Pragmatism and Opting Out of Apocalypse

Just because you are opting out of the Apocalypse, it doesn’t mean there are no practical measures you can take to prepare.

Continuing the theme of the last two posts, I wanted to tie up the loose ends hanging between them. On the one hand, I admit there can be a lot of silliness about thinking we can reasonably estimate this or that means of preparation. Too many things the Preppers are doing assumes too much, if you ask me. There are quite a few sites trying to help people obtain things which can help see you through most disasters, but I don’t think too many of them offer useful advice which could have prepared you for the likes of the tornadoes which ripped through the Southeast, nor the floods in the Northeast of the US. What happens when something sweeps away all your stuff, all your specially selected weapons, freeze dried food packs and so forth? And what’s to keep some heavily armed government or private raiders from simply confiscating your cache?

The whole point in ruminating about computers and operating systems was the sarcasm, marking how silly people can be about such things. Yesterday’s post was more directly honest about bigger things than computers, guns and food stocks. If you think your salvation is in your Prepper Cache, I hope you have everything ready now, because time is about gone. Most of those Prepper sites are trying to make a buck off your fears. Yes, I reaffirm it will be very tough the world over, because the bankers who run the global economy are not our friends. They’ve been working on this for a couple of centuries, and we are all way behind the curve. Their moment, whatever it amounts to, is upon us. Sure, do what you think you can, but don’t halt your life.

That is, unless something in what I’m writing serves to wake up the other part of you. Otherwise, this is nothing more than asking you once again to reevaluate over this weekend, with fresh destruction and disasters in our minds, just what it was you should have been doing all along. When that awful day arrives for you, whatever it means, I’m hoping it finds you in the big middle of doing what you really know is the most important thing you could ever do. In terms of the New Testament, “Let us be found faithful.”

It means everything in this whole universe, this plane of existence, is just a tool, a means to things that really matter. If you can see it, touch it, and/or give it a name, it’s not really all that important. Honestly, if you have young children at home still, the most important thing you can do for them is not fearfully guard their bodies and their futures, as if there was really that much you could do. Rather, the one thing you can do to secure what future they may have is to demonstrate to them what really matters most is how we draw the hearts and minds of our fellow humans away from this awful plane of existence.

Let’s put it bluntly: This life as we know it does not matter. Yes, what you do matters, but only in the sense of what it says about things beyond this. If you have opted out of this broken and doomed world, then opting out of the Apocalypse is just one more expression of that.

Should the state under whose jurisdiction you reside decide to take your kids, only death can prevent that. So far as I know, not a single Western nation does not already operate under the assumption you, as the natural parent of those kids, are merely the “custodial parent.” You may well be able to flee, or even stand off some armed assault meant to enforce a confiscation, but the legalities don’t change. I still believe and teach it is proper, that it is within the justice of God Almighty as revealed by Christ, if you decided to use violent force to defend your parental rights — but I don’t think it will do much more than create a brief delay.

The same could be said of your own life, and all the things you own and can do. Until you truly grasp just how fleeting is everything most people think really matters in this world, you can’t get your head into the right place for thinking beyond either minor nor major changes in your world. Your Facebook page, nor my blogs, are anything more than a passing means to an end.

Yes, I have my computers ready for what I can guess is coming down the road at me. For the record, I am happy for now with the way Scientific Linux works on my laptop, and the way Ubuntu 10.04 works on my desktop, and how Windows 7 works on my wife’s computer. I have some hand tools because I figure power tools will be hard to operate sometime in the near future as electricity prices continue to rise. I’m not relying too awfully much on my cellphone because I figure I’ll be lucky to afford a landline.

I don’t expect my VA pension to be there that much longer. I still don’t know how I would replace what it buys for me, nor how we might survive if the local government can’t afford to pay my wife to work in the local high school cafeteria. And on and on… There is only so much I can do before it’s just running against the wind. What really matters is I know what I have to be ready to do in general terms, because I know I am committed to something much, much bigger than my pitiful existence. If my choices, the really big, long-term commitments, mean dying tomorrow in some senseless gesture as most people judge things, I am not about to change course simply to avoid that.

I’ve already opted out. How about you?

Apocalypse Soon; Opt Out Now

We can’t prevent the coming troubles, but we can prevent ourselves from panicking.

Yesterday’s post was partially in jest. Frankly, my mind from day to day might drift on the subject of which operating system I would prefer and why. It’s entirely contextual, and the factors are more numerous than even I would like to admit. My personal perspective is in flux, and I am only guessing why I even bother with computers in the first place, and what seems important today may change before the lunch time. The reason I chose that as the ostensible topic was to show how it really doesn’t matter that much. What matters is we really are in trouble, and it won’t be fun.

That is, it won’t be fun unless we are prepared for it. A part of me realizes this will be one of the most entertaining moments in human history, but only for those capable of stepping outside the moment. We know we won’t be able to disassociate ourselves totally from the empty stomach and cold bodies resulting from exposure to the elements, if it comes to that. And it very well could. But knowing we face that as some probability for our future days need not cause panic. We know a vast majority of those we encounter daily will panic, indeed, and it will surely flavor our existence, and we need to understand some of what causes all this misery and sudden disruption. If it is possible to grasp some of the markers which indicate the flavor of our future suffering, we are responsible for trying to grasp them.

