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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Recovery Survival Ideas

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been chatting with people, specifically surveying business ideas for local economy rebuilding. Here are some of the more interesting ones.

Tire Sandals — recycled auto tire casings. While there are some patterns on the Net, those are the hobby type. For genuine durable footwear, you’re going to need some kind of pattern for soles, cutting the tire casings with a jigsaw. I recommend recycled auto seat belts for straps, probably riveted in place. Consider attaching them at an angle so they conform to the shape of the foot. For cold climate, stitch a heavy sock inside the sandal, made of leather, canvas, or other water-resistant materials. Experiment until you come up with a working pattern.

Bicycle Delivery — It will require at least one good, solid bicycle. You’ll need various kinds of frame augmentations, like racks front and rear. Also, you’ll need to create different kinds of luggage depending on the loads. The safest load rides down close to the axles. It means you need a strong frame, fatter tires are better, and you’ll need to invest in extra tires. Also, consider learning ways to minimize puncture flats: thicker inner tubes, puncture resistant straps (liners), solid rubber tires, etc. Oh, it would also require a good pair of legs.

Lunch Cart — Sandwiches, wraps, meat pies, burritos, etc. Make it cheap, but make it filling. Frankly, there’s nothing like good animal fat to make someone feel full for quite a while. You’ll obviously need to find a location under-served by local snack bars, etc., particularly at the lower price range. As long as you aren’t fighting a mass of regulation, you can afford to be very competitive. Bonus points if you mount the food container on a bicycle frame of some sort, or hitch it behind.

Essential Services — There are some things we have done so cheaply for so long, no one remembers how to do it for themselves. Do you know how to wash clothes with a rub-board and tub? Learn how to fix washing machines, or how to do large amounts of laundry cheaply. Learn how to make and repair clothing. Learn plumbing and electricity. Learn how to turn junk into spare materials and parts.

Packaged Vices — I do not recommend this, but felt it was only fair the mention it: alcohol and tobacco. If you know how to distill spirits or brew beer, and have the supplies and equipment, all you need to do is avoid regulation to make a fortune in bad times. Tobacco is quite a bit harder. You’ll have to research how to grow it, dry it, and store it. Learn how to make cigarettes cheaper than other local sources and you’ll never lack for customers. Or simply make them accessible in locations closer to the users.

Import Replacement — This is more of a general principle. Keep an eye on businesses which exist only because they import their stuff cheaply by the boatload. As the global economy slows down, shipping is one of the first things to either die or become horribly expensive. Cheap import stuff will go away. Some of that stuff people will buy only because it is cheap. Other things are fairly essential, and they’ll buy at much higher prices when necessary. If you can replace anything in high demand with a local product, they’ll pay the higher prices you’ll probably have to charge.

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Economic Recovery Can Take Only One Path

It seems so funny the huge number of folks acquainted with basic principles of economics, who can teach it well, but can’t support it. Our current economic system in the West is broken. The foundation itself is broken; it cannot but collapse. Indeed, it already has, but the sheer size of it will make the fall painfully slow. Most of what the experts are saying amounts to encouraging fresh guylines be attached, but it won’t work — the foundation is gone.

It’s been gone for a long time, but nobody wanted to talk about it. That is, not in the mainstream information sources. The information has been available elsewhere for more than 20 years, going back to the early days of the Internet. When I first went online more than a decade ago, it came as a surprise to me how much economic information was available, contradicting the popular press. I devoured it, having already been teaching Economics for several years. Think of it: Some 20 years ago minority voices were warning this was going to happen. They didn’t quite know the timing until it got closer, but they knew enough theory to understand the whole thing was long past broken. They got their information from books and papers going back prior the WW2 (the 1940s for those of you historically challenged). So let’s take a look at some of those fundamentals.

Primary economic activity consists of extracting resources as they exist in nature. That’s usually hunter-gather stuff, but includes fishing, logging, mining, etc. Secondary economic activity means either growing your own stuff through cultivation (and animal husbandry) or processing stuff you get from nature. That includes building and various types of crafting, manufacturing, refining, etc. Tertiary gets us into trade, banking, transportation, services, etc. As long as any particular system continues to do all three, natural economic variations don’t cause too much disruption in life.

The key to balance is human employment. As long as people are working and making some income — able to carry on an exchange of goods, services and money — the economy can absorb shocks. That is, when one economic activity collapses for whatever reason, the workers can be absorbed, or at least carried through, until something picks up the slack and puts people back to work. Encouraging people to save also helps. It also provides the means to investing so folks with bright ideas can create new business, and allow old ones to die. The whole idea is to maximize productivity, yet not outrunning the balance point. There is a certain amount of labor which must always be free — a percentage of unemployment — to enable the necessary change from one sort of production to another as needs, fashions, whims, etc., change.

