The Crypto Cyber Punk Anthem

1n 1996, you probably were not going to find a bigger anthem than John Perry Barlow’s Ninety-five Thesis nailed to the Church door of public disclosure which was the burgeoning internet entitled A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

I will re-produce it here for further discussion:

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

source: https://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/02/11/john-perry-barlow-a-declaration-of-the-independence-of-cyberspace/

Like any good thesis, there are refutations. For the sake of thoroughness, I will reproduce one here:

A Critque Of Barlow’s “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”

by reilly jones
©1996 Reilly Jones - All Rights Reserved

Published in Extropy #17
Vol. 8, No. 2, 2nd Half 1996

Last February, responding to U.S. passage of the Telecommunications Reform Act, John Perry Barlow, writer, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, disseminated on-line “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”1 In this polemic, he declared cyberspace independent of external sovereignty. His assertion generated much discussion, pro and con, leading Barlow to respond publicly in Wired magazine.2 Although a federal court ruled that the Communications Decency Act’s content-based regulation of the Internet medium violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, Barlow’s broad rejection of State jurisdiction over cyberspace remains in force and, as I will show, subject to criticism.

Malignant Political Universalism
Barlow’s “Declaration” contains a dormant intellectual malignancy that could grease the path to universal tyranny. That malignancy lies in expressions of political universalism, a recurring utopian urge that has only produced misery. His use of phrases such as “global social space,” and “Social Contract,” highlight an all too familiar affinity with the sorts of ‘universal rights’ that have left a bloody trail from the French Revolution down through the Cold War. Barlow proposes to form a global cyberspace polity, “where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs,” with impunity. He advocates the imposition of the American polity’s unique right to free speech on all the world’s polities. The creation of any global polity for the purpose of securing such a universal right, could act as a catalyst to the formation of a World State. “We will spread ourselves across the Planet,” Barlow envisions, “so that no one can arrest our thoughts.” In addition, Barlow’s “Declaration” undermines an already-weakened U.S. Constitution. As I will demonstrate, the Constitution’s polycentric principles, i.e., limited sovereignties of enumerated powers, offers our last line of defense to universal tyranny.

To begin with, set Barlow’s “Declaration” side-by-side with the American Declaration of Independence, a comparison that he expressly encourages. This comparison demonstrates the cultural and intellectual free-fall we have entered. A theme recurs throughout his “Declaration,” a temperamental adolescent complaint of, ‘You don’t understand me! I want a lock on my bedroom door!’ Barlow says: “I ask you of the past to leave us alone; You are not welcome among us; You do not know us, nor do you know our world; You do not know our culture; Our world is different; You are terrified of your own children.” Barlow only forgot to add “Don’t trust anyone over 30!” Will the hippie residue of the 60s never grow up? I guess the answer to that, is blowin’ in the cyberwind.

Adolescent emotivism crops up again: “You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.” No reasoning whatsoever backs up this outburst of feeling. Wait until the IRS, FBI, ATF, or another of the grown-ups’ three-letter agencies come after you, then see if you have true reason to fear. Barlow’s response in Wired doesn’t improve matters by invoking the equivalent of a high school ‘in’ crowd: “[I]t does seem self-evident that there is a Net culture, manifestations of which can be found everywhere in this magazine.” I suppose, by analogy, that manifestations of a TV culture could be found in TV Guide. Barlow’s self-evidence thus reflects mere self-selection.

Such self-selection prompts me to wonder: For whom does Barlow speak? “On behalf of the future” he writes, and “I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.” Whose future? Whose liberty? Who granted him the authority to speak for the world’s future and the world’s liberty? When he speaks for universal cyberspace, and of it breaking free of all external sovereignty, does he really mean to exclude those in cyberspace who don’t mind some statist regulation? Would Barlow deny citizens of particular geographic communities the right to choose regulation of cyberspace-mediated behaviors that historically have proven harmful? Barlow promotes a rigid form of liberty: freedom for him and like-minded individuals alone.

His proposal to form a global cyberspace polity tills bloody old ground. “We are forming our own Social Contract.” Why would you and I want to follow this historically destructive Rousseauean model of polity formation and hew to their totalistic ‘general will’? “We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge,” he says. Whose ethics? Whose self-interest? Barlow can forge the commonweal only by eliminating incompatible individuals, a task that calls on either persuasion, or coercion. The cyberbureaucracy of the hippie residue will no doubt feature their own censor’s chair, mandating a mildewed day-glo atmosphere of political correctness. Suppose that we resist ‘re-education’ and refuse to join their ‘Social Contract.’ Must we be coerced?

Sacred Cyberspace
Barlow does not make clear, in “declaring the independence of cyberspace,” the nature of the boundary between the internal sovereignty of cyberspace and the external sovereignty of the rest of the world. “We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies.” Where does his virtual self end, and his physical self begin? Barlow’s confusion arises from his definition of cyberspace. In the Wired response, he tries to clarify the distinction between cyberspace and the rest of the world by declaring that only “thoughts” exist inside cyberspace, no physical “action.” Would child pornography, libel, slander, consumer fraud, traffic in insider information, theft of state and trade secrets, copyright violations, obtaining access to or tampering with personal records be legal as long as they are “thoughts” in cyberspace rather than “actions” elsewhere? Must one global cyberspace polity decide these questions and override the diverse answers from all other polities? Barlow’s proposal claims it must.

He attempts to transcendentalize cyberspace, even to sacralize it, to place it entirely outside of any jurisdiction. He imagines cyberspace as a timeless, spaceless realm, as “the new home of Mind,” and “thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave.” He reveals that “There is no matter here,” and “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere.” Barlow’s cyberspace lives as well as cogitates: “It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.” No mere flight of fancy, this picture of cyberspace bolsters his central jurisdictional claim: “Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.”

In part, the fact that information has many uses explains Barlow’s confusion. Information about reality allows us to comprehend the actual world with clarity; information for reality allows us to increase the extropy in the actual world; information as reality allows us to escape the actual world and carries our vitality away with it.3 In this last form, as reality, information loses its materiality, offering the escapist a route to different realms. Jurisdiction could not possibly apply to this transcendent realm, to this heaven on earth! Perhaps if the States of the world don’t define cyberspace as Barlow does, he would at least settle for religious tax-exempt status.

