Arguing with God

The definition of sin is arguing with God.

It won’t matter what your arguments are, when you disagree with God, you are asking for His wrath. Granted, if you don’t believe in Him nor His revelation, then it won’t matter to you what I might claim God has to say. That’s okay, because I’m sure God has plenty of issues with me, too.

There’s a lot of stuff passing before my gaze in this world, and far too much of it thrust in my face, which is pretty easy to mark as “sin” by that definition. Not in the absolute sense, because I can only know what I can discern from my own spirit, and when I label something “sin,” it’s more about my understanding of God’s revelation than it is about God. My theology is nothing more than my attempt to formulate a response to something I can’t really describe. But that’s all God requires of me. He demands I wrestle with the issues using whatever limited talents and faculties I possess, and when I find some sense of peace about them, I am permitted to declare, “Thus saith the Lord.” All I’ve said is this is what I believe He tells me.

How you respond is entirely between you and Him. Go and do your own wrestling, if my words provoke you. But if what I say provokes you not at all, then ignore me. I’m fine with that; I encourage it. Don’t trust me. If what I express does not move you, it’s not for you in the first place. That doesn’t mean you’ll escape His wrath, but it means He’s not trying to get your attention through my words, so maybe He has other plans for you. The point is, it’s not my problem. Nothing I do or so or imagine can make it my problem. I won’t get into trouble with God because you don’t listen, if I can’t get your attention. All that’s required of me is to be faithful with what I have.

So when I say things about LGBT issues, I stand where I best understand God requires me to stand. I care not a whit how you feel, nor the feelings of anyone who claims any part of that. That’s because my feelings don’t matter, either.

Most of the time I don’t address it at all. It’s not as if folks have never heard about the Bible or what it has to say about such things. There are plenty of misrepresentations about it, but most of that is in regards to what we are supposed to do with it, not what God calls “sin.” His viewpoint hasn’t changed since before folks used writing. It’s almost tiresome to talk about it anymore, and I have no great urge to preach about how it will destroy our civilization. Sorry, but the foibles of human sexuality are merely a symptom of much greater sins. You can’t simply pick out crossing gender lines as the whole problem, because that’s just a tiny part of it.

But the greater sin is demanding civil legislation which addresses the issue either way. Until we get fundamental justice on the right track, there’s not much point cherry picking polarizing topics for legislation and propaganda. It’s nobody’s business what the creature called Chaz Bono thinks it is. So long as that person isn’t poking around in your home life creating trouble, it’s just a distraction to put their face and name on TV. People silly enough to watch much TV aren’t going to get much right in the first place. Frankly it’s a much bigger problem having nearly naked women cavorting on the screen with men in clearly sensual poses and moves designed to cheapen sex, and then making it a high-paid business. We’ve got serious problems, and the only problem with the likes of Chaz Bono is a political agenda which seeks to make my faith and calling illegal.

The reason that agenda exists is because those who claim to represent God are doing such a poor job of it. Sure, Chaz wants to argue with God about what He had in mind at birth. Most Western churches argue with God about what He had in mind at the birth of churches, too. Churches want to use human laws for all the wrong purposes, so the LGBT Lobby does the same thing. The grace of God cannot be accomplished by human power. So often and so bluntly has God said that, it’s pretty easy to add, “thus saith the Lord.” There are some Laws God revealed, but we aren’t even close to getting that working right here in the West, so we best leave that alone until we understand the fundamental assumptions behind all God’s Laws. Chaz Bono doesn’t need therapy, corrective surgery, jail nor acceptance; Chaz needs to see God’s truth in action. I dare say that hasn’t happened yet.

When we quit arguing with God ourselves, most everything else takes care of itself.

Disasters Manmade and Natural

My friends in the Northeast tell me Irene wasn’t so strong as she was just full of rain with some wind. Local flooding and power outages abound, but it sounds like the utilities are coming back pretty well. Meanwhile, we have wildfires here in the Heartland. Just a dozen miles from here semi-rural real areas are burning, covering several sections (square mile areas). Other parts of the state here are seeing more such fires, too.

We are under no threat here for the time being. So today I was refitting my bicycle.

