Unspeakable Foolishness Called “Democracy”

Democracy in the widest sense of the word includes any system of government by which the people decide things. A republic is simply indirect democracy. The result of making it indirect is to slightly slow the degradation inherent in the choice to let every citizen — or “stakeholder” — have a voice, and creates a much larger and more persistent ruling class separate from the people.

The very act of pretending the people have an interest and stake in things means the primary form of criminal behavior will be based on deception. While tyrants may use deception to delay negative reaction until after the thing is done, the fundamental nature of democratic assumptions will guarantee deception from start to finish. The notion there is something sacred in the will of the people assumes a level of character in government people which simply does not exist. That we do have a few now and then makes them exceptional, noteworthy. Power and wealth are two edges of the same sword of oppression, and once a man gets hold of the handle, it’s more intoxicating than any drug.

History offers too many consistent examples to refute this. History shows there is no advantage to placing any power in the hands of the governed, because they will inevitably hand it over for all the wrong reasons to all the wrong people. It is an utterly silly basis for deciding anything which matters. All it does is beg for someone to become proficient at manipulating the masses. In our current condition in the West, we have been shaped over several generations to be particularly easy to manipulate. The difference between what we now have and the old “divine right of kings” is a greater share of society is dishonest by necessity.

Thus, to tinge the notion of “consent of the governed” with some mystical holiness is a lie in itself. It guarantees deception will be the fundamental essence of the entire society. Not the sort of “mind your own business” privacy of civility, but this is the outright denial of justly informed decision making. It has never been otherwise in human history. All that pretty talk about earning respect is just noise. The only way anyone can justly hold your respect is when you see their actions first hand, and the results of those actions. When that person can go away, out of your sight, and return with the bacon, you have no way of knowing if it’s even bacon. You have to be there for the slaughtering of the hog, the butchering, and help guard the smokehouse door as a member of a close community. Otherwise, you have no business trusting them, as they go away to become part of another community, one fundamentally based on serving self.

The biblical standard remains: No one has any business under God’s Heaven of governing you unless they are related by marriage or blood. Government is family, and family is government. Any other system is damned. What appears to the Western mind as the random results of birthright is actually protected and guided by God when Noah’s Laws are observed. That does not remove evil patriarchs, but limits the harm they do. Instead, we have the modern world which dissolves households and follows the enticing piping of Satan.

No Life on the Commandline

It was fun, and I really gave it a good run. I tried hard to make things work the way I needed them to work, but it was not to be. At least, not yet. I have found evidence there are some developers who believe in the console “desktop” but the support for the idea seems to come and go. The main problem is lock-in, of the sort where you have to accept the whole thing one particular way, or you don’t get anything at all, at least in relative terms. The lack of flexibility is what hurt my effort the most.

Those who have been following may have observed I tested the idea with openSUSE, Etch, Lenny, Squeeze, CentOS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and a couple more I probably forget. I’m not sure I can pronounce any as reasonably close. I was trying to avoid building everything from scratch. Way too many Linux distros offer console packages which depend on X. Given FreeBSD is much easier to use that way, with opulent documentation on covering almost everything it can do (console mouse options were missing a lot of information), I wasn’t really willing to go with Gentoo or something similar. I’m not as handy with configuration from scratch in Linux the way I am with FreeBSD; the latter is much simpler. With Linux, I usually need some config tools, and there was usually some lacking for console operations.

The one reason I don’t go back to DOS is I am too thoroughly spoiled on the high resolution offered elsewhere. Besides, my laptop does not scale at all. If the display is 80×25 characters, it’s the same size characters as for any other resolution, just less screen space being used. I would not consider any form of Windows.

Yes, it was fun, and I learned a lot, but I am behind on the other work I have to do. I consider it a lost cause for me, because I lack the expertise to make my own. So I’m running Debian Etch again, and I’m not interested in testing any more until someone takes a notion to produce something closer to my interests.