Unfortunately, Barlow undercuts his notion of collective CyberMind in his Wired response. “Even if I wanted to, there wouldn’t be much I could do to call [the Declaration] back at this point.” This recognizes explicitly that matter ultimately controls cyberspace. Anything that goes onto the Net can land on someone’s hard drive, and might remain in storage long after the writer has changed opinion three times, gotten a new boss who dislikes boat-rockers, etc. Dare we post our deepest, most interesting thoughts? Who can be sure that our old content won’t be used against us in a New World Order ‘show trial’? Such concerns demonstrate that cyberspace constitutes a very solid, material object - not a transcendent realm.

Toward a People’s Republic of Cyberspace
Having diagnosed Barlow’s confusion about the nature of cyberspace, I have to wonder what - other than the fact that Barlow hangs out there - makes it more special than, say, a suburban shopping mall? Should we declare shopping malls to form a worldwide independent jurisdiction, transcendental agoras totally disconnected from the real world?

When Barlow rebelliously declares that “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” he stakes out just such an exclusive jurisdiction. Sovereignty, here, refers to the power of giving the law on any subject along with the power of punishment. Jurisdiction refers to which individuals exercise sovereignty in each particular case. Jurisdiction, a structural consideration, means more to liberty than the law itself, because stronger individuals make law for weaker ones. Strong individuals, with jurisdictional authority backing them, determine which entities qualify for inclusion in the human community, which are entitled to the benefits of citizenship, and which have the capacity to enter into consensual agreements. If cyberspace is institutionalized as its own unlimited sovereign, then its jurisdiction will grow at the expense first of other institutions, and if successful, at the expense of everyone outside of cyberspace. Hence Barlow initiates a new version of Marx’s class struggle.

If external sovereignty can only be exercised at the gate to cyberspace, and cyberspace is global in nature, then won’t declarations such as Barlow’s midwife the World Surveillance State? We already sense such a regime in embryonic form. Overlapping nets above us obscure our vision of the stars. First, the crisscrossing jet streams of its diplomatic, military and corporate overlords whizzing around to important meetings; then above them, an orbiting grid of spy satellites watching everything below. We sense the AI supercomputer scanning microscope examining our lives in detail; and we are mindful, in our laogai-gulag-holocaust world, of the totalitarian apparatus of informing on each other.

Barlow repeats the traditional formula for legitimate sovereignty: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Despite this theoretical ideal, in practice States require only the acquiescence of the governed. Contrary to Barlow’s claim that in cyberspace “[W]e cannot obtain order by physical coercion,” most order, or acquiescence of the governed, comes from coerced consent. This coercion consists of massive, coordinated, intentional fraud, coupled with a silencing of the truth. The Soviet state pioneered “disinformation” programs, forms of worldview warfare specifically designed to elicit the consent of deceived individuals. These have scientifically evolved into highly sophisticated techniques available to all advanced groups of influential and powerful elites. Citizens labor under a pervasive bombardment of false facts, false meanings and false values from the statist miseducation system, the shameless liars in the orthodox media and the virtueless reality of Hollywood’s image makers. This sophisticated fraud gives rise not simply to false judgment, but utopianism. Absent accurate, reliable facts, clarified meanings, and correct values, individuals find it hard to escape indoctrination. Instead, they remain caught in a closed ideological loop, a self-perpetuating strain of anti-realist thought. Barlow writes from within this loop, whether consciously or not.

The Utopian Conceit
Barlow writes classic utopian cant, an example of what Thomas Sowell calls the “vision of the anointed.”4 “We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace,” exhorts Barlow. “May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” Governments make the world, and the world is inhumane and unfair? Then, by all means, through ‘permanent revolution’ in cyberspace, we will make them ‘wither away.’ Intentionally or not, Barlow evokes Marxism. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Can “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!” be far behind? Apparently not; Barlow adopts as his underlying premise the view that we can create a heaven on earth by freeing our natural goodness from all external discipline through a transcendental cyberspace. “The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule.”

Members of the utopian ‘anointed’ appoint themselves shepherds over the ‘benighted.’ They want to institute emotivism as the world’s only ethical system because individuals who judge right from wrong via ‘feelings’ readily respond to being told how they should feel about things. I can see the future crowds yelling exultantly, “We are free!” then looking around and quietly asking, “Can we say that?” Cyberspace, in its aspect of information as reality, the appearance of freedom from the actual world, could offer the shepherds a perfect stockyard for managing the world flock. True to this form, Barlow indulges in escapist fantasy, “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”

Next: A Cyberspace Constitution?
Constitutions represent theoretical expressions of a polity’s practical political life. To change a constitution, the practical political customs of a polity must change first. Before a world polity calls for a constitution applicable to the entire planet, the practical political life of every person of the world must reflect thinking in global terms. Declaring cyberspace free to develop its own political customs sans ‘interference’ from existing local polities thus represents a step toward developing a Cyberspace Constitution, applicable world-wide.

Our Western Culture has dissolved and its remnant civilization begun to fade. Yet where are the spaces protected from hostile criticism, from the urban rat race and prying eyes where new cultures can arise? A collectivized World State will leave little room for us to carve out our own havens of liberty. Each individual has little power to oppose the formation of the World State. Hence the need for mediating institutions between individuals and statist authorities. Mediating structures, as the threads of the web of public life surrounding the cells of our separate private lives, provide critical protection for individual liberties. Institutions providing private law arbitration, reputation markets, and technical communication standards must act as competing powers to thwart utopians’ constant attempts to consolidate world power.

This polycentric model allows the fluid formation of diverse polities of limited sovereignty in cyberspace, what I have termed “cybernexus.” These polities constitute wholes, with no split between “mind” and “body.” They include the social relationships and technological superstructure required to maintain the virtual communities in cyberspace. This creates a complex adaptive political system, one resistant to both egalitarian mobocracy and oligarchic tyranny. There can be no universal cyberspace. A total war between limited sovereignties and global tyranny lies before us. Will there be any new human cultures at all, let alone opportunities for posthuman speciation? I, for one, do not want utopian cosmic consciousness; I want to foster the seeking of a plurality of individual destinies.

Liberty and freedom represent different concepts. Barlow offers not just a declaration to be free of any existing governmental authority, but rather a statement of his desire for ‘vacant freedom.’ Such vacant freedom exists only after the overthrow of all authority - including truth and history. Without history, depletion of a large store of meaning and context in our lives occurs. Absent truth, lies and propaganda reign. Barlow thus encourages fraudulent revisionism and relativism, a violent form of worldview warfare.