This assumes you share somewhat my underlying vision; why else would you bother reading this stuff? I get a lot of hits on this blog which point to people seeking practical answers to computer annoyances. But I’ve said repeatedly my self-image is not wrapped up in a high blogging profile, but in making life better for others in this awful world. Something about this expression of caring for your suffering, of trying to clarify things which puzzle, is meant to point to something far more difficult to say in human language, but far more important than all the piddly stuff I’m trying to clarify. I can’t give you Truth, but I honestly believe that Truth demands I write certain things which might serve to indicate something about the Truth. If you manage to get closer to that Truth, my job is done, my purpose is served.

All I have to go on is the paltry few comments and the statistical feedback WordPress offers here. But without that, I still have this burning desire to express myself. Welcome to my private bubble of insanity. I’m going to babble along with or without your eyes. Today’s babble is aiming to clarify, to point out some connections you might not have noticed.

The primary means of our current malaise is economic in nature. That’s because the bad guys who are mashing us into the dirt are primarily interested in their own economic advantage. They want control of their environment, and the current understanding of that control means mostly economic control. Whether they are wise enough to understand the symbiosis of economics — that we have to receive our share or they won’t have anything — is not the problem. It’s more the problem of how much they believe our share ought to be. Right now, it appears they estimate we should have far less than we have been enjoying in recent history. So they are working to take from us a significant portion of what we have had.

A major element in transferring all that wealth was deceiving us. Would we just voluntarily go along with it? No, they had to make us believe we still had our growing wealth, even as they were slipping more and more of it into their own stash. Propaganda is an ancient game, going back to the Fall itself. My fingers tickle the keys on a laptop which came into my possession fundamentally because we all believed sufficiently in the Information Age and the economic value of handling digital data. With the power of such belief, we were ready to allow our government to give tax breaks to major corporations for moving all the real jobs they could pry loose from our hands to other countries where folks would do those jobs for a lesser share of the income stream generated by what they produced. So nowadays we shuffle lots of electrons, but don’t produce more than a tiny slender minority of what we actually consume in material goods. And we all somehow believed we were richer. Meanwhile, the stuff we actually have in our hands, which our own laws secretly insist we don’t really own, is mostly junk, but we still have this lingering impression we are wealthy compared to other nations.

In fact, the laws of our nation actually consider each of as human beings the property of someone else. There are people near you today who have the full legal authority to dispose of your very flesh as they see fit, and are wholly unaccountable to you on the matter. The only limits are those which prevent them acting accordingly at any given moment — whether they can find you, can touch your person, or exert some means of compelling you to present yourself to their choices for you. A major element in all this is whether you feel constrained to accept all the underlying assumptions by going along with the system.

A great deal of this depends on your understanding of the system. That you go along with it at any given moment is not the point, but how you understand it. And if you aren’t American and aren’t presently under American jurisdiction only means you have your own complications, and they probably aren’t all the different at some fundamental level. The whole mess is so tightly strung together across legal jurisdictions, and just about everybody will probably be suffering to some degree in the near future.

At some point, conditions will permit The Powers That Be (TPTB) to stop pretending. Along the way, they’ll pretend less and less. Personally, I think things will be dramatically and painfully different before my next birthday — 18 September. I pray I’m wrong. On the other hand, I am utterly certain it is coming, and it is God’s own plan in action, and nobody on this earth really knows what it will be like. Part of my estimation is a matter of economic numbers I’m not quite sure I really grasp. What I do grasp is things like the Dow Jones Industrial Index is running off false liquidity. That fancy jargon means a bunch of debt is being used as money by people who won’t have to pay when the debt comes due. But they get to use it as their own because that’s how the system works. That debt is a numerical representation of our future freedom to choose, which is being sold cheaply — AKA slavery.

I’ll do my best to avoid popular jargon because it might cause someone to miss the real point here. This whole thing assumes you and I, and most other humans on the planet, will accept certain assumptions about the necessity of participating in the system. Had Eve not swallowed the unspoken assumptions of Satan’s lies, we’d still be in the Garden. Whatever you want to make of the Flaming Sword at the entrance to the Garden, the way back means we stop swallowing those lies. At some point, some level of your personal awareness, you need to see the disconnect between what-seems-to-be and what-really-is for yourself. You may well go on participating simply because that’s the best answer to certain fundamental questions of your existence, but by no means should you simply keep believing it’s the whole story.

Almost everyone has the capacity to see through the lies; almost no one will bother. The first lie they buy is the necessity of this human plane of existence, as if there is nothing else. I can’t fix that for them, nor for you. I can only assert it’s not so. Based on that firm conviction, I find myself much more comfortable questioning a lot of assumptions common to the human condition.

A great many governments today are serving a much higher ruling regime. I call them the Illuminati because most folks have a useful idea that means a governing class of people we seldom see in public positions. These Illuminati may not show their faces any more than in the past, but their policies will become more directly enforced, including to the point of more forcefully keeping their servants in government positions in line. An awful lot of people who really think they are in charge are in for a rude awakening. Too bad you can’t ask Saddam Hussein what that feels like, but his associate Moamar Gaddafi is too busy for interviews right now.

Because of the vagaries of human decision making, and the vast numbers involved, and a raft of other factors hard to list without writing a book, we should expect this whole shift to continue being as sloppy as it is right now. Regime change in the Middle East is not a precise operation, and the Illuminati didn’t expect any better. If we get wrapped up in all the details, or in silly things like Obama’s birth certificate, we’ll let slip the really important details of where this is all headed. I don’t harbor any particular animosity towards Prince William and his new bride, but that’s just a side show. While I applaud personally his choice to wear the red tunic of his highest military rank, and the announced reason for this choice, I doubt his more critical choices as Heir Apparent will make that much difference in the long run. He’s a pawn, too, and the game is too big and complicated for me to care much when and how he’ll be played.

