Cannot Silence the Message

Posted on July 31, 2021 by ehurst

On the one hand, the Internet is overwhelmed with iniquity. It’s hard to avoid defiling yourself by what is being pushed so forcefully at us. This is the primary reason I use adblockers in all my surfing. I’ve mentioned subliminal conditioning in the past, and tried my best to explain how it works. Lately it has shown up in the writing tools most of us use. It’s a pathway for demons to suppress your resistance. It requires a strong heart-led awareness to avoid the conditioning to open up to sin. While not everyone involved is fully aware of it, the whole idea is to silence the power of the gospel flaming inside each of us. But that’s not the only problem.

There is yet another form of silencing at work on the Net. I have no hard evidence to offer on all of it, but I’m seeing a trend in censorship that I never expected.

The early efforts are familiar by now. It’s not enough that the gospel truth has been displaced in public with the dreaded “wokeness” idolatry, but those who oppose that idolatry are being forced off the primary social media carriers. And perhaps you are aware of how various “woke” Internet service providers, along with the background traffic moving providers, have been trying to silence voices they didn’t like. Plus there are plenty of governments blocking unapproved traffic at their borders. It’s been a game of whack-a-mole, an arms race between those governments and their tech savvy citizens slipping past the virtual roadblocks.

Lately, the “woke” folks have been colluding together rather like trade groups, bringing very heavy pressure to bear on those who haven’t bought into the “woke” point of view. It’s getting harder and harder to find hosting and traffic support for anyone who defies the idolatry, never mind those who actually condemn the idols. The safe harbors are being closed.

So far, the mainstream churchianity has been the only resistance. But as we have seen, the churches themselves are being hijacked from within. Did you notice how even Southern Baptists, the traditional bellwether of conservatism, have now significantly compromised with this evil over the past two years at the national level? It’s trickling down into the individual churches already. Church offerings are now being spent in ways that support the “woke” message on the Internet.

Our far more primitive biblical ways are even more threatening to the system.

Every means to expression on the Internet is under attack all at the same time. Apparently there are other ways of crushing dissent, ways I haven’t seen directly, but I’ve seen the effects. I’m not sure I can put it into words, but there’s this dark mass behind yet another major push to subvert every form of human communication on the Net. Very soon it will seem almost impossible. This is part of why I keep expecting this blog to be shut down by outside forces — there’s something big and evil cooking out there. I can smell it, but I can’t see in the fog where the demon kitchen is.

I won’t tell you to get off the Net. That’s not my place. What is my place is to obey my convictions, and that’s where I get the idea that my computer should be reverted back to mostly a writing and printing machine. And if any kind of CME or EMP fries that, I’m already part-way shifted over to using pen/pencil and paper alone. Again, I can offer no timeline. All I know is that it’s on its way.

Perhaps a useful parable is the image of the Roman Roads of the New Testament world. The Internet has been that for us, but now the roads are being closed. It’s not just the surveillance; it’s the road closures that are the big issue now. They are being fenced off with checkpoints all over the place. We’ll have to learn how to take a slower path on the backroads and trails that are now often hard to use because of neglect. It’s time to restore the old paths, and maybe open up some new ones. I’m sure I can’t imagine all the ways God will work in this time of tribulation, but that He is working is never in doubt.

The message may be slowed, but it cannot be stopped.

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Another Slice of Life

Posted on July 29, 2021 by ehurst

For some time my clownish sense of humor had been dampened, but it’s back now. My outlook of joy and hope have returned, and I’ve missed it. Of course, this means for folks around me that they have to put up with my outrageous joking. Pray for my wife.

For the time being, as long as everything works, I’ll keep using my computer and tablet. I’ve decided to pass my laptop off to my son. The point here is that I’m leaving the ranks of online content producers. When it comes to the Net, I’ll be just another consumer of content — and very selective about it. Of course, this blog will stay alive until God makes it clear it’s mission is finished, or external events force a stop.

But my desktop computer will become what my first computer was thirty years ago: a glorified typewriter. That is, I’ll keep writing and printing, along with collecting important material I find on the Net, but I’m not going to participate directly in whatever the Internet has become. I’m withdrawing.