Vacant freedom, in practice, unfolds as wars between gangs over turf. Liberty, on the other hand, arises when individuals in unresolvable conflict with each other, turn to law for resolution by judges to whom the parties have, by mutual existence in a consensual moral polity, accepted the method of choosing the judges and given them limited judging powers that they accept as valid. “For true liberty is not a matter of ridding oneself of external law,” Miguel de Unamuno wrote, “liberty is consciousness of the law. The free man is not the one who has rid himself of the law, but the one who has made himself master of it.”

If we have bad laws, such as the Communications Decency Act, let us, by all means, change them. But let us not throw out all of our existing polities. The historical lesson to be derived from the fall of the Roman republic to tyranny can still be found on the dusty shelves of used book stores. A contemporary observer of this tragedy, Sallust, prescribed the course of action that foils this fall, “It is better for a good man to be overcome by his opponents than to conquer injustice by unconstitutional means.”
Notes:

1. Web location, A Declaration of Independence

2. John Perry Barlow, “Declaring Independence,” 4.06 Wired 121-22 (June 1996).

3. Albert Borgmann, “Information and Reality at the Turn of the Century,” vol. 11, no. 2 DesignIssues 21-30 (Summer 1995).

4. Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. (New York: BasicBooks, 1995).

source: https://www.reillyjones.com/critique-of-barlow.html *

In context then, Barlow is upset because of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and what he sees as failed government policy. His solution, it appears, is to be ungovernable and formulate some manner of internet global hive-mind and to ask all the rest of the world politely to sod off while he continues to pursue this activity. There are no kings in this telling.

The refutation produced by Jones, on the other hand, comes at the problem from standpoint of the body, specifically transhumanism, and points out that that there can be no such thing as a space without a sovereign and therefore a war necessarily follows. Either it is crypto-anarchy in a global space, or a limited monarchy warring over sphere of influence.

If Barlow is the 60’s, Jones represents the 1760’s. Both use a lot of words to outline positions that are, in essence, distilled down to the bifurcation of anarchy and egalitarianism, or governance and war.

In the words of Dr. Evil, though, there is another option. “How about No?”

Barlow’s idea that there should be no governance is incorrect, since people are always going to be governed by something or another. Living in a household with other people is enough to demonstrate this principle. There will be house rules or someone will likely be kicked to the curb. On the other hand, you cannot have a constant state of one house being pitted against another unless you want something like the Scottish clan system that resulted in most of those same families moving clear out of Scotland.

The answer was all ready posed to this dilemma before Barlow penned it in the Declaration of Independence 1.0. That specific document balances the will of the people against the will of those who represent them and makes the people sovereign. In 1996, it is true that this feeling was not high because the elections were generating problems between candidates that were not good against candidates that were worse. However, that has nothing to do with the Declaration and everything to do with the people being asleep at the wheel. What was needed was an awakening–which the internet certainly could and has served as a tool toward. It was almost as though by 96, everyone had given up on the actual land and moved into a digital territory to fight what was originally the cause of moving to the land of America with which to begin. Barlow’s solution of “Go Away!” seems juvenile. Jone’s analysis makes more sense, but comes at it from a transhumanist stance of insanity. Do you doubt that it is coming from such insanity? Fine. Let’s do this:

Transhumanist Philosophy is the quest to enhance life and liberty through speciation. It is piloting an ascending course between idealism and materialism: the Tao, the Logos, the living arrow of creation. The self-organizing honing in on a moving point of purposeful disequilibrium in a dynamic pattern of increasing complexity. In Isaiah Berlin’s words: “An unstable equilibrium in need of constant attention and repair…. an open future.” Berlin adds: “The glory and dignity of man consist in the fact that it is he who chooses, and is not chosen for, that he can be his own master.”

Consider the consequences of the concept that we are not one culture, that we are not one species, that we are not approaching one destiny, when thinking about the future… observe carefully the fences of a “one world order” philosophical stockyard that restricts our liberty, they are well camouflaged. Outside this globalist-open-borders stockyard, as J.R.R. Tolkien phrased it: “Resistance still had somewhere where it could take counsel free from the Shadow.”

The concept of cultural unanimity is antithetical to the natural convergence of the American polity’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; namely, the right to culturally speciate in order to physically speciate, or not. We cannot all culturally speciate equally at once; therefore, such speciation optimally occurs under conditions where excellence is the social ideal and not under conditions where equality is the social ideal. Another way of expressing this is that evolutionary adaptability is nature’s preferred upward social path.
source: https://www.reillyjones.com/

Not one species, eh? k. You go to your heat rock and bask. When you deal with the discussion concerning humanity and rights, though, I am allowed to call you a lizard. Whatever you say I will then consider in the light of lizardness. I will not allow you to pose as a human being, saying things that sound humanitarian, that actually server your lizard-kin. Gorns speak up for Gorns and people for people. It is the way of the Star Trek.

The fact I have to point this out, though, tells you the level of insanity all ready present in what many consider to be quaint pre-Q post(s) 1996. Normal was never there other than the Grace that God poured out on the time and the people to make it seem normal. These people were restrained then, and considered “weirdly academic” at best and “eccentric” at worst.

Speaking of which, John Perry Barlow is one of the Q posts that were made that seemed to predict his death due to a heart attack. Some of that content can be found on the original above source where Perry’s Declaration is quoted.

The Pride Flag Is A Hateful Symbol

The Gay Pride Flag is a hateful symbol, which, in some ways, is “worse” than the flag the Nazis flew. It certainly is “worse” than the Confederate Flags that are often flown. How so? The answer is contained in the Bible.

Neither/Nor

Neither the Nazi Flag or the Confederate Flag take a symbol that is inherently given in the Bible to try to usurp and use it for their own ends. The Nazi flag does borrow from a symbol that meant “good luck” and modified it. The original symbol (the swastika) concerned the stations of the Big Dipper in the night sky. This constellation was often likened to “The Plow” because it had to do with the changing seasons and when your crops should be in various states. The Confederate Flag was a modified “Union Jack” flag, which invokes Jacob, as Jack is a nickname for Jacob. The idea behind such a construction was that there was about to be some “Jacob’s Trouble” and a “new attempt at order” which came via rebellion. So, both the “plow” and “Jacob” are in the Bible, but neither of them are outright featured on the flags mentioned here. You have to know a little extra to understand where the symbolism might be and how it relates, and what is being said in context. Both of the kinds of folks who used these flags in such clever ways did some terrible things, but they both seemed to have enough fear of God that they did not want to brazenly steal something directly from the Bible that could be considered to be sacred to God. That’s a whole other level.