The game itself is about control exercised via our cooperation. If you believe in any part of the system as it now exists, you are a prisoner, a slave. Whatever bad stuff is coming will hurt you more than is necessary, more than is actually inherent in the event itself. I’ve written plenty about what it means to opt out of the system, but the point here is you would have to choose to remain shackled each step of the way. Question the whole thing and you’ll be half-way there; you’ll be in a better position to bear whatever misery is coming.

Your choices are limited enough by the mere fact of living on a fallen plane of existence. Don’t make it any worse by accepting the lies which lead you to believe there is no other plane. We are facing some seriously painful days very soon, but you need not surrender to the pain. Apocalypse is your opportunity to learn the boundaries of this plane, and to explore freedom beyond those boundaries.

Personal Computing in the Apocalypse

As if having a computer would matter when all Hell is breaking loose…

So I claim to be a prophet of God, but that does not guarantee I can answer your questions about tomorrow. God only tells me what He wants to me to say, and most of that has to do with notifying folks of things they should already know about His requirements. You want a predictive prophecy? Here goes: If we go to war in the lands of Ancient Persia (currently “Iran”), the Lord Himself will scatter the dead bodies of our troops across the landscape. So numerous and dense will they be, the Iranians will beg us to send folks to gather, or at least bury in place, their remains. Now, keep in mind: Hebrew Scripture was more about impressions than clinical descriptions. The intent was to make you aware of God’s wishes regarding a particular choice, so I counsel you to understand the point here is we got no business sending US troops to war in Iran. Naturally, that goes for just about all the other places we got troops, but I think God would say Iran is the last straw, so to speak.

So it’s not a matter of prophetic insight when I suggest we are heading for something which will taste like the Apocalypse. If you didn’t already know our economy is headed for a major crash, you wouldn’t be the kind of person who would read my blog. So when it comes to timing and specifics, or even broad hyperbole, about the fall of the United States, all I can do is affirm we deserve it because the Bible says so. Okay, one minor qualification: It is a word from God when I tell you political resistance to the current drift of US government into naked tyranny is pointless. That is, we are getting the government we deserve, and it is frankly a coup d’état from what we once had. The take-over is God’s wrath at work on our national sins. You should resist in the sense of doing what’s right regardless of what any government demands, but preparing to fight via political resistance of any sort — whether armed revolt, pacifist marches, or monkey-wrenching and sabotage — is not favored by God. So we are headed for tough times, and the saints of God will tribulate.

Given I spend so much time with computers, mine and other folks’ computers, what am I going to do? God hasn’t told me anything specific about that. I should think that indicates it’s really not important in His plans for me. But I do have some general expectations and plans which are derived from the things I know God does require of me.

Linux for me is a failure when it comes to the graphical interface. Over the past few years, the drivers have gotten steadily worse for the particular set of things I do with a computer. Given I read so very much about Linux in particular, and computer technology in general, and the vast number of different operating systems I have tested on a very wide array of hardware, I find I am in a position to decide it’s utterly pointless. Whatever it is the developers are planning, it’s not going to help me at all. I realized long ago there was nothing I could to make it better, and the developers could care less what I want. So for as long as I have use for a graphical interface, on my current hardware that means Windows.

It may come to the point graphical computing is pointless itself. For example, there may be some sort of doomsday virus, or some other general vulnerability which makes it entirely too risky to use Windows. Right now, I’m not aware of such an issue. But I would hardly be surprised if it reared its ugly head any day now.

When it happens, that will signal a radical change in my computing needs. From that moment, for as long as computers are still useful to me, I won’t be using Windows. But I won’t be using the Linux GUI, either. When things get that ugly, I’ll be needing the very most basic computer functions, and a GUI won’t matter. So I’ll most likely go back to something like Squeeze on the console. Yes, you can still watch your videos by using something like Mplayer compiled without the X dependencies. I have used it to watch Youtube videos, after downloading them with Cclive. Of course, should such a dramatic change come to the computing landscape, I have to wonder if there will be a Youtube when things get that crazy. I suspect the window of opportunity for using a computer for much of anything will be short, and the Internet as we know it will be long gone at that point.

So it’s not as if I hate Linux, just the X server and all that goes with it. Whatever good it may offer, it amounts to nothing for me, and it’s only getting worse. Nor do I love Windows, and certainly not Mac. I regard Apple as even more anti-consumer than Microsoft. There are literally hundreds of other fine projects out there, and I still think highly of Haiku-OS (formerly, BeOS) and Syllable. There’s always ReactOS, doing Windows right. But I doubt any of them will be really ready for general computer use before the Computer Apocalypse arrives. No, not a prophetic insight, just my current guess.

Come on; you needed something stupid to make you laugh today, right?

On Human Insignificance

The only reason I bother having my say is because my sense of God’s calling requires it of me.

Indeed, I would not have bothered starting this blog if I didn’t believe God required it of me. My own amusement is not sufficient grounds for a brain spew in public. In the sense I put my thoughts in a digital format alone makes them public, never mind posting those digits in an unlocked blog. Among bloggers I regard myself a nobody. Don’t read this stuff because I wrote it; read it because it calls to you in some way. I will surely fail you, as I daily fail myself. But when God speaks in my soul, I cannot be silent, regardless of any actual ability to let that voice out in any coherent fashion.