My knees are giving me just a bit of relief, enough that I can walk more. I got my hands on a really nice welded aluminum basket set for the rear, but had to cut off chunks to make it fit. It was designed for a smaller bike frame, so I modified it to sit on my existing rack. I’m also working on designing a front carrier of some sort. It’s tricky because I have shocks on the front, so whatever I devise can’t attach on the lower forks. Hopefully I can come up with something versatile.

It’s important to me in the midst of all these natural disasters because the man-made economic disaster has yet to show it’s worst face. For example, the Dollar Index (dollar value against other currencies) had been trending down until the banks in Europe, particularly Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (PIIGS) started hitting the insolvency wall. That brought the Euro down a bit against the dollar. But the trend is clear, and at some invisible point, if history is any indication, the thing will simply plummet as everyone panics and decides to dump their dollar assets. Depending on whom you ask, that line is around 60 or 65. It’s been sliding slowly down under 74 in the past week. It had touched 73 briefly a couple months back, and it seems sure to be there again soon.

There are other indicators, such as the gold price and some other things. If you analyze them all from the perspective of what keeps them from getting out of control all at once, it’s a lot of background work from various government and big-bank proxies. What makes these things noteworthy is the apparent level of effort is reaching a saturation point, and we see a decreasing return on investment, as it were. Doing all they can, it’s still sliding down, just a wee bit slower than otherwise. There isn’t much left to throw at it.

I don’t have a word from God on these things, and I won’t pretend I’m smart enough to estimate what and when. I do believe I understand enough to see sweat beading on many brows as their strength begins to fail. So I’m getting my bicycle ready to use more like a substitute car. During the time when my knees wouldn’t let me walk much, I managed a couple of rides near or over 30 miles. Not much for a serious cyclist, but pretty good for an old fat guy on a mountain bike. So long as our grocery stores have something to fetch, I can get to one or another with just a 5 or 6 mile ride one way. Sam’s Club is just over 7 and a Wal-Mart is 9. Nothing worth the trouble is any farther out. So I figure I can fetch what will fit on a bicycle until there’s nothing left to fetch.

I’ve grown weary of folks like the 700 Club President saying Irene was a warning from God. No, it’s too late for warnings. The wrath has begun, and it won’t stop until we as a nation are toast. Given all the incredibly foolish things we have done earning that wrath, hurrying the process along, it should be one wild ride.

It’s my foolish personal opinion September will see some truly crazy changes in our American way of life. Lordy, I hope I’m wrong.

Satan Loves Prohibition

The Tenth Commandment prohibits the Nanny State.

I’ve not had to sit holding the hand of a drug addict in cold turkey, but I have been there to counsel and encourage a few folks who did. More often I’ve counseled a few folks who ended up wishing they could do that for someone they loved.

“When an unclean spirit goes out of a person, it passes through waterless places looking for rest but not finding any. Then it says, ‘I will return to the home I left.’ When it returns, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they go in and live there, so the last state of that person is worse than the first.” (Luke 11:24-26)

Simply tossing out your demons will not solve the underlying problem which made them feel so welcome. Getting clean and sober is not the whole solution to drug abuse. You have to find out why the substance abuse is so powerfully attractive. People have used drugs and alcohol for centuries without losing control to them. Granted, there are a few folks with something broken genetically which makes them far more susceptible, but that’s another issue. Most people who succumb and are destroyed by it are not merely genetic freaks, but people who had other reasons for failure to cope.

One of the greatest sins is exercising power unwisely. Simplistic reasoning in government is evil. Our modern War on Drug Abuse is directly connected to Prohibitionism. We can easily trace this false philosophy through the likes of the Salvation Army, who, for all the good they do, have from the start embraced an awful heresy. They use lots of words about God’s grace, but their conduct and assumptions behind their programs make no room for grace. The whole solution is the simplistic notion of reforming human behavior, and making things illegal. The Salvation Army is the direct result of the collision of horrific social problems and the rise of the secularist Social Work movement. Social Work arises from the communist doctrine the State is God, and has a valid claim to use all citizens as mere economic units. In other words, Prohibition is actually anti-Christian. It is a truculent refusal to account for the broader context of revealed Truth.