Meanwhile, I won’t even bother getting a typewriter. I’ll just try to find a really nice, fat ink pen like I once had that is comfortable for gripping and scribbling for hours at a time. I’ve been working on my penmanship. Note: My brain does not like cursive writing at all, so my best hope is the old grade school printing. I managed to submit a handful of research papers that way back in my college days and was commended for making it readable, even without a typewriter.

I can do this.

The trick is to collect the necessary materials before the economy crashes. That’s coming any day now, never mind CMEs and stuff like that. TPTB are working hard to make it happen, once they are satisfied that they have scraped off the last bit of plunder that they can possibly extract from us. So I’ve stocked up on writing pads, pens and I’ve got some pencils on order. If I can’t find a fat writing pen, maybe I can get some of those cushy finger guards for the thinner pens/pencils.

But I still need a mechanical watch, so if you have one floating around somewhere that you can afford to let go, I’d love to know how I can get it from you. It needs to have a face large enough and contrasting enough for my aging eyes to discern where the hands are. I’ve been searching for one locally with no luck, so far.

Do you realize that a great many retail stores no longer even sell watches? Sure, you can get a smartwatch almost anywhere, but even those cheap electronic chronographs are disappearing. And the only reason I had to order pencils online is that I need #3 hard lead, and nobody stocks those any more in my neck of the woods.

So in the meantime, I’ll keep using what works during a sort of transition period until something shuts it all down. Aside from this blog, the forum and some email or texting, I’ve moved the bulk of my writing onto paper. For years I kept a rolling daily journal on my computers, just because writing something daily is critical to keeping me sane, but it’s now going into those composition books kids have to use for school around here. But I’m still chasing down Bible reference materials online that I can’t find in print, and printing it off for my own use.

I’m plowing back through the Ancient Truth Bible study series of books, giving them one last edit for a print-on-demand edition. I started with the Gospels and I’m almost finished with Mark. This has become my daily job for now. As I get through these books, I’ll announce it on the blog and put up a link for the raw word processing document. They’ll be in Word DOCX, but I can easily get you one in the older DOC format, or in the Open Document format by request. It’s been a real blessing to read those commentaries again.

For those wondering, my physical therapy is going great. I’ve cut back to every other day, and I’m not taking as many long rides for the simple reason that I have too much to do. I’m still riding enough to get to quiet prayer chapels every couple of days, of course. I still can’t walk too far without a bad response from my knees, but the strength is coming back. In my younger adult days, I was proud of my ability to squat and rise on one leg at a time. It was a skiing thing in Alaska; our instructor made a big deal of it, and I could do it from the start. Well, I’m getting closer to regaining that kind of leg power. Also, I’m working hard at the kind of interval training that most older folks can’t handle. Age and death will have to chase me down to catch me.

And how are you folks coping?

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A Little More on CMEs

Posted on July 28, 2021 by ehurst

Let me offer a little more about the prospects for CME disasters.

From what I understand, an EMP (weaponized electromagnetic energy) is a high-frequency blast that threatens everything that conducts electricity. However, an EMP bomb is a single point, with a limited radius of effect. There’s some debate as to how fast the shockwave weakens the farther it travels. It could be the thing has only a short range before the power of the pulse dissipates. Still, it’s high damage as far as it can reach.

CMEs are massive and will overwhelm the whole earth, rushing past our earth’s magnetic field — a field that has been weakening over the past century. It’s currently weakest over South America, but is quickly spreading. It’s difficult to assess, and the graphical representations vary. (See here and here for examples; blue = bad in both pictures). A CME is a low frequency blast from the sun that is picked up mostly by long wires. We don’t know if the sun can do high-frequency, but it hasn’t done it where anybody has noticed so far.

So, as previously noted, it’s not so much a threat to the wires of the electric grid themselves, but the transformers connected to the wires. The wires will get hot. Transformers are more heat sensitive than wires. Furthermore, a lot depends on how the transformers are connected, in that hot wires sag and pull on the connections. If there is a buffered connection, it pulls on something else, something designed to take the stress. But when wires are directly hung on the transformer, sagging wires can pull the connectors off.