People much more intelligent and talented than I, with a much larger and more ardent following, even to the point of making money with their writing, would naturally provoke nobodies like me. They sell books and are invited to participate in the on-going public forum of opinion where they get even more attention to their ideas, and perhaps their person. If they didn’t provoke others, it would be hard to sell those books. The manipulation of advertising works only so well. I am provoked, and something in me will not let it rest. Since those who have offered the provocation would never take me seriously (as best I can gauge from having tried to get their attention in the past), I won’t clutter their blog with my dissent. No, I’m not trying to insult him, but the man himself admits to arrogance. Whether it’s justified is at least one thread of what constitutes his Internet persona, but I freely admit there is no reason he and his Dread Ilk ought to pay attention to me.

Still, I am provoked, and what I take as the voice of my God is rattling my cage. That voice says God is not impressed with Vox’s logic on the matter. Not that I support Piper, either, but that’s because both he and Vox presume too much about understanding God. I can sum it up: God cannot be understood, nor explained, from the grounds of Aristotelian logic. As I assert virtually every day of my life, Aristotle rejected the most critical element in discussing God, that being a rejection of divine revelation — at least, revelation in the sense of what God’s Word offers. If you drag Aristotle to the Bible, you should not expect to get a reliable, or even useful, answer from him. Vox cannot deny giving Aristotelian epistemology supremacy in his analysis.

The question of God’s nature, and how evil is or isn’t under control in this world is wholly beyond the capabilities of Aristotle. We can make statements which appear propositional, but they cannot be handled as mere propositions. What we say of God and the current reality of our fallen world can only ever approximate what God Himself might say, and then only when we realize His statements are necessarily contextual. In one place, we can say God is always Master of all things, but in another place we must say evil rules the world. That the two are mutually exclusive is simply a reminder of our limits, and frankly has no bearing on the matter. God can know and control all things far in advance of our historical experience under the Arch of Time without necessarily suffering schizophrenia, since He remains beyond any analysis from our limited perspective. It’s not supposed to make sense to us if we limit ourselves to Aristotelian logic.

Yes, I disagree with Piper, too. That’s more a matter of his pretense of clinging to Aristotle, too. The whole debate between Calvinists broadly, and Westminster Accords specifically, versus the Arminians and other historically significant theological perspectives all boils down to the inherent failure of Aristotelian epistemology in the first place. Both camps are trying to satisfy the presumption of Classical Western respectability, which is inherently Aristotelian. Aristotle is, in that sense, the ultimate symbol of human arrogance and pride in believing the fallen human mind is capable of accurately assessing everything worth knowing, and assessing whether anything is worthy of knowing, or even constitutes knowing at all (which is the subject of that fancy word “epistemology”).

The Bible asserts both God’s mastery and the presence of evil in the world. The Bible asserts God’s perfect and complete foreknowledge, His perfect control in every detail in advance of its historical occurrence, and yet our culpability in making choices contrary to His stated desires, and a lot of other self-contradictory things. It doesn’t bother me that they are mutually exclusive because I don’t feel bound by Aristotelian logic. Thus, any discussion of “omniderigence” strikes me as missing the point before getting started.

The human intellect is fallen, too. The boundaries of our best sense of knowing will forever come up short of God’s truth. Our statements about God and other things supernatural (or whatever other term you choose in place of that) are always weak hands seeking to grapple with the universe. God’s truth cannot be reduced to words, much less human understanding. All we can ever really know is what God requires of each of us individually within a specific context, and at that we maintain a healthy self-doubt. Yes, you can easily become too wishy-washy, but even that is beyond our proper discernment. All I really need to know about myself in the context of other professing Christians is whether I am obliged to work with them on any particular project, and would by no means suggest anything I can say is a matter applicable to any other person.

Do you find my ramblings useful? Bless the Lord and pray for me. Do you have questions? Ask; I may be able offer a useful clarification. Did I leave you confused? Stop trying to understand God with your intellect; it can’t do it. All its good for is organizing your response to His Spirit, not deciding whether something is good, right or true. Such evaluation takes place in the spirit, which itself depends entirely on the hand of God Himself to awaken. The intellect is a separate faculty from the spirit. What I have to share cannot be taught to the mind, only caught by the spirit. I can’t even explain how it works. This whole business of communication between humans is dicey at best with universally fallen human intellect, but when we try to discuss God, we cannot make the mistake of taking ourselves too seriously.

Profundity in Short Supply

I’m out of gas.

The spring allergy season has struck and stuck. Being ill makes me depressed, and depression makes me ill. So my ADD flares up and I can’t keep focused on much of anything that matters. At least I know what to do when I’m bored and depressed. Those two are close friends and confidants from way back. They were joined not so long ago by Arthur (last name is Itis).

Okay, sick humor. If I took myself seriously, you wouldn’t. As it is, the best you can get from me today is a late post about why I have nothing to post.

Are you still reading this? God bless you.

I haven’t lost sight of what really matters to me. Somewhere over the horizon from me is yet one last adventure. I have no idea what it is, only that it is. Days like this help me to reduce the baggage, to challenge and shake loose a lot of things which aren’t likely to survive the adventure. More than anything, I fear this all signals something rather challenging and trying for a lot of folks.

I’m pretty comfortable with my own suffering, but I really hate watching others go through it. Everything I write is aimed at reducing suffering for my readers and the lives they touch in turn.

Time and Redemption: Crimes Against Heaven

Our modern American justice system is a rank offense to God.