What made alcoholism such a serious problem in England in those days? The grinding dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution, against the background of communist theory arising from the Enlightenment, and the sudden availability of gin at startlingly cheap prices. Gin was cheaper than food, in part because of artificially inflated food prices (regulation affected food, but had not yet caught up with gin). It wasn’t simply the ghastly evil of the aristocracy and upper middle class oppression of the working poor, but the removal of the otherworldly spiritual assumptions. Oppression alone is not enough to create sin; it only dampens social prohibitions against sinful behavior. People encouraged to have an inner strength don’t look for excuses, but these folks were discouraged by bad religion.

The Social Work movement arose attempting to reduce the human misery of the towns built specifically by and for the mining companies to house their workers, who were simply slaves in effect. Their assumptions were simplistic, rejecting the notion of afterlife and the Spiritual Realm. People were merely intelligent animals. The Salvation Army adopted some of the secularist assumptions of that Social Work movement, simply pasting Bible verses on top of it. But both of them embraced the Satanic notion anyone has a claim on the life of another outside the bonds of blood or marriage. The Social Gospel, then, strove to change government policy in favor of the Nanny State intrusions, particularly in regards to things like alcoholism. Their only response to the slavery problem was promoting a communist political agenda.

(Hint: Modern evangelical rejection of otherworldly focus, the middle class obsession with politics and reactionary social policy, is indirectly the result of absorbing socialist theory.)

Karl Marx’s logical influence lives on, despite how wrong he was in his theories. He extrapolated the economic data of what he saw around him, which completely failed to predict the way industrial production and the democratization of credit banking would pull the majority of the workers up into the middle class. Now it’s a part of the communist doctrine to hate the middle class “bourgeoisie” for all the wrong reasons, mostly because their mere existence destroys all Marx’s assumptions.

But the timing, the confluence of events, requires rising above simplistic silly understandings. Queen Victoria gave her name to the culture which belonged to the latter half of the 1800s. It was intensely middle class, materialistic and prissy, obsessed with a false morality. Good religion is impossible when it’s totally hijacked in all religious institutions, and this occurred as a direct result of Victorian culture. The British and American Prohibitionist Movement breathed an evil spirit of life into that culture, and was rewarded with vast political influence. It raised the false dichotomy of either giving into the temptation or fighting it with mere human rules, rules which were formulated by people refusing to accept the limits of human intelligence, but also refusing to take full advantage of what human intelligence could do were it not chained to silly notions in the first place.

Today, the fruit of this evil includes the modern prison industry, which in turn depends entirely on the War on Drugs, which is merely Prohibition 2.0. The result is a deeply cynical regulatory regime which sees government intentionally poisoning any substance which might be abused recreationally so that people die. God is not pleased.

Thus saith the Lord: If you abuse substances, it’s your problem. If your self-abuse leads to abuse of others, it’s for them to intervene sufficient to protect themselves, but not more than that sufficiency. Only if they are family have they any limited authority to get more involved and try to clean up your dependence, and only if this includes filling your life with other things which crowd out the drug abuse. Outside that family circle, no one is permitted to get involved, especially government. If your abuse leads to crime, crime is punished for its effects, not its cause.

The Tenth Commandment prohibits coveting what belongs to another, including their self-ownership. Once you understand this, it’s easy to extrapolate outward why God hates nearly every government in the world today. Our American government is supposed to regulate industry in favor of the people (consumers), but chooses to regulate the people in favor of industry (we call it “fascism”). Thus, the FDA makes popular drugs poisonous, raw milk illegal, etc. And when disaster strikes, at no time does actual human need enter the equation. What disaster agencies cannot control, because they lack the manpower and procedures, and certainly lack the expertise, is simply not permitted. The real story of FEMA and Hurricane Katrina is all the proof we need.

What’s Shaking? (Updated)

People who road out Irene are saying warnings were overblown, as if government and MSM were trying to hide something.

My family arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, just months after the huge earthquake in 1964. It never forgot what I saw. Too young then to understand much, I was delighted to find, the last time I took college classes, my campus had the entire report from the US Geological Survey on that event — a whole shelf of binders with tons of drawings, photos and advanced mathematical formulas. I tried to read the whole thing. While I quickly got intellectually buried by the math, everything else made sense to me. In the process, I came to understand the basic physics of tectonics and how earthquakes affect things on the surface.