We got way out on a limb, with most of our nation’s labor involved in a very narrow range of activity, all in the tertiary. There were far, far too few people employed in the primary, and most of those in the secondary were very narrowly deployed in just a few things. The bulk of our economy was invested in non-productive pursuits, without anything to back it up. Propping up the tertiary services with trillions of dollars is simply throwing those dollars away. What little productivity we do have is consumed in a bottomless sinkhole. Indeed, what’s being tossed into that sinkhole is borrowed from future productivity, which will certainly not come.

The only path to recover now is via localized economic activity. We have to recreate the primary and secondary, and we have to spread it out as wide as possible. It won’t be too hard, since we won’t be able to import much of anything — the dollar will be utterly worthless on the international market very soon. The only way we will get people back to work is to stop supporting the collapsing tertiary economic activity, and invest in the primary and secondary. In other words, we have to regain all the extraction and manufacturing activity we sent overseas.

Only when we rebuild the localized system will we have any hope of getting people back to work, and the system being powerful enough to support some kind of recovery. It will have to come by people building new businesses from scratch, without much capital except what they have on hand. The bailout efforts must stop, or it will only prevent people getting back to work.

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Municipal Computer Virus: No Surprise

Lots of places to find the details, but this one will do: Computer Virus Hits Houston Municipal Courts.

Are we surprised? Not if we know anything at all about computers. And governments. Consider how bureaucracies attract, and hold, the least competent folks. Sure, some are really competent servants of the public, but it’s become so rare as to be remarkable when you find one. So you have this series of offices populated by folks who would tend to have some of the worst behavior regarding computer security, for all the same reasons you might expect.

Next, we have thousands upon thousands of Windows computers in these offices, used by these bureaucrats. Further, they were installed by some folks who seemed to have their own problems with competence. So the world’s mosts vulnerable computer OS, installed by some questionable technicians for some bureaucrats. But it gets worse.

These bureaucrats are in the courts and police system. They have a well-deserved reputation for being among the most oppressive goons to ever stain the term “justice system.” People dropped in cells for truly minor offenses are stuck there, and people on the hook for paying tickets and such can’t beat the time window. If I understand correctly, you still take the fall if you don’t pay on time, even though it’s technically their fault.

Are we surprised? No. At times like this I am sooooooo glad I don’t live anywhere near Houston.

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Trail Update: Surprise

After we broke the trail out through the third section of woods, I found I had missed my target. We were just a few dozen yards from the western property line, which apparently isn’t a straight line. We have been zig-zagging a lot, but mostly heading somewhat east of straight north. So the open section left by the bulldozers coming down from the north end just off that western line made a last-minute turn west. Thus, my trail crosses north over the end of that open strip.

We’ll continue into this tiny section of woods. I’ll have to survey again to see how it lays up at the north end where the bulldozers cut deep into the sandstone hillside. I may just run the trail up on top of that ridge and come around the east side.

At any rate, we are making fast progress for now because the underbrush and limbs just aren’t that thick.

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CRC Coming to America?

The UN Convention on Rights of the Child (CRC) — Let’s think about that for a moment. I’ll be the first to note WorldNetDaily is loaded with hyperbole, and the editors take themselves too seriously. Still, this is hardly news. Communists and other government-is-god types have long known the most terrifying and humiliating thing for any human is loss of parental rights. That’s why they press the issue.

This has nothing to do with “think of the children.” People who consider the best interests of children could easily find a better way to implement protections for them. Instead, at every step of the way, getting between parents and their children, government has consistently taken the worst possible route. No, that’s not hyperbole, that’s the judgment of God. Check His Book. We know government bureaucrats don’t care what God has to say, but that’s another issue. Any government which rejects the advice of the Book is by definition illegitimate.

But let’s take a look at how this is likely to play out in reality. So far, we have a long record of various state iterations of Family Services doing the worst thing. No, not in every case, but all too often. The reason is the system itself is just a big pile of doo-doo. It is not possible for a bureaucracy to do anything right, and the more things revolve around very real human uniqueness, the worse it gets. Consider this: Child Welfare agencies always hire the worst people. Good people do not apply for such jobs. Good people don’t want to interfere with internal family matters. There is already plenty of laws on the books for arresting parents for outright assault, and for serious neglect. Everything else is simply nobody else’s business.

That families tend to resist outside interference is simply a fact of life. Kids are notorious for lying and exaggerating in the first place (at least in the US), so if they don’t want to tell on mom and dad, too bad. It is guaranteed you cannot possibly come up with reliable a method for bypassing that. I say that from the background of one trained as both a cop and a family counselor. Yes, I am an expert, at least as expert as any government thug I’ve ever met or heard or about.

They are thugs in the sense they have no sense of proportion. This is not merely anecdotal evidence, but piles and piles of studies done by academic researchers and other experts. Study after study shows the flaws in the systems, and the systems never change. Such agencies still attract a very high percentage of people who truly enjoy squashing other people. They still establish brain-dead policies and hire the worst idiots in town, often from the welfare rolls. They even hire the parents they’ve prosecuted. Once such people are on staff, they are gods, itching to dole out even worse treatment to everyone else in the world. No other agency under heaven is permitted to second-guess; they close ranks against God Himself.

These are the people, and these are the agencies which will enforce the CRC.

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