I’ve been privileged to see variations of justice up close and personal. On the one hand, I’ve had a fair selection of relatives who passed through the system. On the other hand, I and others in my family have worked in the enforcement industry. There is a vast substantial disconnect between God’s Covenant of Social Order (AKA Noah) and the fundamental assumptions of what we do today, particularly in America.

The purpose of God in the Law of Noah was redemptive. It was His provision for making the most of a bad situation. We are fallen; nothing we do can fix that. But we can salvage from this situation an opportunity to reach for a better place, an escape of sorts, by striving for another level of existence. You can’t actually have it without leaving this one, but you can surely be made aware of it, and initiate the process of making your home there in God’s good favor. Embracing the final revelation of His Son includes embracing the basic message of Noah — there is a thing called “sin” and you have to embrace God’s revealed judgment against it. Only then can you comprehend the mission of the Son.

The path to that reaching and striving is for us today through Noah. The fundamental statement of Noah in Scripture is symbolic; the Hebrew literary tradition which includes the Covenant of Noah presumes a wealth of information no longer easily accessed. It also assumes an intellectual climate our Western Civilization rejects, parodies and generally derides as primitive and dangerous. No surprise, then, to note the whole of Western Civilization stands condemned by God, because to be Western is to reject God’s revelation.

A particularly Western flaw is the way in which public order and the system of justice so utterly misses the point. Frankly, the whole thing is punitive, hateful and arrogant, versus the system God designed to be redemptive. God intended we should reclaim from the wreck and wrack of the Fall what He deemed salvageable. He remains the ultimate expert in the matter as Creator of all things. His limits were most thoroughly rooted in the reality of things on this plane of existence. That we complain He was too vindictive and assessed the capital penalty for too many things is merely our excuse for making certain groups of people as miserable as possible. We are the barbarians.

It is known for a certainty to those who wish to review the vast pile of literature on studies in human behavior: There is a limited window of opportunity for any system involving humans to reclaim what can be salvaged of fallen humanity. In broad terms, punitive confinement works only for a time frame up to, at most, one year. For the vast majority of humanity, half that is about it, but we can permit some room for those who are a little slow to respond. If we add conditions which are physically challenging, most folks capable of responding do so in a matter of weeks. If our purpose is to correct human behavior, longer sentences are an unreasonable waste of resources.

Our silly attempt at matching longer penalties based on some cultural assumptions about how much this or that action threatens society is pure fantasy. The entire political process of setting sentences reflects a perverse notion of putting a price on crimes assessed by how shocking they are to some artificial value system. It arises from the utterly evil materialism of the middle or merchant class which dominates Western political processes. Yes, the sum total of Western Civilization is little more than prissy middle-class values writ large. It’s the pretense of noble privilege without the actual nobility of character. Because it lacks that nobility, what we have as Western Civilization simply proclaims itself “noble” and all else as dangerous.

As such, most “crimes” are simply violations of that prissy idiocy, an unacceptable challenge to the materialistic orthodoxy. So long as you aren’t born and raised in such an atmosphere, it’s patently obvious to anyone with elementary intelligence the entire concept of civil policing is merely class warfare and oppression. The only reason anyone bears a scintilla of class consciousness is as a reaction to the excesses of the middle classes intent on enforcing a separation between themselves and everyone else. Their socio-economic existence is entirely due to materialism and greed, the demon-god of hedonistic comfort. It’s a rejection of those intellectual assumptions necessary to understand God’s provision for a decent life in this fallen realm.

Indeed, it should present no great challenge to discover civilian police forces as we know them today arose entirely from the urban middle class trying to force their social habits onto the working classes which made their prosperity possible. The first arrest powers were purely a matter of keeping the rowdy workers from blowing off a little steam. That’s it; the whole thing was preventing workers from acting like workers. Workers were supposed to be miserable. If you did not aspire to prissy middle class society, you were wrong already; no room for debate.

Contrast this with the history of rural policing, centered on the sheriff and simply keeping property losses to a minimum. There was no pretense of demanding a culture shift, since the difference between a poor peasant and rich peasant was a combination of personal aspirations mixed with the vagaries of circumstance. The presumption that the less fortunate were somehow inherently evil did not come from the rural folks themselves, but the urban middle class who had some fantasy of bucolic life they didn’t understand. What we call “suburbs” is the mass middle class version of rural life.

It would be easy to get lost in the differences in social history. The point is our modern American “justice system” is entirely the result of materialistic, anti-Christian middle class ogres who run things. It’s not about making things better for all, but making everyone miserable who dares to think differently. On paper it all looks okay, but in actual execution it turns the concept of justice on its head.

God’s idea was to decide as reasonably as possible what it takes to contain the natural threat arising from human fallen nature. Put them through the corrective process a few times; see if it helps. Not years upon years — that simply creates a stable counter-society of evil. Make it of short duration, so that a high turnover prevents anyone establishing an artificial world. Is there someone who, on the balance of actual record of behavior, shows themselves unwilling to value human life and what goes with it? Are they truly harmful, not just annoying? You can’t fix that; get rid of them. Is there a place you can send them away from threatening you? Do so. Can you keep them from coming back? Do so. Otherwise, there isn’t much you can do except execute them. They have shown themselves incorrigible predators.

I’ll leave for another day what sort of behavior constitutes a genuine threat to society as God sees it. The point is, our modern American way of doing things is the moral equivalent of poking God in the eye and laughing at His sorrow. We have so twisted and perverted the meaning of “justice,” we can’t even imagine it on God’s terms. America fully deserves to be destroyed, so don’t be surprised when God makes it happen.