Let me tell you: That earthquake in Virginia a few days ago was no natural event. That is the signature of a very large explosion. Most quakes show up on seismographs with a distinct pattern. It starts with a strong Primary Wave (P) pattern, followed a bit by Secondary Waves (S) — vertical compression waves followed by vertical rolling waves. Finally, there is a set of surface waves that shake things apart because they are horizontal. That thing in Virginia had no P waves separate from the S waves. It all struck at once, and there were no significant follow-on tremors so far. There are always tremors, sometimes before, and certainly after, but it’s exceedingly rare for them to wait this long.

So far as I know, there is no precedent in the history of seismography for calling that a natural earthquake. The announcements very authoritatively said right away the thing was pretty shallow, about 500 feet. That’s unheard of, so shortly after they changed the story. I think the first estimate was correct, though. That was a subsurface nuke, if you ask me. All we need is confirmation of some serious activity in that area sometime before the quake. A close up satellite view places it out in the woods, if the coordinates are correct, but it doesn’t have to be a straight down drilling.

Update: I stand corrected. There have been small aftershocks. However, I note this fact was only a small part of the bigger picture. As noted by others, it’s the pattern of aftershock placement which matters most. In this case, all the aftershocks have been within a very short radius from the original shake, in an area with no active faults. All that tells us is there is no fault line involved in the shake, and all the aftershocks are subterranean shifts near the original shock. Thus, it does not hinder my assertion it could have been man made.

Diaspora Is Working

Thanks to my good friend, Mark, we now know Diaspora is working. I’ve got my account set up, and I’m using the nym: br073n — a blatantly religious nick based on a geek spelling for “broken”. It’s still a work in progress, and I’ve found Opera doesn’t work at all well on the site. Still, come and join us!

Laptop Oracles: Forget Me Not

In virtual space, what you smell is yourself in front of your computer. It won’t matter what sort of deplorable habits you bear in your personal space.

However, if the virtual world is your whole world, you are not civilized even if you get the Networked civility perfect. That we are compelled to bring the Networked civilization into our real world does not justify forgetting meat space is not the same as virtual space. Civilization means you are civilized wherever you go.

In ancient times when someone from a high civilization visited a part of the world still clinging to a more primitive lifestyle, they never forgot themselves. It’s one thing to act as Romans do in Rome, because that was a civilization. You adapt yourself to what keep civility alive, but you don’t forget your own. There is a dynamic blending which recognizes you can’t correct everyone’s moral flaws, especially if you have no sense of what is moral. As we build our new civilization, it requires we closely examine the meaning of morality itself, so we can rightly recognize those things we should embrace in their place, and things we cannot. A critical element in the calculation is reducing your social rules to a minimum without throwing them all away.

The West is an inferior civilization, largely because it’s full of hot air. We put up with a lot, and we can’t morally justify wallowing much in it. That Western Civilization is so patently superficial does not excuse bad habits which don’t register over the Net, however. We of the Networked Civilization are trying to escape that fake world, but it requires sufficient thought and intelligence to grasp some issues are not merely a symptom of the disease.

We can afford to trash most of high etiquette as almost purely Western phoniness. A fundamental flaw of the West was pretending things could be perfect, that people could be perfected, and we just should not put up with basic icky human traits. But civility itself is something more fundamental. You are still trying to work out living in close physical proximity in meat space. If you understand careful wording on the Net, you should also understand what constitutes an offensive intrusion in the real world. Some things can’t be helped, but it’s a good idea to make some signal you realize your farts are not sweet.

Anything which affects others obliges you to make amends where possible. It is equally uncivil to pretend you have some God given right to a perfect world. The burping, stinking grouch is no worse than the prissy, whiny grouch. If we fail to understand people are the cause of all the imperfection in this world, that’s a philosophical weakness. If we fail to understand we are no better than anyone else, that’s a moral weakness. Humans are not smooth ball bearings, so we need someway to lubricate our necessary rubbing together in a confined space. On the Net it’s by your careful choice of words, but in meat space it’s by restraining yourself reasonably.

Where Western Civilization has remained hopeless is in the truculent demand for unreasonable restraints. This is not simply a philosophical difference of opinion. The West is coming apart for this primary failure, and we should not simply let it go, but help to kill it. But we do so by proving its failures, by demonstrating something better. A perfect image is from the movie, Matrix, when Neo dove into Agent Smith before bursting out and destroying him. You have to get fully involved before your superiority has any useful effect.