Enter The Pride Flag

The Pride Flag, however, does steal the symbol, directly. The rainbow is well known from the Bible as the symbol from Heaven that YHVH would not flood the entire earth again. The rainbow is also sometimes considered to be a kind of weapon that YHVH can use as He “fires arrows from His bow”. More often, this concerns a different expression of the rainbow than we think of from the standard rainbow. Probably, the physical version of this state is more akin to the “double rainbow” we sometimes see in nature. The light in a double rainbow is twice refracted, which creates a mirrored rainbow in the sky.

Pride Is a Deadly Sin

Putting aside for a moment that Pride is one of the deadly sins that caused angels to rebel and fall from heaven, it is worth examining how this symbol was stolen to create the hateful symbol it has become:

It goes back to 1978, when the artist Gilbert Baker, an openly gay man and a drag queen, designed the first rainbow flag. Baker later revealed that he was urged by Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S., to create a symbol of pride for the gay community. Baker decided to make that symbol a flag because he saw flags as the most powerful symbol of pride. As he later said in an interview, “Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible, to live in the truth, as I say, to get out of the lie. A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility or saying, ‘This is who I am!’” Baker saw the rainbow as a natural flag from the sky, so he adopted eight colors for the stripes, each color with its own meaning (hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit).
source: https://www.britannica.com/story/how-did-the-rainbow-flag-become-a-symbol-of-lgbt-pride

A “natural flag from the sky”? You mean that thing that YHVH put up there? Baker apparently looked up, decided to cut YHVH out of the equation, and to impose his own meaning. What was it? Sex, life, healing, sunlight, nature, art, harmony, and spirit? Again, the irony here is thick, since the earth was flooded due to giants having unnatural relations of which gay sex is a subset. Nonetheless, I guess if a person is making their own flag, they can make it mean whatever they want, but if you base it on something that belongs to YHVH, you are going to have some trouble sooner or later with that notion.

A discerning eye will notice that the Pride Flag as it exists today does not have all these colors. What happened?

The first versions of the rainbow flag were flown on June 25, 1978, for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade. Baker and a team of volunteers had made them by hand, and now he wanted to mass-produce the flag for consumption by all. However, because of production issues, the pink and turquoise stripes were removed and indigo was replaced by basic blue, which resulted in the contemporary six-striped flag (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet). Today this is the most common variant of the rainbow flag, with the red stripe on top, as in a natural rainbow. The various colors came to reflect both the immense diversity and the unity of the LGBTQ community. source: ibid

Sex and harmony and art were removed? Sex and art probably should not have been there anyway, but taking the harmony out of it? What does that leave? Life, healing, sunlight, nature, and spirit. Since blue was not originally in the design, we do not know what it means, but the Mother of YHSVH is often depicted in art with a blue coloration around Her. Therefore, if we are not sure what it means, we can deduce since the flag was “stealing” things that YHVH placed in nature, that the goal here is to try to steal nature itself out of pride and replace the “mother” with something else. In other words, the Pride Flag hates the mother and nature, and seeks to replace it with its own defined relationships that are counter to the kinds that YHVH has ordained for humanity.

YHVH and Homosexuality

Homosexuality is defined as something stronger than the typical word for sin in the Bible. It is defined as an abomination, or something hateful. Worse still, abomination usually occurs with another word frequently, which is desolation. While sin can kill people, homosexuality is considered to be so hateful to YHVH that it brings about destruction in a more rapid way than any other given sin. This was the testimony, for instance, of Sodom and Gomorrah when the men of Gomorrah wanted to “know” the angels. It was the last straw.

YHSVH and Homosexuality

Many times people will say that the Messiah did not address Homosexuality. He did not have to since He said He came to fulfill the law and not to alter it. In the Hebraic culture, it was a given that such relationships were inherently unlawful and forbidden. It would be a bit like telling people today that you should not murder a child because you feel like it. (Although with abortion being where it is, that might prove more controversial now) His ministry was for the End of Days, which would feature the Abomination of Desolation which, if you are carefully following the reasoning outlined, concerns homosexuality directly. It could be that He did not say directly anything concerning the subject in our recorded Bibles because when He returns He will use those who think this form of love is not forbidden as an instant judgment of the condition of their hearts and love of lawlessness. The kind of love Messiah gave to the world was not a sexual matter as such, but a kind of universal love of mankind that keeps the right relationships established on the face of the Earth.

I Know…

Now, I know there are a lot of you out there that don’t want to believe what I’ve just said, but I’m not the person you want to take this matter up with as I’ve put the above to the test. I had a ministry and outreach to people who struggled with these problems, and my church, home, and business were attacked by members of the Pride movement who made up false claims about what I was doing because I did not “come to a Pride event”. It did not matter that my ministry and business was such that I did not come to any given event, so as not to break the HARMONY of what I was doing by showing a kind of favoritism or alignment concerning my business values in the community. I viewed all sin as potential problems to be repented from and worked through and that nobody had the edge on being the biggest sinner. While my business served people who were straight, gay, and in between, as well as did my ministry, the Pride movement was not going to have it, and hatefully libeled my business and tried to organize a kind of gang-stalking in response to their perceived slight. It was not an isolated incident, as I wrote to the GLADD alliance and explained what had happened in the hopes that they might try to repair or address what transpired. They did not, and neither did many of the institutions in government and law enforcement. So, my testimony, evidence, and experience is that the Pride Flag is a symbol of hatred, and there is no other interpretation for it. It should be seen in the same light, if not worse, than flying a Nazi flag, or a Confederate flag and hate crime laws should apply to it along with the legal penalties associated with such speech and actions.

Not About Inclusion

Even if the colors on the flag were changed, it would not change the problems associated with the flag indicated above. While a person can own a flag, they cannot own a rainbow, and anyone in the PRIDE movement ought to understand what hate speech is and what it can do. The only remaining things are to hold those responsible for these hateful acts accountable. It may be only by the King of Kings, but then, that will be more than sufficient.

Fake Reviews

Over yonder at The Bookseller there is an article which discusses bad reviews being given on Goodreads even before a book is available to read.

What’s the motivation? From the article:

Goodreads reviews have long been associated with review bombing, for example in 2021 Time revealed how some authors were allegedly victims of extortion, facing demands to pay scammers to avoid bad reviews on the website. In 2023 the Guardian also reported authors were actively “staying away” from the site. Later that year, Goodreads announced changes later that year to prevent review bombing, shortly after Daphne Press backtracked on Cait Corrain’s debut deal after the aspiring SFF author admitted to posting negative reviews about other books on book recommendation website Goodreads under multiple accounts.

