear under Windows, since everybody makes a Windows driver for their stuff.

Still… yuck.

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Major Trail Work Today

I managed to devote a solid three hours to the trail today. The day the tornadoes raked across this state, I had about a half-hour just to break down a large pile of dead-fall limbs, part of last winter’s ice storm. Today I plunged ahead and added nearly 100 yards. This put me through this fourth patch of woods and almost back out in the open.

I explained last time I missed my target and ran into a little pocket of woods, so decided to keep going and cross back over into the northern extent of the central woodlot. Today, at the expense of much stiffness in the upper torso, I hacked my way through the little woodlot to the point just before it drops down into a swamp.

Once across the open swath, I have some more woods there, then probably some field and thorn patches. The work will change from clearing limbs and underbrush, to mowing grass and nibbling through thorns. It’s actually quite a bit harder than simple hacking.

Just a bit more and we’ll have a solid half-mile of trail on the west side of the loop.

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Global Elite Goals

Keep in mind, this is at best an educated guess. I’m abstracting what appears to be the goals of the global elite from published data, and partly from simple observation. On occasion, you’ll find a blunt confession, such as the willingness to use food as a weapon to compel nations to submit. Most of the time, you have to ignore what they publish, and simply watch what they fund and promote. Sometimes you have to simply take a long view of what they’ve done. Aside from taking control in one way or another of the entire world, several items emerge.

1. At least half the world’s population must die. I don’t think anyone is surprised this means darker-skinned races go first. It’s not racism as popularly defined, but contempt for any race which breeds too thickly. The methods include war, manipulation of agriculture (via the likes of Monsanto and GMO), weather manipulation (as much as possible), select forms of pollution, restrictions on nutrition and health care, etc.

2. Urban packing for the rest. The habit of laying aside land preserved from development is a major push. This should be seen as a means of control, to prevent independence of any form. The human race at large is useful as economic production units, and that means virtually everyone in the cities. They aren’t quite as green as the ecology extremists, but they use the watermelons commies to push things in their preferred direction.

3. The complete dissolution of any traditional social structures. In particular, the nuclear family must disappear. The best way to maintain control is to keep everyone isolated, with a sort of artificial sense of identity. People who live in families are too likely to fight for the family’s sake. The same goes for any instinctive grouping, to be replaced with something imposed artificially. Mostly, it is essential everyone be consumed with self-interest.

4. Religion must become empty, fake. True believers in anything are dangerous. A part of this is degrading morals across the board, because morality and religious belief build too much genuine self-respect, another element in identity. Independence and self-reliance are a serious threat to the elite agenda. Genuine religious practices must be crowded out with mind-numbing entertainment.

5. All information must be controlled. The Internet as it currently exists undermines their control. They already own virtually every mainstream media outlet. Keeping the hidden facts hidden means marginalizing as kooks anyone who tries to communicate anything but the recommended pablum. However, it has already been shown a powerful minority are still coalescing around honest inquiry and rejection of the official propaganda. There will be multiple attacks to rein in Internet communications, including: conglomeration of all ISPs into big corporations which can be forced to play by elitist rules, regulation from various angles, attacking Open Source software because it can’t be controlled, requiring backdoors in commercial operating systems, monopoly pressure on hardware manufacturers to build more backdoors, etc.

In general, the nightmarish fiction depicting a rather drab “hive” existence is close to the real plans.

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Trading on Craigslist

I finally decided I have no use for my eMac. It just sits there. I don’t do Mac. It’s okay, but it doesn’t work the way I do, so I’m going to find it a new home.

Over the years, I’ve done okay playing with Craigslist. I got rid of a camper shell a while back, and found a decent used minivan. So now I’m trying to get rid of my eMac. I’m not interested in selling it; I’m trying to trade it for a good laptop.

I have a need for something capable of running Win2K with a little room left over, so I asked for something at least 500Mhz and 256MB RAM. The thing I need most is something solid, reliable. I got a nibble within hours, but that was a bum steer. The poor guy misread thinking I was trying to dump a Macbook.

We’ll see how this goes. Too many people are trying hard to sell systems, and almost no one is seeking one.

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Lost in the Political Haze

Even before President Obama was sworn in, political observers noted a tsunami of proposed changes which tend to characterize the shift from Republican to Democratic leadership. All the fears of the right-wing were flaming, and denunciations wafted to the sky like sparks from the bonfire. Those denunciations had just about as much impact as floating ashes, sometimes starting new fires, but mostly crumbling into stinking dust.

So even as Obama promised he would not confiscate guns wholesale, people went out and bought up enough to provide a fresh issue to our entire US military, and then some. That’s because his Attorney General is one of the loudest proponents of gun confiscation in US history. The warnings from the 2nd Amendment activists caught fire. However, the warnings about slavery — AKA military and civilian draft — aren’t getting much notice. That’s because too many Republicans are only token opposition by virtue of their love for the imperial state. There is also the standard noise about abortion, hiring quotas, support for/freedom of religion, editorial equal time, etc.

All of those things are very real problems. Obama is lying about guns; there will be attempts at confiscation. There will attempts to pass a draft for both military and civil service. Murder-in-the-womb will rise. Racial tensions will skyrocket (but not everywhere). Conservative talk radio will take a major hit, and perhaps disappear from its current venues. Those are all bad things. There will be some good things, too.