FreeBSD: Busted

I’m posting this from a borrowed Windows machine. FreeBSD was a bust. I got the whole thing optimized and ready to rock-n-roll, but most of the ports I needed were broken. That is, they refused to build, or did crazy things like looping and building the same dependency over and over. I couldn’t build MC, Vim, and some others refused to build without X dependencies. I gave up.

I’m beginning to wonder if anybody in Linux or BSD remembers the concept of “console only.” The projects are few, and most of those are aimed at server use. Is there nobody running Linux on the console only any more?

*sigh* I’m going to try Ubuntu Server. Maybe — just maybe — I can eventually find something usable. It used to be so easy to by-pass X and just get a good system. Now I know how it feels for blind users who are forced to struggle with such poor support.

Squeeze Too Dependent on X

I’m finding I can’t even install Groff without X.

I was willing to learn how to mark up in troff so I could print a few things now and then, but I can’t get the basic Groff package without heavy X dependencies. I suppose I could build it from source, but with that much work invovled, it would be simpler to start with scratch running some other OS.

Phooey. So close, and yet so far.

Console Keyboard: No Help

After reading countless webpages, manpages, and everything I could find, I realize it’s pointless to try to fix the Debian console keymap files.

In the first place, Debian places in the keymaps tons of useless keystrokes no human could possibly make.

In the second place, there is no simple guide to making a corrected keymaps file. It’s all very obtuse, or the simple stuff is utterly missing the parts I need. Nobody has bothered to translate this for common users who can’t write code. Lots and lots of explanation, but nothing most people can use.

Third, it appears Debian folks make sure, even if you do figure out, you won’t be allowed to load your customized keymap. At least, that’s how I understand it. There’s an MD5 hash which must perfectly match the real file and the information in the updates, or it will overwrite your mods.

I’m sure there are good reasons for all this, but I’m not happy with it. At any rate, it leaves me concluding nobody at Debian expected any users to simply use the console as the desktop. They’ve made it difficult in lots of little ways.

Should a sympathetic reader be passing by, I’m trying to add CTRL+Right, CTRL+Left, CTRL+Home and CTRL+End, so that I can use those key combinations in at least two different console applications. I even know what string should be transmitted, but I have no idea how to past that into a keymap Squeeze will allow me to use.

Sigh.

Console Life: Adjustments

This is not about what you should do if you run the console, but what I have experience with Squeeze on my Inspiron 4100 laptop.

I tested the Radeon Framebuffer (“radeonfb”). While it does work, it’s not quite right. There are some odd changes in the default behavior of anything which actually calls on the fbdev to display. It also slowed down a few things. So I’m staying with the default VESA/VGA driver. I also found out Splashy does some odd things, so I had to uninstall. For example, if you set “splash” in your boot options, it will grab the console and wait for X — which never comes, so the splash just sits there blocking all console use. I suppose there are ways to fix that, but I don’t care to dig into obscure configuration parameters, or having to rebuild it from source. It’s not worth it to me.

There are some default keystroke combinations missing from the keyboard config for the console. I can’t combine, say CTRL+RIGHT. I know enough to find out where that’s turned off, but the instructions are a bit too techy, so I’m having to proceed slowly before I’ll understand how to change that. I’m sure there are good reasons for crippling keystrokes which are standard with X, but I’m struggling to fix it to suit me. Once I succeed, I will probably write a very simplified HOWTO for others.

For example, I never realized most framebuffer apps would be broken for the user account until I fixed the permissions. You see, Links2 with the graphical display, along with fbi and fbgs require full console permissions, and those are denied by default. So I had to find out where the permissions files were located and modify them. In this case, it’s: /lib/udev/rules.d/91-permissions.rules. That file had to be modified at line 59:

KERNEL=="tty[0-9]*",       GROUP="root"

to

KERNEL=="tty[0-9]*",    MODE="0666"   GROUP="root"

After reboot, my user account had normal access to the framebuffer.