You can abuse yourself; that’s between you and God. But if you abuse others in the same fashion, God encourages them to act. Being invulnerable in the Net, however much a self-deception that may be, does not translate to invulnerability in meat space. God grants various types of strength to some with an attached obligation to protect the weak, and it’s a moral blessing if someone roughs you up in order to contain your bad habits from harming others.

We can discuss across human lifetimes what constitutes a threat and what is simply the necessity of human existence, but the moral compulsion to act right now is pretty strong. It’s an instinct God built into us. People will miscalculate, and you may not ever get justice in the narrow sense. Prepare for that. Prepare by making some effort to recognize where your humanity pokes outward at others, accept it as reality, and do what you can to limit harm to others. When you fail, always be eager to clean up your part of the mess.

Humanity cries out that you not forget there are other people with whom you share this world.

Overwhelming Generosity (Updated)

I’m at a loss for words due to a generous computer ministry client.

I spent the whole evening, up almost to midnight, helping someone. It was no big deal; these are fine people and old friends. Their Sony Vaio RS620G running XP had given them BSODs. We debated upgrading to Win7, but I couldn’t promise I could fix the BSODs. Besides, I knew the graphics card was badly dated (Radeon 9200) and it wouldn’t do videos that well. So they decided to just buy a new one. Went to Sam’s Club and he picked out a really fancy HP Pavilion with a huge monitor and quad-core CPU.

It took me about three hours to break down the old one, unpack and set up the new one, and then answer all their questions while doing basic setup tasks. They have a pretty extensive computer desk, so the cables had to go through all the right holes. They told me to take the Viao home and give it a good home if I could. Then they gave me a couple other gifts and some cash. It was far more than I expected. That will probably be a dandy Linux server.

I’ve done it for several folks without any kind of offerings, and never looked back. This was huge, and more than makes up the difference. Since I’m about the pass out from exhaustion, it will have to wait until tomorrow to see what I can get to run on it. Sometimes you just run out of words.

Update: Turns out the machine’s graphics card was burned out. Sony’s factory had placed another accessory card too close to the Radeon AGP card and it got overheated enough to quit working properly. Fortunately, a replacement was in stock at my favorite computer parts house just a half-hour bike ride away. We are now up and running Ubuntu Lucid.

Update 2: I eventually gave this computer away to someone who didn’t have one. They are enjoying it right now (December 2011).

Just a Small Dose of Reality

If you were to search the alternative press and talk to folks who have been there, or are there now, you’ll realize just how vast the lies are.

For example, when you read of terrorist attacks on, say, an Israeli bus, it’s actually a military target. You see, almost every bus in that little country is loaded with soldiers on subsidized duty travel. That’s rather like a lot of European countries do with their trains and buses. The military issues an ID which gets them free travel to work or for any duty purpose. Except in Israel, the average random passenger is more likely a soldier than a civilian, because most of the bus lines were created to support military use. Civilians are permitted to ride, of course. Most of the buses shot up or blown up are at least half filled with troops, and many of the dead and injured were in uniform. Sounds like using civilians as shields, no?

At least once or twice I mentioned the whole mainstream narrative about Libya was 100% lies. We do have “boots on the ground” pretending to be reporters and other civilians with excuses to be in a war zone. Every poll shows the majority of the US citizenry want this action stopped. Gaddafi was better to his countrymen than our government is with us, whatever his flaws. A greater share of the economy went to the common people than what does here in the US. Images of rebels in Gaddafi’s palace? He abandoned it several months ago because NATO kept targeting it for bombs. A slender corridor into the city was blown open by massive bombing for this big photo op. Independent reporters on the scene keep contradicting the MSM about how much of the city the rebels control.

Syria is far more complex than anyone wants to admit. CIA and allied clandestine agencies have been placing snipers in every action zone, shooting people on both sides of the conflict. Most of the protests are in cities dominated by Assad’s enemies, rival clans and tribes, etc. The CIA arms them, too. These could have been easily stirred up any time since the current government rose to power. These political opponents talk about wanting more freedom, but what they really want is a simple change or regime. In case anyone is wondering, these are harsh Islamic regimes they are proposing, compared to the relatively mild and secularist government currently in place. It would be rather like arming and giving lots of money to all the KKK and White Power groups here in the US and encouraging them to rampage for “liberty.”