Martial Law? Of Course

Count on it. We will soon be under martial law in the US, or at least some parts of it.

The stage has been set. This is no joke, nor merely some hyperbole. That they have been slow to actually implement this martial law atmosphere is simply a matter of trying to scrape off the last thin patina of confiscable wealth. When there is nothing left to take, they’ll crack down on us to prevent anyone taking any of it back.

Yes, this is our government, Americans.

Barnett’s warning about “now is the time to act” may be true, but I’m sure he knows it’s flogging a dead horse. Not that nothing could be done; it could, but only in theory. That something is even likely in the other sense is a fantasy. It won’t happen. Most of those who should act are too fearful, believing they have too much to lose. They don’t realize they’ve already lost it, that when they finally see it being stripped away, it will be entirely legal and fully enforced. Too late.

Then there are some, like me, who honestly and truly believe it just doesn’t matter. Indeed, as a prophet of Almighty God, I’m warning you this coming martial law is in His hand, and it is justice due for our vast ocean of sins against Him. That it could come is proof we deserve it.

Yes, I know it will fall on me, too, but fighting it would be fighting God. Feel free to try that yourself, though, and tell me how it turns out. Meanwhile, I’m preparing myself to face it rather as a Mission Impossible type of assignment, as an agent without any of the incredible toys, unimaginable training, or backing of any authority on this earth. It’s truly impossible, unless, of course, you view this from the higher plane of existence. Then you’ll realize I’ve already succeeded.

For those of you who just don’t get it, never mind. Enjoy your martial law.

A Prophetic Critique of Game Theory Model, Part 4

Fixing It

Starting with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, fallen man has been granted an ever-brighter light of revelation on the path back. The bare trace in the wilderness became a highway, until the very living Incarnation of God’s self-disclosure Himself was born. God didn’t simply choose a nation, but created one from scratch, arising from a particular cultural background. Revelation cannot take place in a vacuum. Inscriptions on stone are not sufficient; it must be living and breathing, including the whole of what makes up a dynamic human identity. The ancient Hebrew world was the setting God designed for His revelation.

It’s not simply a matter of 2000 years. First, the Son Himself pointed out how the nation at that point had long previously slipped away from its genuine Hebrew identity. They were not true to Moses, much less Abraham. The teachings of Jesus were a call to return to a very different frame of reference, so for us it’s more like 3500 years. Plus, it’s 5000 miles, several shifts in language, culture and civilization, and a wholly different intellectual frame of reference.

Grace cannot be grasped by the human mind. It can’t be told, only indicated. Only a living spirit can receive it. Human awareness itself was broken by the Fall, disconnected from a living spirit. In His mercy and wisdom the Father provided the means to call us back to the place where His Spirit stood waiting to reunite us with our spirits. The shining beacon of truth is beyond the fallen mind, so God offered a lesser expression, something which could be grasped in the fallen intellect. It’s primary expression is in the Law Covenants — Noah and Moses — as indicators, something the mind could grasp as a parable of the unspeakable Truth of God the Person. To know God is to know His will; that is as much as any human can know of God. The Laws of God were within reach of fallen man, the merciful provision of a path to grace. Law is not the goal, nor the sum total of revelation, just a mere manifestation. But even with that, we have a massive gulf to span on our human level. The thread of revelation through human history included not merely a pile of logical propositions, as if truth could be objectified. Nor is is sufficient to say revelation is in the gestalt, the whole of it. It’s a radical shift in epistemology, of awareness itself.

It’s not the data, nor the software to process it, but an entirely new operating system and logic, because grace completely changes the hardware. It’s a whole new architecture. You can only port so much of it without starting from scratch. As long as you read Scripture from a Western mind, you will miss an awful lot. You’ll get that you have sinned, deserve to go to Hell, and that Jesus is your only hope. You will have only a very poor idea how to follow Him, though. To fix the problems described above requires a radical solution most readers are not prepared to contemplate. God’s solution is mandating a change in cultural in our frame of reference. So long as there is a Western Civilization, there will be no solution, no good human government.

Learning the justice of God means, in part, embracing the decentralized tribal lifestyle which is assumed by God’s Law Covenants. No other social structure will do as much to maximize the variability and uniqueness of humans. A tribal culture makes no room for Alphas because there is no cohesive Beta class. There is no means to amassing that sort of power. Tribal elders are contextual Alphas in effect, but seldom with the underlying personality traits, since there aren’t that many genuine Alphas in the first place. Deltas and Gammas in a tribal society are too often pushed into the Alpha role, and it changes them. They won’t easily be demoted to Beta status, though. This is in part because their fundamental responsibility to their families, their tribal constituency, keeps them sensitive. Unaccountable and arrogant elders, which real Alphas would be, tend to get into too much trouble, because tribal cultures don’t permit unquestioning loyalty and conspiracies; too many different folks are jealously guarding their decentralized prerogatives as their duty to God.

Sigmas, Omegas and Lambdas are less likely to arise because virtually no one is permitted to be isolated. Close-knit families are like that, sticking their nose into your business. Truly different or odd people are kept inside the human society by family care and constraint, because the family as a whole is accountable to other families.

Since women are not forced to work out their own mating choices alone, the whole female hierarchy and competition is sublimated. That is, social controls make chasing an Alpha utterly forbidden. Instead, every other man is encouraged to manifest a little Alpha. The merry-go-round never completely goes away, but its rare because its scandalous; personal costs are too high. A woman’s attractiveness is evaluated differently, and may be irrelevant to her status. The mating instinct is regulated. The market is controlled, but not necessarily by males only. The nature of things prevents a pure patriarchy. A biblical society distinguishes between social and civil government. While men dominate the latter, they are not permitted to rule the former. It’s the wiring issue. Women cannot be kept out of social matters very long, and men invariably bungle it.