But beyond that, a CME is loaded with plasma and particles that affect all living things. There’s a lot of theory about these effects, but not much established fact. Furthermore, the high intensity magnetic disturbance are bound to affect us in ways that we cannot predict very well. Different creatures bear varying sensitivity to magnetic fields, notably migratory animals like birds and some sea creatures. We don’t yet know that much about latent sensitivities in other creatures; it may be impossible to know until it happens. But there’s every reason to believe almost everything has some sensitivity to magnetic disturbance at that level.

Because the earth has so much metal in the core, a magnetic disturbance is guaranteed to provoke earthquakes and volcanoes. It’s guaranteed to have weather effects, most notably in the form of lightning, in part for the same reason volcanoes have lightning strikes above them. Overcharging the earth’s magnetic field will bring clear-air lightning strikes, literally out of nowhere. Those strikes will affect lots of things, and it’s exceedingly difficult to estimate, because they’ll be of such a high magnitude.

Your standard CMEs are not much threat to small bits of conducting material, such as electronics and electrical appliances. They could threaten the electricity grid. It’s the big ones that cross some invisible threshold that should be a concern. Over that threshold are effects we cannot estimate; we know only what kind of things it might include. It’s not that I want to promote fear, but a sense of calculus about what we can do to carry on the divine mission. If you know what’s likely, you’ll be less surprised and less panicky.

When a big one comes, we will have some hours advanced notice, less than a day to prepare. If you keep track of the weather on the sun, you’ll get a better idea of such things. The sun is more volatile than ever, even while the earth’s protective shield is coming down. This was God’s plan in foreknowledge of the need for His wrath to fall and shake things up a bit. Who will cling to Him through the coming apocalypse?

How we respond is a major element in our witness.

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Maybe It’s Just Me

Posted on July 27, 2021 by ehurst

There’s a battle going on in my soul. From where my conscious awareness stands, it’s impossible to identify all the elements in the battle, particularly in terms of which is the good guys and the bad guys. Maybe it’s neither, but a matter of choosing from two or more equally difficult paths.

I know where my convictions are steering me. Sometimes I’d like to know more of the why, and that’s what makes it slow going. Not some impetuous child demanding a reason for something unpleasant, but in order to make my flesh obedient, I need to know a little more about the context.

Here’s what I have so far: God is pushing me to get off the Net. Not today, but somewhere out there in the future. I’ve been moving that direction for quite some time. Yes, my flesh has a heavy investment of 30 years messing with computers and networking, and it’s not really happy about all the wasted investment. But my heart knows that I got involved in obedience to the Lord, and now I’m getting out of it in obedience to the Lord. It doesn’t have to make sense to my human mind.

I’m certainly going to miss the communications. Both passive and active engagement in the wider world seems like a good thing to do. There’s something beneficial about it. Still, I have to wonder how it was for the ancient Hebrew peasant who knew only what he experienced first-hand, and maybe had some inkling of things in the wider world that he heard about. Yet, he was able to focus on what God required of him, if he was so inclined, and nothing else really mattered.

So, if you have had time enough to waste reading my blogging, you can surely see I’m tapering off the active engagement first. I honestly do not understand why God wants me to abandon the audience I built up through blogging, but I do understand that the Lord gives and takes away what suits His purpose. There’s a conflict here: I have a mission and message, and the Net has been the best way to express it. Apparently, that’s no longer true.

I have no idea why. I could speculate that it’s because the Lord is going to make it hard for everyone else to be on the Net, but that’s not certain in my mind. There are gaps between the things my convictions declare about this whole story, and my brain is eager to fill in those gaps for it’s own use. It’s not a sinful thing; it’s just human nature. It’s what we live with in this fallen world as we pursue the path out of it.

I’ve done some more research on CMEs and electronics. I’m not an engineer, but I’ve tried to find out what engineers know about such things. So far, I don’t think anybody really knows. What they do know has wide gaps, and so far all they have is speculation to fill in the blanks. Most of them seem to think that a major solar flare/CME would not fry electronic devices, but would do more damage to the electric power grid than anything else. They suggest that the most vulnerable thing is what I’ve already identified: the transformers. The wiring might survive okay, but the transformers appear to be vulnerable to what a CME does to the grid.