The most important thing is simply getting used to all the favorite websites viewed another way. Mostly I use Elinks because of the JScript and mouse handling. On the other hand, I have to remember that and MC both require holding down the SHIFT key to copy and paste. Getting past that is simple, but the one thing which still surprises me is how much time I save not having to deal with a graphical display. While some actions do take a few extra steps, I end up getting through with most of my standard Net doings much quicker this way.

I’m still exploring what I’ve gotten myself into, but so far, there’s no turning back.

Clarity: Market versus Government

We need a little clarity here. At places like LewRockwell.com, you’ll find the underlying theme, often bluntly stated, of preferring the Free Market over the State.

For those of us who serve Christ, the eternal viewpoint is the Market and the State are competitors, not enemies. If you grant all power to the State, you have a nightmare world of oppression. But if you grant all power to the Market, you will still have a nightmare world of oppression. The libertarian worship of human freedom is based on the Enlightenment assumption man is essentially a good moral agent. It won’t matter what they say to the contrary, this is the undeniable philosophical assumption on which they build all their theory.

Man is fallen. Allow the market to rule and you will have oppression by commercial government-in-effect. Everything will be slanted in favor of the merchant’s profit. You can talk all you want about fair and free competition, but without a big stick, you can’t begin to keep any businessman honest. If it has to do with any part of human behavior, there must be a restriction imposed by other humans. However fouled up that may be, it’s the facts. It’s the reason why God established the Covenant of Noah. Assuming a Free Market merchant will tend to be fair, simply because it’s in his own best interest, is too silly to chase very long. There has to be something of a risk, or he’ll quickly do only what makes him happy, regardless what it costs others. This remains true of the whole, regardless what may be true of individual specimens.

The Laws of God assume the only proper and just restraint on sin is Himself working through His chosen instrument, the patriarchal extended family setting. For all the evil seen in that by Western Civilization, everything else so far has been worse. The mere notion we can reach an earthly Nirvana if we just keep studying and tweaking the system is one of Satan’s favorite lies. What no one wants to admit is the ultimate trend of the Free Market is simply the State with another name. If all are restrained under the one head authorized by God — the patriarch — neither the State nor the Market will tyrannize the people. There might still be tyranny, but God has already explained how that is limited. It’s just that no one wants to study up on it and find out how it works when His Word is obeyed.

Life on the Console: Debian Squeeze

Perhaps you can come up with your own reasons for it, but running Linux on the console only is certainly worth the effort. For example, a lot of really fine hardware still runs fine, but painfully slow if you run any recent version of the X-server. In my case, it’s simply a matter of comfort and sanity. No one has to tell me I’m way out on the fringe of things, but I really don’t care for the way X and window managers work. I could say that about most GUIs I’ve tried on other operating systems, but that’s surely due in part to my use solely of DOS during my first five years of computer experience. While I hated the limitations of the 80×25 screen, everything else about it was quite comfortable for me from the user perspective. If the number of discussions on Usenet and various forums are any indication, I’m not alone in wishing more was offered for the Linux console.

Over the years, I’ve been keeping an eye on this, and tested the possibilities from time to time. That includes forays into BSD Land, but the framebuffer is very unpopular there. Regardless of what’s possible, what I need for my own use isn’t available without the framebuffer. A key element of promoting Open Source is freedom of choice. It has nothing to do with any inherent superiority from where I sit, but how closely it matches what I need. While specific needs do change, there has been an underlying collection of things I have wished for over the years. Recently, things have come together, and gotten my attention, and I’ve made the move.

For my purposes, this means running Debian Testing (“Squeeze”) on my Dell Inspiron 4100. Relevant specs are:

• 1Ghz P3
• Radeon M6 w/32MB VRAM
• half-GB RAM
• 20GB hard drive, DVD/CDR

You can find the official Debian installation guide here. Having tested a few of the daily build ISOs for Squeeze, I found I couldn’t get one that worked consistently, so I opted for installing Lenny and running an upgrade. In essence, it meant catching TaskSel, un-checking the “Desktop” option, and keeping the Base System and Laptop. Once the system was up and running, I used Nano to change all the references in my /etc/apt/sources.list from “lenny” to “squeeze”. I also had to take out references to the Volatile Repository. Then I ran apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade. Once that was working, I added the “contrib” and “non-free” plus the Debian-Multimedia repository and ran apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.