It’s the same every place Washington DC touches. If the people in power aren’t our clients, it matters not a whit whatever else is going on, our government will try to create a revolution. Then we’ll send plane loads of money and weapons to whatever filthy slime ball is willing to do our dirty work. Everything else is just window dressing. Then our government will lie, but most boldly lie to our citizens, about what’s happening.

Laptop Oracles: Thick Skinned

A corollary to consistency is the power to resist attacks.

Every civilization has predators within and barbarians without. What makes a civilization strong is many things, but among them is the ability to take and hold real estate against attacks. The Internet is a metaphor for geography, and the greatness of the rising Networked Civilization is how well it exploits available resources, and fends off attacks from those less well suited.

When the geography was small and simple, the Internet was exclusive to those who could be trusted a priori. That was long ago. The strongest form of virtual life on the Internet now is the device which can face the onslaught of predations without disconnecting. In simplest terms, that would be a computer with good security against known and likely attempts to hijack. Every civilization attempts to tame the wilderness and pacify the barbarians, but it first has to survive them without losing its character as a civilization.

God does not smile on a civilization which cheats on His moral laws, and the Networked Civilization is not exempt. The task is to abstract them properly to our context.

Conquering and pacifying goes too far when it crushes the freedom of your citizens. What’s the point? Civilized people aren’t quick to slaughter, but they also don’t disarm those under threat. In the real world, there cannot ever be a time and place when there is no threat so long as there is more than three living souls. It’s the nature of this plane of existence, and it’s the nature of the Net. Civilized people prepare themselves to face threats based on probabilities, not wishes.

If you realize the necessity for computer security, you should recognize the same need for your mind. Your place on the Net becomes strong when your machine and mind together are prepared for attacks. The very nature of civility is cynicism. You expect to encounter a generous helping of fools and predators, and you prepare accordingly. The moral high ground is not demanding everyone else behave, but demanding it first of yourself, then conspicuously contrasting your manner against others. You expect to be in the minority against the larger population, but if some few don’t show the way, it all comes apart. To be civilized is to hold uncommon high morality, and to offer whatever defense is necessary to keep it.

Taking a single potshot and running away is cowardly and common. Trolling is a favorite pastime of those with nothing better to do, whose real lives are so empty, causing trouble in the Net is all they have. Whining is unbearable. If we object to these things, we should object to them in ourselves. Civilized people are committed to a standard they can’t actually achieve, but never quit trying. The elite generally succeed, and deserve all the wealth and power that tends to come with it. Whatever it is that counts for success in civilization depends on self-discipline in pursuit of making the world more thoroughly civilized. Moral superiority is not compelling compliance in others, but inspiring it.

Don’t get too wrapped up in yourself, nor in despising what strikes you as riffraff. Civility keeps the doors open to peace and takes nothing personal, even when it’s intended as a personal insult. Consider the source. Everyone can change, and the best way to help them want to change is let them see your character. That character should include relative resistance to attacks, baiting, trolling, and other digressions from the matter at hand. Computers don’t care; they are serene. You can be serene on your own level.

Serenity is a virtue, and makes God smile.

Update on Lynx Browser for Windows

Getting the latest and greatest Lynx browser for Windows is possible.

I’m working with Thomas Dickey to get his latest iteration of Lynx for Windows working properly. My focus is on the PDcurses color version with all the latest patches. If you would like to test it with me, there are some external support packages you’ll need to install first.

1. Get the C++ Redistributable libraries from MS. Just install it; you aren’t likely to see any conflicts with anything.

2. You’ll need OpenSSL for Windows. I recommend the Light version for 32-bit, since all the stuff here is 32-bit. During the installation I elect to put them in the standard Windows DLL folder.

3. You’ll also need Gzip and Bzip2. This will require a bit more work than any other part. These packages come from GnuWin32, of which I’ve written in previous posts here. For each package you want to install, click the “Setup” link off to the right of the list to download. These all install in C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\ and you’ll need to make sure that goes into your system’s PATH statement. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Proceed with caution!