And everyone who claims to know says we don’t have very many transformers in stock. So if the CME heats up the wires and overloads the transformers, it will be a loooong time replacing them. Maybe some are shielded, but those little gray cans mounted on utility poles all over the US are what’s almost guaranteed to explode in vast numbers. And everyone is pretty sure if that happens, there won’t be much power to keep the cellphone towers and Internet switching centers working. So it won’t matter if you still have a working device, there won’t be any service to which it can connect.

But then, a few other folks claiming to be engineers and astrophysicists say a CME like that is not what everyone thinks it would be. They say it would include a lot of stuff not often accounted for — not just plasma and particles, but various energy fields. We haven’t had any big CMEs in a long time, and when we did, nobody knew what to look for back then. And they suggest that everything that can conduct electricity will be overloaded, frying the lightweight stuff first. That would mean electronic devices.

I don’t know what to make of it all.

What I do know is that I’m supposed to get off the Net as much as possible. For now, it looks like there is some transition time left. That could disappear without notice, but my heart says we have time. I have no idea if it’s something that applies to you, but it certainly applies to me. I need to get comfortable doing things the way I did back in the 1970s and earlier, in terms of getting the message out.

Whom the new audience will be is still shrouded in mist for me. For those of you who read this blog, if you want to hear from me past that final cut-off, you’ll have to send me a snail-mail address. I may still have use of phones, but I wouldn’t count on that. For now, this blog will keep running. For some of you, I know that you are concerned about the ongoing series of Bible studies, and rest assured, that’s the core element of my ministry. I’ll do what I can to share that stuff until circumstances force my hand.

But it’s the same thing I’ve been saying for at least a couple of years: You need to be ready to proceed in your religion and faith without me. It’s about time to graduate. Whatever God is doing with the Radix Fidem virtual community is about to enter the next phase. I have no way to estimate at this point how much I’ll be involved in the Internet and the cellphone net at any point in the future, but I am convinced that I will have no presence on the Net. In terms of the virtual realm, I’ll be dead.

I have no idea why, beyond vague visions of a fellowship here in the real world. Whether that means a cataclysm that kills it for everyone else is more than I know right now, but I believe it includes something like that. So I can tell you what God is doing with me, and some of what I am doing to prepare for the changes, but you’ll have to follow your own convictions.

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How Do We Live?

Posted on July 26, 2021 by ehurst

Note: It’s okay if you think that I’m nuts preparing for a major solar flare. Just ignore that part and keep reading the stuff you can use. But there are at least a few of us who take this seriously and those are the folks I’m writing for in this post. I’m not going to be embarrassed if nothing ever happens. The notion that a big CME is coming is just how I organize and make sense of what my convictions demand of me.

The foundation is that you will live by your own convictions first and foremost. What works for me may not work for you. It’s not a question of being right or wrong, but of being obedient regardless how it turns out.

I stand firmly in the conviction that Iain is correct, that a big CME is coming our way in the near future. The Lord is granting us some advanced notice, some time to prepare. Here are some things that cross my mind, arising from my convictions.

Generalities: I expect the electrical grid here will survive. Most older cars will, too. However, a lot of electronic stuff, especially the more recent ultra-thin chip products, will fry. I’m counting on not having a cellphone or any computer devices. So I’m trying to unwind myself from dependence on them. Aside from trying to take advantage of the time I have left to print things that I have currently saved on computers and devices, there are other practical considerations.

I never gave much thought to how much work it would be to put all my books on paper. For me, the most important stuff is the Bible commentaries. I’m rereading all of that as I reformat for printing. It’s not just typos and grammar glitches, but there are places where I’ve changed my mind about things that matter. So, I’m investing a lot of hours in revising the Ancient Truth series of books. The rest I’ll hold off until later.

I need to get a mechanical wristwatch, maybe one with a date window, because I get lost regarding date and time a lot. I need lots of writing materials, and I need to see if I can recover a decent penmanship. I plan to start putting more stuff on paper tomorrow. It means rearranging a lot of my habits and assumptions about daily activities. I am quite serious about getting a typewriter, but the Lord says I have some time; good ones cost roughly $200 used. Oh, and I was surprised to find that the best quality typewriters are all portable.

I’m not sure if our cars will make it. I know that my bike will suddenly become very valuable, and I’ll be using it like most people use a car. I managed to get the front rack back on and I think I solved the problems I had with it before. I can’t estimate if the bicycle lights I have will survive (and whether batteries react to a CME), but I’ll try to shield things like that as a matter of storage habit.