By no means do I claim to be a geek. I’m not even a geek journalist, just a writer with a geeky bent. I’m much better with people than with computers, so my primary computer-related work has been helping ordinary people get along with their computers. For me, computers exist to serve people’s needs, and are otherwise not very important. I frequently advise people, if they can live without a computer, not to get one. Most of my computer use time is in research and writing. Most of what I write is about religion and social sciences, and only a little about computers and other technology. So I tend to learn only so much as I know I’ll use, and secondarily about things I find it useful to teach others. You need not be a genuine computer geek to make use of what follows.

One of the first things is getting the console set up. For my laptop, the native resolution is 1400×1050. To get all of that, I had to edit my /boot/grub/menu.lst at the line which begins with # defoptions and add vga=834. Then, I added the console-setup package, which pulled in the marvelous Terminus console font. Once installed, you’ll need to run this command:

dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

Accept the defaults, keep the UTF-8 encoding, but choose Terminus as the font, using size 16. Reboot and everything should be nice, with sharply defined text filling the screen out to the edges. I also personalize my login prompts. For my user account, I like cyan and yellow, with some indicator of where I am in the file system. You can learn more about that here. Here is what I have posted at the bottom of my ~/.bashrc:

export PS1="\[33[0;36m\]\u@\h\[33[0m\]\w\[33[1;33m\]>\[33[0m\] "

Next, be sure you install GPM (apt-get install gpm) if you intend to use the mouse at all on the console. Apt will set it up for you automatically. If you are using only a two-button mouse/touchpad, you’ll need to run dpkg-reconfigure gpm, accepting all the defaults on each page, but on the last option type in “-2″ so you can use your right-click to paste.

A primary activity is web browsing. I typically use these three for different purposes: Elinks, Links2 and Lynx-Current. Installing Lynx and Links2 as-is works fine for my needs: apt-get install lynx-cur links2 (accept the proposed dependencies by hitting “y”). However, I don’t care for the Debian defaults in Elinks, and the latest unstable release is actually significantly better. So after fetching the source for the unstable pre-release, I waded through the various standard dependencies (listed here) to see what I really needed. For example, I have no use for Lua, FSP, IDN, and a few others. However, I understand all too well about Spidermonkey, because way too many sites I use require a certain minimum of JScript, and Elinks is the only browser I’ve tried which implements the minimum. Even then, I’m locked out of a few places I don’t really have to use, such as Yahoo Mail. Aside from the “build-essential” package, I prefer OpenSSL over TLS (libssl-dev), and really wanted the mouse to work (libgpm-dev), and added in zlib1g-dev, libbz2-dev, libexpat1-dev, libkrb5-dev, along with whatever dependencies these brought. I configured it with this line:

./configure --enable-cgi --enable-gopher --enable-exmode --enable-html-highlight

When running Elinks, I typically prefer to select the black background as default (Setup > Options manager > Document > Default color settings > Background color = black, and Default color settings > Use document-specified colors = 1). The trick came in blogging. This applies to Blogger, WordPress and MyOpera. In Elinks, each of them is generally usable with varying levels of difficulty, but once you get past orienting yourself to the odd display, you find yourself using a pretty small block for text entry. Because the latest Elinks allows opening an external editor in all the tabs, I had to hunt down an editor which allowed soft-wrapping on the console. To my knowledge, only Vim does this right. The default method of passing off to an external editor is entering the text box, hitting enter to activate it, then hitting F4. I configured Elinks to use Vim by default (Options manager > Document > Browsing > Forms > External editor = vim).