The single greatest failure of the modern nation-state government is absorbing social issues into civil government. This always happens incrementally, slowly corrupting any form of government. Western Civilization in particular has no resistance to this cancer. As opposed to the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) form of civilization, the West emphasizes tangible property over persons. Even people are viewed as a form of tangible property, versus their value as humans. Thus, women are chattel, and their rightful place in social government is denied. But the wiring doesn’t go away, so women find other ways of asserting their power, which naturally requires leveraging their way into civil government in order to exercise their social instincts. Women are not wired for civil government, and we now see the horrors of what their presence brings in much of what is wrong with our world today.

The broken system, with the false social hierarchies we have now, is the result of our inability to even conceive of God’s plan.

A Prophetic Critique of Game Theory Model, Part 3

Recapitulation

Again, this is not God’s ideal. In the Spirit Realm we are all far more unique and individual than our fleshly confinement permits. Before the Fall, humans had a spiritual identity and full awareness. The Fall disconnected us from that identity and awareness. It is as if our spirits are dead, because they are waiting for us in Hell. That’s our condition by default, our fallen state. When our spirits are brought back to life, we are given back our Heavenly identity, our divine citizenship. But now it’s all foreign to us, and our fleshly nature has been too long established to easily step aside and surrender the throne. It is a painful transition, incomplete until the day we finally escape the fallen realm. The Bible refers to that as falling asleep, because it’s only half way there. The final redemption is Christ’s Return to restore what was lost in the Garden, with a new creation, a universe and body not entangled in the Fall.

Meanwhile, conquering the fallen flesh is our primary task. A fancy word for that is “mortification” — killing the flesh nature. We proceed individually because we are reclaiming our spiritual uniqueness, but we are in the company of many other fallen souls, so we also seek to mortify as much of our world as we can touch. An element of that is reclaiming ourselves, pulling back out of the system, refusing to let it rule us. That reclamation has limits, in that Our Lord only permits us a certain limited amount of power. Some portion of us remains linked to the Fall.

Our awareness generally precedes our using authority. Critical to breaking the power of the Fall is knowing how it affects us. As all human science is justified only insofar as it serves this purpose, all truth is God’s truth. Behavioral Science, such as it is, attempts to account for the mere fact humans are not living in isolation. Some portion of God’s purpose in Creation includes putting us at the crown of it, and our dominance regardless of the Fall is rooted in our ability to relate to one another. The whole point is to reestablish our relationship with God, and our social nature derives from that.

The more we fail in relating to God, the more severe our sins as a whole in how we relate to each other. We sin in allowing the development of a social structure which denies our uniqueness. Because we don’t understand how we are supposed to relate to each other, we tend to let things slide. When humans in their native fear congregate for whatever advantage that offers, there will always be a dehumanizing effect, something which constrains and limits our choices in our consciousness, making us more like the lesser creatures with whom we share so much. The ways in which we seek to secure our shalom — our instinctive search for security, social stability, the filling of our appetites — reduce us to a simple herd. When these things occupy our existence, the uniqueness which is our divine destiny is reduced to allowing a peculiar few variations.

Those few variations manifest in the roles of the hierarchy we have described. There are Alphas only because the vast uniqueness has been narrowed down to permit a tiny portion of human character to dominate the social structure. So those with a lack of fear who survive by craft, and a matching talent in manipulating their fellow humans, take the leadership. There are Betas because they don’t quite make the cut, but know they can benefit from sticking close to the Alpha. There are more of them, and they congregate to focus their combined force in creating a strong system. Sigmas are the Alphas who didn’t succeed in gaining Beta support. Neither above nor below the Alpha-Beta channel, they developed a limited sphere of dominance almost as parasites on the system. It still feeds them.

There are Gammas because, while highly talented in their own right, their talent arises from a passionate drive which somehow excludes their having any talent with people. The system keeps them around for their usefulness, but is either unable or unwilling to solve their social weakness.

Deltas, for whatever it is they may have, are unable to gain any distinction in their social context. They are useful as the asset pool, the tax base, the breeding stock for the Alpha-Beta dominance scheme. Without them, the Alpha-Beta symbiosis has nothing over which to seek an advantage.

There are Lambdas because there is always room for variations which serve to validate the system by the very depravity of appetites few are willing to indulge. They are the necessary foil of the mainstream sins. Omegas are an element of scenery, completely deprived of their humanity because humanity is reduced to something which excludes whatever uniqueness sets them apart. Their existence reminds us how evil the system really is.

Truly, we can do better.

A Prophetic Critique of Game Theory Model, Part 2

The Hierarchy in Action

The Game Model hierarchy for manhood is pretty much the same in both the narrow socio-sexual sphere as well as the broader human society. The model applies well in several contexts. However, the model is itself highly contextual. The descriptions of roles in the hierarchy is derived; it is specific to modern Western Civilization. The roles take their shape and delineation from the cultural context, even as they reflect something fundamental to human nature. Our modern Western world consigns men to identities as a range of reactions to the particular stresses of our society. What you have here is a snapshot in time, through the lens of a particular functional approach, printed on the paper of one man’s writing skills (such as they are). Hopefully the colors and forms of this image can reflect something more universally recognizable.