I need to keep a rotating stock of canned goods. The issue here is that banking will suddenly come to a screeching halt for a while as the panic hits and everyone has to shift back to technology from the 1970s or earlier. I don’t think the Internet will be completely gone, but there will be a sudden paucity of machines able to connect. I’m just guessing, but I suspect some older hardware in protected places could survive. Most radios and TVs will be toast. Printed media will make a sudden comeback.

I’m going to hunt for Bible reference books locally, and download/print everything I decide I can’t afford to lose. I have a smattering of DIY stuff, and I’ll try to get more, but only what I know how to use. I’m unsure if any of my power tools will survive, but I do have a manual backup for most of them. Oddly, the hardest thing to replace is electric drills.

I gotta remember to create something like my own Rollodex, and put important dates on a paper planner. I’m expecting to have very little phone access for a long time to come. I need to develop mental habits that account for all of this.

What seems really amusing to me is that my convictions led me to move in this direction before I was aware this kind of disaster was in our future. I’ve long felt the need to prepare to do without computers and the Internet, I just couldn’t picture it happening until now. Suddenly, it all makes sense. The CME is the thing that holds it all together. My convictions were already pushing me there from other angles.

Suddenly all my computer technology experience is approaching irrelevance. Think about how significant that is for me. I’ve been drifting that way for a while, but now it’s a clear mandate. The way I see it, we have only a few years at most, and it’s now almost humorous how my reading habits have changed.

Feel free to share in the comments how you see it.

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Admin: List of Published Articles

Posted on July 25, 2021 by ehurst

This is a list of the articles in PDF format currently stored within this blog’s archives. If you click on a link, your browser should attempt to display or download the file. Right-click on a link and download should be one of the options:

East versus West: a Review of Epistemology

Rehabilitation of Peter

Biblical Human Development

The Heresy of Dispensationalism

Logic Games: Doctrine of the Fall

A Quantum Spirit

Sex, Pornography and Children

The Nature of Sin and Temptation

Christian Mysticism HOWTO

The Cult

Repent

Radix Fidem (trifold)

Gifts of the Spirit

Omnisexual

Ancient Truth: John’s Revelation (2nd ed)

A Redemption Story

Radix Fidem Booklet

Commentary on Matthew 24-25

Theology and Practice

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Admin: Making Printed Copies

Posted on July 25, 2021 by ehurst

If you invest enough time in reading my stuff, it’s not long before you can guess that I might say about various things. If you read my stuff with your heart, you might do a good job of estimating what you should be able to say about almost anything you encounter. As always, I don’t take myself that seriously, so the most I ever hoped to do was to prime the pump so that Living Water would flow out of your own soul.

Because I’ve honestly expected things to go badly for our access to each other on the Internet, I’ve tried to warn you all from time to time that you really should aim at standing on your own in serving the Lord. I really don’t want you dependent on my faith and religion. Still, I suppose for the sake of fellowship, and perhaps an easier way to share what I’ve taught up to now, you might want to try capturing some of this on hard copies.

It appears at least one person (Jay) wants printed copies of my books badly enough to collate them into anthologies and submit them to a POD (print-on-demand) service. They should be available at cost, since none of us are trying to make any money at this. We’ll let you know how that turns out.

This may take awhile, but if you want any of my current ebooks in a printable format, let me know via email. While Smashwords does offer them in multiple formats, I’m quite willing to email you a copy in whatever format I have. The idea is that if you feel like you are in a hurry to use your own printer, I’ll be glad to make it easier. If you give me a little time, I plan to burn the library to CDs, because it really isn’t such a large collection.

Which brings up the next issue: I’m collecting snail-mail addresses. You can share yours with me via email or whatever, but I’m posting mine here for all to see:

Ed Hurst
2600 N. Glenhaven Dr., APT D
Midwest City, OK 73110

Be aware of a minor problem: If you use any kind of electronic service to send something to that address, you may get a complaint that they can’t find that street. This is what my local post office uses, but Google is a butthead operation that insists it is W. Glenhaven. That will still arrive here, but it’s not technically correct.