Would-be authors are being asked to pay a bribe so that a preemptive negative review is not given. This is quasi-extortion, as the only action the author has done by this point is to write a book. The equivalent would be to pay a ransom so a person is NOT kidnapped, which is also a backwards-facing procedure to the unstated criminal rule book. Maybe criminal kids these days are getting lazier?

In case the reader of the above article missed the important desired nuance the writers wish the audience to deduce, there is a predigested-digested ‘this-is-what-you-should-think-about-this’ quote provided for them:

“Also, book ratings do matter. Otherwise, why are we all here? One friend who writes crime for a digital imprint was advised by an editor to retire a long-running series because the average rating for the most recent installment slipped below 4.2 stars. So every keyboard-licking troll who fires off a volley of one-star ratings for their own strange and probably sad reasons, has the power to affect a writer’s career.”

Begging the question does not drop alms in the bowl of the scribblers of volumes. What the article is making abundantly clear is that the reviews do not matter as they cannot be trusted.

Trust And Money

American money, last I knew, still has the motto “In God We Trust” on it, sometimes. (it originally appeared on two cent pieces –for putting in my two cents) The reason for invoking a higher power on the filth that passes for a medium of exchange is because it turns out that many people are dishonest, and if you cannot trust anyone, you are not going to trade with them. You need something a little higher up the chain than the Earthly kingdom to figure out whether you should trust someone who is presenting themselves in a certain way. This skill is discernment, which in the business world is often labeled shrewdness.

The vexing version that highlights the issue between trust and money is illustrated by P.T. Barnum’s quote that “there is a sucker born every minute.”

Circus Wisdom

On the other hand, P.T. Barnum also said that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” Since he was in the business of running circuses, one deduces he probably knew something about when the world was more bonkers than normal. This is to say that a writer will write because they are a writer. Publishers might care about reviews, because sales could be impacted negatively by word of mouth. Conversely, one could market the book on the merits of how badly it sucks as a work. There are many photos of coffee places doing exactly this where one can stop in and get the worst cup of whatever a person has ever had. This is what Barnum meant.

Reading Between The Lines

What this article is specifically about is making a living as a writer where the industry and commerce of being a writer and one’s reputation matter. How anyone can be alive in 2025 and have anything that does not resemble the American flag flying in tatters above a sieged fort for a reputation I cannot fathom other than such a person must have been a non-offending political genius that should be immediately placed in an embassy so their skills can be used for important problems like National Security. The rest of us plebeians, though, have had at least one round of attempted reputation assassination if not worse. The free-speech-o-meter has been running almost on empty and is just now showing signs that the needle might bounce back to a position a little greater than it has been occupying for the past ten or so years.

Fake News And Dastardly Jews

Fake reviews are a specialized case of Fake News, which court accusations of Evil Jewish World Empires. Right now, the pulse is that Palestine is an angelic being that would never do anything to provoke anyone, and Israel, a place which was born after World War II on the heels of attempted genocide, is super mean and wants to beat the world with the Star of David as a billy club. Apparently, the last scorching of a type of specific religious identity predominately only buys you around 70 years or so before everyone decides the guy who tried to kill you last time was actually right about everything even though the illustrations of the evil wrought by him are legion. If we cannot get the narrative straight on something as simple as this story, which has been pounded into almost every media imaginable, I doubt we are going to do better because your book about vampires falling in love with dolphins is being unfairly held ransom by Russian Shadow Brokers. Hell, people cannot agree that the huge fire sacrifice on Jewish people happened, and if it did, they try to get all mathematical about it as though it would be somehow better if two people died in a raging inferno instead of six-million. (it was probably way, way more for the record) Such logic brings to mind the reasoning of Joseph Stalin who allegedly said that “one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic.”

Picking One’s Battles

Are Fake News stories a problem? Sure. Fake reviews are too. However, we are much, much farther down the rabbit hole of problems. We want to sit around and bemoan our fates concerning our potential to sell books. How about we focus on the ability for some people to work at any given job at all? That’s a thing now. If Social Credit lunatics have their way, it will become more of a thing. We might also want to think about how we are teetering frequently on the knife edge of world war with the power to completely obliterate life as we know it. But then, what do I know? I have only been blowing this horn for something like the past 13 years, and you know what I got for the effort, at least in part? Accused of being a part of a vast Jewish conspiracy to uh–well, I’m not sure what it was, exactly. Not be Satanists? Pretty much that.

Into The Philosophical Morass With Thee

Over here, Akhilajnya is pursuing the noble art of quiet self-infuriation and indignation which philosophically introspecting chiefly involves.

Here, he considers what influence is. A quick summary of his position from the article follows:

No one can truly give anything to anyone. A person can only speak in the language of the other’s existing logos. At best, influence is an illusion—a shared mirage between speaker and listener, where the listener believes transformation is occurring through external force, while in truth, the transformation is evoked from within.

This is, indeed, a valid way of seeing the concept of influence. On the other hand, it also somewhat supposes a conscious agent. What about all those seeds people have that they do not know they have? Here enters the smokey depths of the subconscious.

Story Time

While Akhilajnya endeavors to find the scalpel to cleanly cut the subject into discrete parts, I will instead take the route of telling you a story. Back in 2016, a game was released on several systems called We Happy Few by Compulsion Games. The game unfortunately shared a similar vibe to the pre-existing survival horror genre games of the Bioshock universe and appears almost to take place in the same continuum. A lot of time was spent by the game studio decrying the fact they were emphatically not Bioshock. (Thou protesteth too much?)

The plot of We Happy Few revolves around a post World War II society that has done some bad things and it very much wants to forget having done those bad things to the point that it demands everyone take a drug called “joy” that puts the inhabitants in a euphoric state–or at the very least–a compliant state. The main character works as a censor for a government office and discovers that when he is not taking his “joy” reality is a terrible nightmare scenario that the pills were disguising as acceptable parameters of quotidian life. Of course, everyone taking their joy notices his attitude, and their response is to try to force him to take the pill, or kill him. At this juncture, the game turns into a kind of riff of The Twilight Zone meets The Prisoner aesthetic.

Remember, This Was 4 Years Before COVID

At the time the game arrived, I pointed it out to people who were avid gamers and suggested to them that this specific game was closer to a kind of confessional–that someone had decided to turn some of the darker facets of our world and its mechanisms into a game so that people might be able to more easily pretend that it was simply fiction. If one watches a movie, or reads a book, or even plays a meaningful game with a plot, there is typically that moment of “Ya know, I think I learned something here,” if a person is truly engaged with the process. I made some statements at the time about how the medical system cannot always be trusted and that the game demonstrated that point in a way that my simply saying so could not. People played the game, beat it, and then, only a short 4 years later, were not sure whether or not they ought to take the COVID vaccine. In fact, many of them did. It was as if I had never said anything about this game, and as though they had never played it or learned anything from the experience of doing so.