I’m using Windows 7 for this, so the link is “Computer” instead of the older “My Computer.” Right click on the link and select “Properties” from the context menu. Select “Advanced system settings” — a window will open with several tabs at the top. Select “Advanced” and hit the button at the bottom marked “Environment Variables…” This opens yet another window with two panes and buttons for each one. In the bottom pane, scroll down to the word “Path” and click the “Edit” button. You will see a very small window with an edit field. The whole thing will come up highlighted, so be careful what keys you hit, because typing will replace what’s there. It will really ruin your day, and your computer. I hit the END key to remove the highlight and place the cursor at the end of the line. Make sure you know where that “Cancel” button is in case you fat-finger things.

Add a semicolon. Then add this — C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\. Be sure you get it exact, either by typing carefully, or copy and paste carefully. Once you have it, start hitting the “OK” buttons until it’s all closed. You’ll have to reboot the computer for this to take effect. Once the GnuWin32 packages are in your system path, they’ll be found automatically when anything needs them. This includes Lynx asking for Gzip or Bzip, which does happen on some webpages.

Then, download and install your choice from among the various Lynx packages at Invisible Island. The installer should place an icon on your desktop. Depending on your habits, the thing should work well enough as is. Making changes requires you dig into the configuration file and variables for Lynx. You can change the color scheme of the display, what it loads as the start page, etc. Also, if the window which opens when you double-click the icon is not suitable, you can right-click on the top bar of the window frame and set the options for fonts and window shape/size, and Windows 7 remembers them automatically. I recall XP asks if you want to save them by modifying the icon settings.

As noted, the current packages as of this writing are still a work in progress. Mr. Dickey is aware of some display problems and, in the midst of several other projects on his hands, he’s trying to fix this. In my testing, I find any site which requires Lynx to process a webpage through Bzip or Gzip causes ghost text to display from background processing, which makes things hard to read. Not many sites I visit use either of those libraries, so you may not have a problem with this.

For those of you not familiar with text-mode web surfing, it can take quite some time to adjust to the vertical display layout. All web pages are shown in a single vertical column. Most web pages with multiple columns display starting with the left column, stacking the other columns below in whatever order the page codes them, usually left to right. Quite a few elements are simply not displayed; the whole point is to get the text and little else. Lots of spacing is lost; some pages render the paragraphs without any blank lines between them. Tables (data in columns and rows) are unstacked, too, and it makes them hard to read. Keep your eye on the status bar at the bottom of the screen in case you need to make some input from the keyboard.

Links are a different color from regular text, and the “cursor” selecting them moves by changing that color. It always starts at the top of the page. Moving from one link to the next is the UP or DOWN arrows. The RIGHT arrow always selects the current link and loads whatever is at the other end. The LEFT arrow takes you back to the previous page. Moving up and down responds to the usual PGDN and PGUP. There is a hard-coded limit on short movement, two lines at a time. The DEL key shifts the display down two lines, INS up two lines. If you want to capture any text displayed on the screen, first right-click and select “Mark”, then highlight in the usual fashion with your mouse. Right-click again and it’s on the clipboard. There are dozens of other tricks you can learn by trial and error. Explore.

The colors of the text are controlled by a configuration file which ends in “lss”. The default color scheme is opaque.lss. You can learn to edit the file itself or choose one of the other files bundled in the package by editing the lynx.cfg, way down at the bottom. We don’t have room to explore all that here, so you’ll have to learn how to parse those files which are kept in the same folder as the Lynx executable at which the desktop icon is pointing. If nothing else, you can examine the LSS file and discern what elements get which color.

Plain text web browsing is much faster, so it’s really useful for slow connections. It’s also a good way to filter out distractions when text is what you seek. Finally, since it’s about as secure as it gets, because it won’t automatically download or render anything likely to harm your computer. By default, cookies are not persistent, so you can accept the all when when the status bar offers the option. I just hit “A” every time, because for sites like the New York Times, it gets the article without any hassle. When you close the browser (hit “Q”) the cookies are erased and you can do it all again. The only drawback is some servers won’t allow Lynx because at one time crackers used it for mucking around in websites. I typically protest to the Webmaster if I can identify an address for the site in question.

Enjoy!

Update: Mr. Dickey informs me you can turn off the encoding feature which tells websites you can’t accept any compression. Most sites will likely honor this. In your lynx.cfg hunt down a reference to “PREFERRED_ENCODING”. Remove the hash mark (#) in front it, then change the “all” to “none”. This is a temporary fix until he has a chance to trace the source of the problem using Bzip2.