As part of this larger project, I’ve purchased a collection of ring binders so I can get my own books and papers in hard copy. In the process, I’ll run through them one last time looking for errors, so the very last edition will be what I churn out that way.

I’m also planning on formatting the popular series Law of Moses and New Testament Doctrine into a book, but I’m not going to mess with Smashwords on those for now. The other thing I’m doing is printing copies of very instructive graphics from Bible research that I find on the Net. If I can remember, I’ll share some of those here on the blog from time to time. It would mostly be maps, drawings of structures, or graphical representations of information that save lots of time.

I’m taking this seriously folks. Maybe I’m deluded, but I believe having a good paper library of things that matter to me will bless others. We have no way of estimating how much time the Lord will allow us, and I can’t even begin to estimate what it would cost to put stuff on paper, but I’m committed to the task.

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New Testament Doctrine: John 3:22-36

Posted on July 24, 2021 by ehurst

Keep in mind that John the Baptist remains an Old Testament figure. His cousin Jesus is the bridge over from the Old to New Covenant, but John remained under Moses. His message and ministry was to prepare for the Messiah. After Jesus’ baptism, John’s doubts about Jesus went away, at least for awhile.

The wording is a bit clumsy in English translations, but Jesus left Jerusalem a few days after the interview with Nicodemus, and went out into the Judean countryside down near the Jordan River. Aside from His preaching and miracles, He supervised His disciples in baptizing those who repented in preparation for His reign.

Our text notes that John the Baptist had moved his ministry upstream a ways, as far as we can discern now. There’s an engaging video here about some folks searching for the site. It turns out Enon (Grk. Aenon) is not a proper place name, but a word to describe an area where there were multiple springs of water. This is after the Passover, during the harvest season when it’s dry, so the Jordan ran a bit low, but these springs were in those days quite full of water.

It’s also outside the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas. Take a look at this map. Notice the two purple areas? That’s the tetrarchy of Herod Antipas. If you look close, you’ll see a city in Decapolis named Scythopolis roughly half-way between the two districts of Antipas. The hill today called Tel Shalim is almost certainly the Salim mentioned in our text, deep in the pocket between Judea and northern Perea. Roughly a kilometer south of there, as the video indicates, is the most dense collection of ancient springs, and highly probable as the site where John was ministering at this time.

The reason John wasn’t yet in prison was because he was legally out of Antipas’ reach. At some point he slips back into Perea and is arrested. He was imprisoned at Machaerus, an old fortress built by one of the Hasmoneans — the Maccabean priestly rulers. This place stood on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, far down at the southern end of Perea.

There arose a debate between some Jewish rabbis and the disciples of John the Baptist. It’s almost certainly something to do with the difference between John’s ministry and that of Jesus. The disciples came to their teacher and asked about that difference. Why was Jesus eclipsing John?

John’s answer was self-effacing. Everything he had gained was from God, and surely God can give it to someone else. Besides, John was not the Messiah, just the forerunner. John uses a parable to explain that Jesus was the Messiah, and the people of the Covenant were His bride, His inheritance. John was blessed to bring them together. Being able to attend the wedding was quite a privilege for John, and it signaled the end of his mission.

Then we get some comments that sound a lot like John the writer editorializing again. Jesus came down from Heaven, while John was just a rather ordinary man. The teaching of the Messiah reflects His direct experience as the Son of God in the Heavenly Courts. John could share only what he experienced with the Covenant of Moses. When people who lived under the Covenant embrace the Messiah, they affirm that God has been faithful to His promises, because they experience the fulfilment of those promises.

John received a measure of the Holy Spirit; the Son is the Holy Spirit in human flesh. As you might expect, the royal Heir inherits everything the Father has saved up for Him. So it is that the Son is the sole, final ruler of Heaven. Those who bow the knee to Him will enter that eternal realm. Those who reject the Son as their sovereign Lord shall stand eternally in the wrath of God.

As God’s own final OT prophet, John the Baptist assures us that Jesus is the Messiah according to the Covenant promises. He is the personification of what the Covenant tried to tell humanity.

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The CME Threat

Posted on July 24, 2021 by ehurst

Brother Iain shared a prophetic word on our forum:

I told Ed about my long held weird attraction to the possibility of a catastrophic CME hitting Earth. I did enough research to understand that it would be a cataclysm. Well, I have it on the Highest Authority … it’s gonna happen.