Presidential Election 2024

By the time we get to the presidential election of 2024, Kamala Harris decides to run on what? You’d never guess it: joy. For four years, the country underwent a succession of less than ideal changes with which it is still grappling, and people who actually played the silly video game did not or could not see that Harris was actually like some cartoon character from the game! “Do not worry about the state of the world, take your vaccines, focus on joy!” Was this art imitating life, or life imitating art? A confessional? A plan designed as a game?

The Tyranny of the Subconscious

What We Happy Few tries to address is the maladjusted coping mechanism of denial. When people refuse to acknowledge something they did or are harboring within themselves, they have no choice but to shove the content into a file marked “stuff I’m not going to worry about”. The obvious outcome of that, though, is to have a thousand buttons that a breeze can blow by and push that suddenly have a person doing whatever it is that someone else wants them to do just so long as they do not have to deal with the thing they are trying to avoid. The desire to “coast” and to do no “internal work” is the main drive. The only influence necessary is to tell someone that they can take that path and continue to do what they have been doing. Influences, in the social media aspect, are not really doing anything other than telling people what they want to hear. In this regard, Akhilajnya is right. However, I would hesitate to call these proclivities “seeds”. They are more like the opposite of seeds–maybe rot or blight. There can be no real persuasion or influence where there is nothing to persuade or influence other than a kind of lethargy that courts death. There is no substance in such a temple. Only a vacuum.

Influence As An Illusion?

Yes, the influence is an illusion in the case Akhilajnya points out which supposes substance. However, it is not even an illusion in the case where there is no substance. It is nothing at all since there is nothing for it to do other than uplift nothingness. It is simply a burnt offering on the altar of the subconscious where no experience, prophecy, or message gets through other than the ones the person wants to hear. “Be happy, go for joy! You don’t need to change! There’s nothing wrong with anything here!” These voices are the gods they must serve. Whatever sacrifice that requires, they will make.

On Continuity

Without ruining the game, in case you, reader, decide to play it, if you do happen to also play the games in the Bioshock realm, I think you are likely to discover an overlap in all those dark secrets that lie at the heart of the plot of each of them. Asking yourself why this specific theme arises in each game might be worth thinking about–and that it showed up on a national stage even moreso. A more terrifying prospect is that those games were never games. They were judgments and indictments. If you were only amused by the game, guess where the sentencing will fall?

New Retro Gaming 90’s Inspiration

When Apogee announced they were making a retro game called Wizordum that had a distinctly shareware 90’s vibe going on, I thought the idea sounded cool. It’d be nice to see some of the stuff from back in the day make the rounds today while also being new to everyone. I asked one of the Apogee guys on X/Twitter for a copy of the game in exchange for a review, but they ghosted that query, which is fine. Eventually, I was able to see it in first person due to the assistance of an acquaintance.

90’s Gaming

I did not have a lot of time for gaming in the 90’s, but I had a lot more time then than I do now. There are many titles that fly by these days that I might glance at for about 10 minutes or so, with no expectation of ever finishing. There is far too much going on in life for me to make the kind of time investment most games require. So, the old Apogee model of save your game anytime was potentially a good fit. Firing up Wizordum after some backstory eventually got me to a screen like this:

That’s not really a wizard-y item, typically–the mace. However, you gotta have some melee mode, and I guess the designers thought the wizard staff was not formidable enough. Pretty soon you are bashing in suspicious walls in search of secrets and finding gold loot laying around from enemies you slay first with a mace, but pretty soon thereafter with some magic rings that shoot fireballs.

Problems With Wizordum

My problems with Wizordum, however, are not so much due to the game design or the fireball slinging. Yes, you could wonder how a fellow can sling fireballs, but I suppose God could grant a person the ability to sling fireballs if he wants to. As you get deeper in the game, though, the God hypothesis gets slammed shut due to the presence of the BFG mechanism in the weapons selection, which originally stood for Big Froggin’ Gun, (not really, use your imagination) but now stands for Big Froggin’ Grimoire. All you gotta do, of course, is just make a huge upside down pentagram with your finger and you are off to the races and things die.

This is in stark contrast to something like Doom, where there are blue million pentagrams all over the place because you are in Hell fighting demons who, it turns out really like pentagrams–especially evil ones:

That’s fine and well when you are in Hell battling evil demons. Their decor is gonna be the Led-Zeppelin-poster-in-the-bedroom equivalent of demon design/culture. Your job there is to shoot them in the face, and use their stuff against them. You are not skipping around drawing pentagrams leisurely with your finger. You are battling that and those that use that.

Same thing with Wolfenstein, which does not have any pentagrams in it as I recall, although it has a boatload of Nazis:

There is no shortage of Swastikas, but then again, a Nazi is gonna Nazi. You are killing those guys, cause they are bad and like bad Nazi stuff. Did you see robot Hitler? Nobody likes him. Did you see those skull flames in the above Doom picture? Yeah, nobody is gonna cry if the flaming skulls don’t come to their birthday party.

Bible Stuff

The Bible has some strong words on wizards, but usually the interpretation really means “sorcerers” which is a nuanced difference. Wizards might be all right–Moses is kind of a wizard. Sorcerers are doing nefarious things that aren’t sanctioned. This would include, in the case of Wizordum, invoking upside down pentagrams for the destruction of your evil nemesis. (nemeses?) Matthew 12:26 reads If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? So in addition to putting the player into the role of casting sorcery, it also is bad magical practice since it really would not work anyway. If you have evil demons, Satan is not interested in ridding you of those. Those are his bros. What he is interested in, probably, is screwing up your life so that you serve whatever his ends are. Sometimes that can come through from something as innocent as playing a game. Pretty soon, if you lack awareness, you remember all the times you drew a pentagram upside down in a game and nothing bad happened, so maybe you ought to try it in waking life, or you ignore it in reality because it is just a game. Of course, if the 90’s taught us anything, in hindsight, it has to be that people like Sean Diddy were running around doing all manner of crazy things that were far from anything anyone would consider holy.

Wizordum, then, to quote Maxwell Smart, “Missed it by that much”. The spirit is there, but the key to the entirety of gaming in the 90’s is missing. You want your parents to complain because upside down pentagrams are in the game to begin with, not because YOU are casting them. Otherwise, when they say the game is trying to make you Satanic, they just so happen to be right! That’s the most un-90’s thing imaginable–parents being right about technology. Apogee should know better.