In broad terms, God’s justice requires humans organize socially in units of household, clan and tribe. Any effort to centralize control beyond that is risky at the very least, and typically evil in almost every case. Pulling diverse groups in under a single governing entity cannot avoid injustice to one or more groups. Somebody will be forced to sacrifice something essential in the process, and lose part of their identity. Anything which reduces human identity is by definition dehumanizing, and that is the fundamental sin of all human government. This is an essential element in Western Civilization, and this prophetic analysis expresses the deeper failure of Western Civilization. Here we see yet one more way in which humans defy God by rejecting His guidance, particularly in dealing with other humans. Part of this critique is reviewing what evil shapes government takes when various approaches are applied, and the shapes tend to match somewhat the characteristic roles within the Game Theory hierarchy.

In particular, our modern Western frame of reference is the background of how men have ruled each other, in the various historical forms of government which appeared in the West.

When Alpha rules, it’s monarchy, which lends itself to despotic tyranny. The genuine human need behind the rise of any monarch is the necessity of vesting someone as warlord. When things get dangerous, somebody has to be quick to respond and take command, because war by committee never succeeds. But too many good warlords enjoy too much the benefits of this power, and keep it after the battle is over. Rare indeed is the winning warrior who forgets his armor. Even more rare is the hero commander willing to take off his badge of rank. It’s his whole identity. The definition of Alpha is the self-confidence which manifests in battle as courage against the odds. The Alpha may be deluded or merely bluffing, but if his enemy flees, no one will ever know. Perception is reality, and the role of Alpha is entirely a matter of having a society which validates his self-confidence. A people ill-informed of God’s justice will be slaves to some Alpha.

Where Alpha rules, there will always be Betas, who represent the nobility. This symbiosis defines the two roles of the hierarchy. To be an Alpha is to be insulated from the herd, and without the Betas, there is no insulation. Betas derive their power and mission from this supporting role. Alpha gets nothing done without them. They willingly enter into his adventures, making them possible through their resources and encouragement. He, in turn, will make sure they lack for nothing from his excess supply.

Critical to their function is keeping an eye on what is possible in the context of the Alpha’s adventures. They protect him from failure in part by advising him, warning him if something is not possible, or unwise. He is wired to discount such things, but they are wired to counter that. Disagreements are taken for granted when everything works, because men by their nature don’t internalize such disagreements much. Still, we have ample precedent of partnership failures. Alpha can decide to destroy them all, but he must replace them with a more pleasing group. Or, they can confine him by reducing his prerogatives, even to the point of killing him. However, in a very real sense, they are the de facto owners of this system — the enforcers. The Alpha is simply the figurehead. Wise Alphas know this, playing it for all its worth, but many aren’t so wise. Without Betas, none of this is possible.

When they get too powerful, we have oligarchy in its various forms. It still amounts to tyranny and slavery for the rest. Even a faceless bureaucratic committee government is composed of real people with real privilege, but the Alpha-Beta symbiosis tends to force them out in the open. Again, where the people are ignorant of God’s justice, they will be slaves.

Deltas are the peasantry and middle class, as it were. It’s not as if they can’t usurp the system, but where they do, it’s more likely things are not what they seem. When Deltas rule, there is a pretense to democratic government. The flavor of such a government will depend on any number of factors, but it will be popular in theory. Sadly, Deltas seldom escape the real power structure because of characteristic delusions. Shortly after the plebes revolt, removing the Old Guard Alpha-Beta system, another Alpha-Beta symbiosis forms and seeks ways to reassert their advantage. As Deltas are deluded about game, they are equally deluded about most other things, and the real government will encourage and shape that delusion. Thus, people ill-informed about God’s justice will still be slaves to some Alpha-Beta system. However, the mass delusion effect is probably far worse, and the task of restoring God’s justice is much harder.

Gammas can rule, too. The effects are similar to Delta rule, because the characteristic delusions overlap. Indeed, it’s likely Delta government itself will bring the occasional Gamma into power. But it’s pernicious, in that Gammas are even more deluded, notwithstanding their higher IQ. Gamma talent tends to be more narrow, and their delusions will reflect their specialty. This gives us more extreme forms of government, reflecting an obsession with a strict orthodoxy. Gamma government is frequently insane and short-lived, terrorizing at least part of the population, if not most of it. At its best, Gamma rule is somewhat technocratic. It’s still slavery, but more insane, far less tolerant. It is particularly given to persecuting anyone attempting to promote God’s justice, as if the truth makes one a heretic from the official orthodoxy. The Alpha-Beta crew tends to be a secret conspiracy in this case, but they never go away.

Omegas typically don’t bother trying to rule. It never occurs to them. They tend to have such a poor grasp of reality, it’s all they can do to interact in any significant way with other people. When intelligent, they may try to manipulate the system for inscrutable ends, which is hard to distinguish from more mundane crime.

There are no characteristic examples of Lambda government, so far.

Sigmas are typically contemptuous of government. Should they actually get their hands on any levers of power, it’s likely to be libertarian non-government, aimed mostly at dismantling just about any system they encounter. Since history indicates humanity abhors this sort of thing, we may never see any libertarian government. Western culture in particular can’t bear the notion of decentralization, and Sigmas generally know this. They are typically critics of any existing government, with varying mixtures of purity versus pragmatism in their philosophical approach. This is why they game every social system, not just the socio-sexual. They are fully capable of arranging the destruction of any system, but they find almost every possible alternative system repugnant, particularly within the Western frame of reference, so they offer no viable solutions.