He goes on to mention how his experience with prophecy is appropriately challenging. It’s not fun and games. That has been my experience, as well.

CME is the abbreviation of Coronal Mass Ejection: a sunspot the spits a lot of energy and particles into space, particularly when that wave of stuff hits the earth. It’s also referred to as a Carrington Event. It’s a type of catastrophe, not specifically a matter of how bad it is. In the context he indicated that the strength would be enough to damage a lot of electronic devices, if not all of them. However, he offered no timeline. I have no reason to doubt this is a valid warning from the Lord, all the more so since it echoes in my convictions.

So what’s left is first to query your own convictions as to what God wants you to do about it. Finally, you can query the human knowledge of such things. Science is uniform in stating that we are headed into another solar activity period, which means that we are coming up out of a low period, and the cycle is well established on this. The peak will come in 2025. On top of that, science uniformly notes that our planet’s magnetic field of protection is weakening dramatically. It wouldn’t take much of a CME to do some damage in the current setting.

It is significant to note that, for the time being, every time the sun spins around to point sunspots at us, they keep going relatively quiet. I haven’t heard a convincing explanation from scientists on why this is so. The best explanation for this is our Lord keeping things quiet until He decides otherwise. Given the context of His wrath on the world right now, that means only that it will be a surprise when He drops His protection. We won’t get much warning.

For now, all I can do is share my own convictions. Of course, the previous post is where I asked for help finding a typewriter. I’ll very much miss having a screen and decent software with spellcheck and all that. I confess I’ve gotten lazy about spelling because of it. Right next to my typewriter I’ll keep a dictionary.

But I’m also investing in writing materials. I always carry a notebook and pen on my rides so I can write stuff down and not forget those fine inspirations coming into my consciousness. Even if I don’t look at the notebook later, writing stuff down makes it easier to remember. I’ve got some good Zebra pens and some lined pads, too, along with an old-fashioned leather folder for those lined pads.

For your amusement: I seem to recall reading somewhere about computer hardware when it encounters electrical/magnetic energy fields. It was some time ago, so it noted that floppy disks and tape drives fail first. As the field intensifies, Bluetooth and Wifi chips come next, followed then by miscellaneous micro-processing chips. CPU, GPU and memory (like SSDs) fail next. Proper spinning hard drives fail last (unless you count cooling fans).

But more broadly, in terms of a CME severity, smaller devices and newer devices die first. Electronics die before plain electrical systems. The fatter, and better shielded wiring lasts longer. So, older cars will ride it out better than newer ones. At some point, the energy field overwhelms anything that conducts electricity at any level, and they can burn or melt. Longer wires catch it quicker, because they create a field of their own that invites interference. Exposed electrical grids (up on utility poles) will fail before buried lines, but the transformers tend go before either of them.

Think about this: How dependent are you on this stuff? What part of your mission and calling will change when cellphones, tablets and computers are all fried? What if the broader Internet goes down, or various types of utilities? Iain suggested that you should make a paper copy of anything important to you. Even if memory/storage devices survive, the means to read them may not.

Even more so, think about how it will effect government activities. Surveillance will take a huge hit, as the cameras will fry early. On the other hand, the propensity of government agencies to lag behind civilian technology trends might save them some trouble. Still, if the CME is big enough, life as we know it will change dramatically.

Keep in mind that there will likely be clusters of CMEs. They tend to come in batches. Also, we’ve already just missed some pretty big ones recently. This is how we know that sunspots tend to weaken right now when facing the earth, because huge CMEs burst out the far side and were detected by satellites.

Again, query your own convictions. Be aware how this kind of thing will affect your mission.

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Admin: Hunting a Typewriter

Posted on July 23, 2021 by ehurst

I feel the need to obtain a manual typewriter. Nothing electric; I’m looking for an old style finger-powered machine. I’ve seen hundreds of portables on eBay, but I really would prefer the desktop kind. At one time, the federal government had a few million of them, including the military services. That’s the kind of machine I’m looking for, so if any of you come across one, let me know what it would cost to buy and ship. Of course, a donated machine would be dandy, if you are so blessed.

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