New Tor Tools

If you missed it, the other day Tor introduced a new privacy tool called “oniux”.

It wasn’t clear to me whether or not wrapping other apps with the command “oniux” before it like the provided Hexchat example would work to produce a different IP while separating the namespace out via the proposed isolation mechanisms. So, I thought I’d give the trusty Lynx a whirl on the command line and see what happened. After going to the https://icanhazip.com link, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Lynx was reporting the IP of a tor exit node. I’m not even sure you could set up torsocks with Lynx without a mountain of pain, whereas Oniux makes it a one-step process. I’d like to, of course, understand more of what’s going on under the hood with maybe a future wireshark scan, or to watch some system calls go by via something like strace, but that kind of investigation is going to have to be left to others at the moment who probably have a more discerning eye than mine for any kind of security mistakes with those tools if they are in the habit of daily usage of them.

One Stop Apps

One stop apps are a mixed blessing because they make what what otherwise be a several step process turn in to only one, but you also have to “trust” the app to a certain extent. Multi-pieces like torsocks complain if some piece is broken readily. With only one app, there is only one thing that has to be breached in order for all your security to go out the window. On the other hand, all security is a trade-off between levels of trust and containment. Torsocks has been known to leak information if not configured correctly without complaint. It will be nice, however, to see how Oniux refines itself in terms of this security challenge over the forthcoming months.

Logitech G 502X

After purging myself of all Microsoft products, even my beloved ergonomic trackball style mouse, I hadn’t really replaced what I gave up with anything of quality mouse-wise other than some drug-store generic-three-button gaming mouse. It worked fine for what it was, but paired with the NsCDE (not so common desktop environment) which has become my regular graphical desktop windows system due to stability, (and familiarity since the first Linuxes I used had its ancestor on it–Common Desktop Environment) I needed something with more programmable buttons. (For instance, in NsCDE you can “iconify a program” which is very handy, but the keystrokes are not so handy)

A quick glance on the net showed that the Logitech G 502 X could do this job with compatibility. It appeared to be pricier than I wanted to pay, but eventually my wife was able to sleuth one at a deal that was within the price range I was willing to spend. The compatibility with Linux, however, turned out to not exactly be the truth.

Non System D

The Linux distro I run intentionally does not use System D. I don’t really have anything against System D, but I have seen enough concerning how it runs with regard to resolvers and defaults that I do not think it is especially interested in privacy of user information as a first principle. I get that it allows for a standardized way to deal with init scripts, but I don’t think standardization is the right barometer. Windows is, after all, standardized in many, many ways. It just also happens to be an evil operating system.

The recommendation for Linux, and the G502 mouse suggest a program called “libratbag” (who comes up with these names?) and a GUI interface called Piper. Piper, it turns out, relies heavily on System D, so you can forget about a nice little graphical interface for programming your mouse buttons. Libratbag doesn’t necessarily rely on System D, but has a stilted syntax and for the purposes of my needs, did not seem to allow for the mouse to actually do what I instructed Libratbag to do. (Libratbag does heavily suggest you use System D and since I was trying to avoid it, there is a good chance some user error was introduced that I didn’t spend more time trying to fix. I spent about a day trying different solutions anyway, and that was more than enough) So, another solution was going to have to happen, and this was likely going to mean firing up windows within a VM. One last stop before that point was trying Solaar. It didn’t even detect my mouse, so I knew it was off to the VM harbor.

Windows VM

I happened to have a Windows 7 VM all ready in Qemu, and thought I might try the suggested Onboard Memory Manger to program a profile to save to the mouse for use with Linux. This didn’t work, and I figured probably Windows 7 was a little too old for this trick. I wasn’t about to try the G Hub from Logitech on Windows 7 since past experience with Logitech and popular opinion suggested that G Hub was, on a good day, a dumpster fire. So, I thought I’d fire up a Windows 10 via Qemu utilizing QuickEmu. After some time, I was able to allow the mouse to pass through, but when I did, the keyboard would stop allowing me to type. So, the Onboard Memory Manager app worked, but I couldn’t tell it to do anything. My keyboard was not a USB style keyboard, so passing it through via USB was out of the question, so the next stop was VirtualBox.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox allowed all the passthroughs, and when I started the Onboard Memory Manager app it ran AND, importantly, I could type. Unfortunately, Onboard Memory Manager did not save my settings to the mouse and seemed to also not be detecting the full range of options available to the G502X. That meant that I was going to have to install the maligned Logitech G Hub software instead to do the job. Fortunately, it installed fairly smoothly, although I can see why people don’t like it. It is a large download for doing very little other than controlling mouse buttons, and it is very slow to start. It wants you to have an account which you must sign up for before you can use it, and all of this seems a little ridiculous just to program a mouse you own. The next complaint about it is that it is counter-intuitive to use, and there is a certain “Logitech G Hub dance” you have to do if you want to program your onboard memory. Fortunately for you, I’ve taken pictures of the process to help you cut down the time required to get what should be a simple task accomplished.

The Picture Tour

In order to program your new G502X or similar product, you are going to need to pay careful attention to the thing I’ve circled in yellow on the upper right. It tells you the name of the profile you are editing, which, in this example, is default. Once you edit whatever you intend to edit, which is probably going to be a macro, (there is a macro tab in the program for editing those) you drag it over to the button that corresponds to the mouse button you desire to trigger said action. Once you are done with that, you will need to push the second button, toward the lower left in my screen shot, that toggles the onboard memory manager on. When you do this, you won’t be able to edit your mouse buttons any more, since the system assumes you are finished with that. What you will be able to do is access the settings of the “On Board Memory Mode” which shows slots and profiles that are active. In my example I’ve drawn a yellow arrow next to the active profile. You want to be sure that whatever this says is the name of the profile you saw in the upper right when you were editing your mouse buttons. So, even though in the example photo it says “Profile 2” what it should say if we wanted settings we edited in the previous screen to take hold is “Default”. Once you do this, it is safe to close down your VM and your mouse, at least in my case, won’t work since it was passed through to the VM. You have to then unplug and re-plug your USB mouse into your tower or laptop.

Observations

If this seems convoluted and tortured to use system hardware, it’s because it is. Many are the pleas for G Hub to be supported on Linux, and Logitech usually answers the same which seems to be “We aren’t aware of any plans for this.” I guess they must be making enough from Windows users that it isn’t a priority, but it is odd to make your hardware dependent on a specific OS in the case of a mouse.