Meanwhile, over half the 50 states are making noise about the 10th Amendment. All the more so as state tax receipts decline and federal mandates increase. Whether it will amount to anything remains to be seen. From the other direction comes a massive wave of globalists who will drive madly toward the goal of bringing the US fully under international government. There is every reason to expect serious threats to your very life, not just all your property, during 2009. If for no other reason, such a threat will come from local crime as folks attempt various ways of maintaining their previously profligate lifestyle. You’ll see rape, pillage and plunder from both government and private thugs in your very own community.

All of this is bad enough, but it’s designed to distract you from something which will be worse in the long run. It most certainly won’t seem worse, simply because it’s both subtle and slow acting, while the above mess is rather immediate. You have to understand: The US has been set up for this turmoil from a long time ago. Neither timing nor particular details could be planned and predicted, but the general rise in chaos was all too easy to engineer. It requires no particular genius to realize when folks get scared and hungry, social stability goes away. The primary ingredient in social stability is whether folks can have their creature comforts. While it’s possible to develop a culture in which a primary virtue is suffering bad times with equanimity, it takes several generations of hard work. Destroying it takes only one generation.

That’s what has happened here in the US. The entire national economy was delivered by fiat into the hands of some folks who really don’t love us. By the leverage of that control, they purchased the destruction of what little national culture we had. What you see today is the result of careful cultivation, which began just about the time our oldest citizens were born. We have become a nation of slave-fruit ripe for the picking. It won’t matter how the harvest is performed.

It could be via a truly fascist government, coming at the end of a series of steady shifts in our government as a whole — Executive, Congress and Courts. To some degree, that sickness extends down into each state government, even unto the local governments. An example would be the change in police training; whereas they once strove to de-escalate tensions, they now strive to escalate every confrontation into the maximum by doing things carefully calculated to infuriate. The only friends of police in the community are those civilians who lick their boots. I can recall being trained in the opposite direction, to reach out, to cultivate friendship with everyone possible. I can also recall seeing the shift in philosophy when reading the new standards in law enforcement training theory.

Let’s assume the best for a moment, and envision a popular revolt. Maybe the people will rise up to throw off the yoke of fascism slowly growing on our necks. At the best, it will create a stalemate, because the feds hold the nukes and other horrific tools of oppression. While I doubt they would hesitate to turn those weapons on their subjects, let’s assume they don’t do so with any degree of success. Then the globalists will step in and rescue one side or the other — it really won’t matter, because the result will be the same. They can reinforce the crushing oppression of the current government, or they can be the savior of the people. Once that global government is in place, there’s no turning back.

Other scenarios are possible, some we can’t imagine. It won’t even matter if someone nukes the UN with all the bureaucrats in the buildings. Those are just the figure heads. The real power behind all this is somewhere else. They hide in the crowd of big names and faces who meet at Bilderberg conferences, in the Trilateral Commission meetings, the CFR, the Council for National Policy, the Club of Rome, and a hundred smaller organizations, think-tanks, foundations, and what have you. Somewhere in the press of people we recognize are some folks we don’t know so well. They want us all as their slaves, the entire human race. They’ll use anyone who is willing, and find ways to control an awful lot who aren’t willing. They are opportunists who keep their eyes on the goal of global slavery, and aren’t concerned how they get there.

They’ve been sponsoring, promoting funding all sorts of political movements. It matters not to them how most of these agendas are contradictory, mutually exclusive in goals. One or another will win at various points, and these sponsors already own every organization in the game. Examine it deeply enough, and you’ll find they even have ways to manipulate and limit those of us who know about them. They have steadily gained a measure of control over every human activity, at least in theory. If they really wanted to stop me writing blog posts like this, they could. Since very few take me seriously, I’m not worth their trouble. Yet. So it is with a lot of other bloggers and writers on and off the Net. Everything we touch has passed through their hands, in a manner of speaking, before we got it. Yes, even the entire arsenal of those underground super patriot types, those few controlling hands had a part in building that arsenal, could have stopped it had they really wanted. Since it is very unlikely they will face any bullets themselves, it wasn’t necessary. There are thousands of proxies to die for them.

Can they be stopped? Sure. They aren’t gods; their power is not absolute. It’s possible a significant number of them will be killed when things start popping in the near future. Calculating human behavior at any level can only be just so accurate. In my feeble imagination, I suspect they will miss their goals on this round. However, they are all too likely to come close, simply because so very many of us are distracted by things which are all too close and threatening on a lower level. We are demagogued to death all day long, buying into the shallow concerns of this or that political agenda, firmly believing these things matter ultimately. They matter, but not as much as we have been made to believe. What really matters is what comes after the dust has settled from the current political battles. Not many folks are thinking about that. They envision some Utopia, but it won’t come.

There is no agenda out there which would lead to the defeat of global slavery under these faceless masters of world banking. Bits and pieces of it can be seen under the label “crazy conspiracy theories” — the gold standard, less government of all kinds, ending public education, ending social funding, bringing the troops home, etc. Anything which returns us to that ancient standard under the Covenant of Noah is labeled too far-fetched, not possible, laughably improbable. Yet those are the only things we could do to stop them. I rather think too many of us prefer the soft slavery, not knowing the warm embrace of padded cocoons will become the spiked embrace of an iron maiden.

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