Since I don’t write code, I really have no other use for Vim. I’m task oriented, learning only what I know I’ll use. I use it only for typing soft-wrapped text in the places where Elinks offers a text input. That I can have spell check on-the-fly is a bouns. So my .vimrc has two lines, so far:

set spell
set wrap linebreak textwidth=0

This, of course, requires you boost the default installed vim-tiny by apt-get install vim-nox. Otherwise, the spell check won’t work, and the soft-wrap will break in the middle of words. The other trick is being patient with the odd cursor movements which come with soft-wrap, since each “paragraph” is treated as a single line, but with a visual-only wrapping. Of course, you can always use this Vim setup to write your longer posts beforehand, then when you get to that part of your blogging and hit F4, you can tell Vim to pull in that prepared file by, first typing :r /path/to/file and then hit ENTER. After that, you can have the file inserted in the text box by saving and closing Vim (:wq).

Another primary activity is email. I have five accounts I can use with any regular mail client. Mutt is almost as bad as Vim for complexity and learning curve. My old favorite Pine has now become Alpine, and it’s capable of running multiple account, all with POP and SMTP actions. However, it requires a little extra work in the setup procedure. It would be hard for me to write up any better this excellent guide. However, Debian’s build of Alpine blocks the saving of passwords. Carp all you want about security, but after reading the explanation, I’m satisfied it’s secure enough to suit my needs. So I rebuilt it from source.

This time, instead of plowing through the list of dependencies, I simply ran apt-get build-dep alpine. When I tried that with Elinks, I got a ton of dependencies calling for major chunks of the X server system. For Alpine, that didn’t happen. So once I got the build dependencies, I pulled down the source package and built it manually. My configure statement looked like this:

./configure --with-local-password-cache-method --with-passfile=.alpinepwd

To get Alpine to save my passwords, I had to create the file first: touch ~/.alpinepwd. The only other item I recommend is Alpine users check out the color highlighting options (Setup > Kolor). On the console, you should stick with the “use-termdef” selection at the top of the form, since I know of no way to get the console to recognize 16 colors.

For most of my standard text editor activity, I use Joe. This permits me to create text files with all the formatting features I need for plain text. For HTML files, the syntax highlighting is very useful. I can report installing Mplayer without X (apt-get install mplayer-nogui) and the codecs package will allow watching videos on the console. I tested a MS-WAV file with “-vo fbdev” and it worked just fine. Sound will work if you fix a bug in the setup script. Sound and video aren’t really significant in my use, but I wanted to work it out for this article.

Finally, there are a couple of things I still wish to see in the future: a console word processor and a full-featured console browser. While the folks at Elinks are doing marvelous work, I have to wonder if there isn’t some way Firefox, WebKit, or one of their lighter versions can’t be ported to a console toolkit. I could care less if there is any hint of graphical rendering, as with Links2, or even pseudo-graphics (say libcaca), but the full range of JScript and so forth would really make a difference. Making it equally mouse-able on the console would be a major plus.

The word processor idea presents the paradox of having hundreds of supporters but no developers. I can’t count how often I’ve read or heard someone wishing for it, but nary a word from anyone among Open Source developers. I realize it’s quite a grand undertaking. However, even something like a clone of Lyx or TeXmacs would be a huge achievement. I’m guessing a major hold up is how to implement printing. For myself, even your basic character-based output would be enough for most purposes. I have no idea what’s involved in linking something like CUPS with a console-TUI word processor. However, anything at all would be much celebrated, even if only by a relatively small group. But if anyone wants a coordinator, PR and documentation writer, I’ll volunteer for those parts. I know for certain I can get the hosting for free. Why there seems to be not a single developer interested is something I can’t answer.

Welcome to the console. Unless things change dramatically, I’m here to stay.

When the Time Comes to Dump the Lackeys

So we now see yet another UK government memo indicting the Iraq War. Let’s back off a bit and take a broader perspective.

I have long contended there are many ruling powers wearing no official title under any current government. That should surprise no one. If nothing else, we say people have influence in governments without officially serving in government offices — lobbyists, to name a much-reviled example. It stands to reason high officials would have advisers not listed as employees, so why not imagine a level of lobbyist above the nation? We have no trouble realizing a certain class of bankers and financiers who have no loyalty to any government anywhere, but only to themselves, and with massive financial resources able to buy out whole countries. You don’t have to be a propeller head to believe in a global government conspiracy. Every government is a conspiracy, by definition — a conspiracy to hold political power, exclusive from others who want it. Just because they follow the rules to get that control doesn’t make it any less a group conspiring to gain power. We need not allow popular idiocy to flavor the word “conspiracy” with its own idiocy.

But to save time and pin it down in the larger moral sense, I refer to this global ruling conspiracy as “Babylon” — taking a cue from the Apostle John’s Revelation. What matters is not their identity, but the spiritual nature of what they want, their motives. Yes, they are evil, but so is the bully down the street. It needs more; we have to give them a label which helps us predict their future behavior. I contend casting these “real rulers” as Babylon serves that purpose.

So given this story about Bush and Blair conspiring to start a war without any proper justification — as gauged by any standard except that of Babylon itself — perhaps it’s useful to wonder why the story is coming out just now. Occam’s Razor is pretty handy if you recognize its limits. Seems to me it’s getting time to throw Bush under the bus. Perhaps he’s not going quietly enough off into obscurity, or has angered Babylon in some way, or maybe he’s just no longer earning his keep. For one reason or another, Babylon finds it useful to dump him. Obviously, he’s not a member of Babylon itself.

Surely we can imagine other useful outcomes from their perspective. If Babylon can discredit selected portions of the US governing class, it will permit them to manipulate things a little closer to a more direct rule. I have no doubt Obama is the man who would willingly turn our nation over to a regional or global governing authority. John warned us that was the whole point of it all.

On the Console Again: Debian Squeeze

After making provisions on another system for my responsibilities to others, I have studied again the possibilities of moving my laptop back to a pure console Linux installation. I waded through some discussions over FreeBSD, NetBSD, Gentoo, and a few others I would never consider. I slap myself for not thinking of it before, but I found Squeeze had much of what I thought I was hunting.

What I was hunting was something which would support easy compilation of Apline 2.0 with my personal tweaks, keep the full mousing capabilities on the console, and allow me to setup sound without having to install a bunch of X dependencies. Squeeze passed those tests.

After burning the netinstaller image, I had several failures, either because the ISO image was borked, the burn was borked, or the installer had errors. At any rate, I gave up and tried the install-upgrade method via Lenny. With minimal installation in place — minus X — I changed my sources.lst to read “squeeze” in place of the references to “lenny.” Then the usual apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade. This worked well enough.

The only trouble I ran into was the sound configuration. Turns out there’s a bug in the files which come in the alsa-utils package. Since the old alsaconf is gone, one runs alsactl init and waits for a response indicating it figured out what card you have. However, I was getting errors about the default file on line 52. Digging around a bit on Google produced a bug fix from the Fedora Community. Open /usr/share/alsa/init/default and change a couple of things:

Line 49:

CTL{name}="Headphone Playback Volume",PROGRAM=="__ctl_search",GOTO="headphone0_end"

becomes

CTL{name}="Headphone Playback Volume",PROGRAM!="__ctl_search",GOTO="headphone0_end"

(replacing the equal sign after “PROGRAM” with an exclamation mark) and

CTL{name}="Synth Playback Volume",,PROGRAM=="__ctl_search", \

becomes

CTL{name}="Synth Playback Volume",PROGRAM=="__ctl_search", \

(removing the double comma near the middle)

Then it was:

/etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

and we have sound. That gave me the confidence to pull in mplayer-nogui from Debian Multimedia’s repository. The only thing puzzling me is why I have to have font stuff for a console app, but I let it pass and installed it all.

Testing an MP3 file with Mplayer on the command line worked very nicely. So we are off and running again.