Outcome

A lot of time was spent for me trying to cajole this mouse into working with a non-systemd distro. Often, the world has a tendency to make the easy things the more costly in terms of the trade-offs. The assessment I’d give for this specific situation is that Logitech is needlessly making this entire process more difficult than it has to be because it wants email addresses and user device information–preferably from a windows system where it might be able to harvest even more data. This is not really treating your users with respect since the end goal isn’t to see how much information in terms of meta-data you can squeeze from your user base to sell to someone else. Rather, the business is to sell them a mouse that they can then use for their purposes. Anything else is an “unstated business objective” that the consumer isn’t necessarily agreeing to since their mouse is going to be held hostage until they agree to the corporate terms. While I think the G502X is a good product from the standpoint of function, the getting-it-there is an unnecessary snarl of some kind of corporate self-interest that shouldn’t be the case.

No Prophecy Around These Parts…

As I was searching around on the internet, I came across a criticism of modern churches that caught my attention. The observation was made that modern churches do not focus on prophecy or their fulfilment. After considering the observation made, I had to conclude that the author had a solid point. In most modern churches it is rare to hear much about Revelation while in many others the book is entirely avoided. What might explain this bias?

For One Thing…

There is a tendency in many congregations where a prophecy is involved to absolutely go nutzo bonkers in expectation of fulfilment. This kind of zeal is not exactly the “patient waiting on the Kingdom” kind of trait that is usually attributed to those who are considered to be holy. It is, on the other hand, a kind of wish fulfilment with an added force behind it of trying to make the prophecy come true on the terms of the believer or believers. A prophecy will likely never have to be forced since it is the will of YHVH for a prophecy to unfold. That is not to say, however, that there will not be contention and tension around a prophecy as it is fulfilled–particularly if the prophecy alludes to such a process. So, the hypothesis here is that congregations have become allergic to the concept of prophecy because believers tend to run off in all directions with what that means and cause the congregation to have to experience something of this roller coaster version of events. If you need a more secular case study though, I have got you!

Q Posts

The Q posts are a little like a prophecy in that they seem to allude to events that are going to happen. I’ve written a little about them here. Watching this movement gain momentum was somewhat equivalent to watching a tilt-a-world gain momentum. Despite some posts saying very clearly answers to questions posed, people ran off with what they wanted to be true as opposed to what was said. This of course led to subgroups of subgroups that were linked by “belief in thing X”. The splintering and fracturing continues until now with some who still think the plan is on, others who think Israel is the secret enemy of the world, some who think the whole thing is a psy-op, and still others who think neither of those things is what the posts are saying.

Prophecy In a Church

The same problems can happen when a prophetic voice arises in a church. For one thing, a prophetic voice that is authentic cannot be challenged. This might upset the power dynamic in the church, although if a church is looking for prophecy, it shouldn’t. One could easily see how a pastor who is faced with a prophecy that sounds negative about their ministry is going to be inclined to not want to hear whatever that prophecy is. Thing is, sometimes pastors are wrong, and sometimes others hear a word from YHVH concerning them. Of course, sometimes people also make up stuff too. This is where prayer and discernment enter the scene.

When Times are Wild

When a prophecy is getting close to being fulfilled, the Bible is full of wild events that begin to happen. Fake versions show up and people mistake them for the real deal. The real deal shows up, and people mistake it for the fake. Demons are in the middle of the conversation along with angels, and the level of mix-up chaos becomes high. Again, a congregation is going to want to instinctively avoid all of this kind of action. However, by trying to avoid it, it also finds itself outside the realm of living prophecy and how it might be fulfilled. This makes the church in that case a tool not for fulfilling the purposes of the Will of YHVH which is supposed to be its entire purpose.

When Times Are Not Wild

On the other hand, when times are not wild, then often a kind of prophecy begins to wake up in one way or another, and people believe it is near fulfilment but do not see the expected result. This causes a falling away from having faith in prophecy as people simply become burned out. A casual stroll through Twitter/X will show you what “burned out” people look like on all sides of the political spectrum. The same thing can happen in churches, and so more than a few leaders probably decide it is better to focus on the bulk of the Bible that has prophecies that are all ready fulfilled as opposed to the prophecies that will be fulfilled.

Weirdness About A Prophecy

The peculiar quality of a prophecy, though, is that it will be fulfilled when it is ready with or without the participation of those that ought to be sensitive to its coming. The prophecy is made so that faith is sustained and has something to focus on–not so people can lose their minds or their religion where the prophetic is concerned. The reactions in some congregations and subsequent avoidance is really the oppositekind of behaviour YHVH seems to want His people to have concerning these future utterances. Rather, they are supposed to be a kind of extra confirmation that YHVH keeps His word, and His people should turn back to Him. Shutting one’s eyes to His prophecies written in His books because it is inconvenient to congregation leaders and congregations says more about those who are convened in assembly than about any of the prophecies. If there is a problem with the Bible, where does the problem, do you suppose, ultimately lie? With YHVH, or with people?

Worthwhile Sci-Fi

As a Sci-Fi author, I have some opinions on what constitutes good science fiction. Farscape in my opinion, is at the top of the list of very good Sci-Fi. If you haven’t seen it, then go flush around 68 hours of your life away watching the series. You’ve probably spent time doing far worse.

Basic Premise of the Show

The plot Farscape explores concerns wormholes and interstellar travel. There are more than a few cautionary episodes of what might happen if you unlock a quantum scenario you don’t understand–and then there are more than a few episodes that are cautionary if you unlock a quantum scenario that you do understand. However, an interesting piece of information concerning the series was that the two leads were in New York when 9-11 hit after a convention and were preparing to book travel to the United Kingdom. Then, my astrological senses kicked in, and I noticed that Ben Browder who plays John Crichton in the series has a birthday that is situated on December 11th, 1962. Claudia Black, who plays Aeryn Sun, has a birthday that lands her existence on October the 11th, 1972. Those two towers at the time had a very “11” kind of existence–they were after all twins of one another. That got me to thinking about what Farscape’s leads possible birth charts look like. The question, it turns out, bore some unexpected fruit.

Some Assumptions

Before I post the charts, I want to make my assumptions clear. This analysis is coming from the Roman calendar system, which ought to be obvious. There are other ways of keeping time, and some of those ways of keeping time probably would not align with both birthdays being on “11” days. The next thing is that I am using Astrotheme’s information for the charts, and it appears that Claudia Black’s chart does not have a solid birth time. The basic characteristics of the day will remain about the same, but the house expression can change drastically with differing birth times. Still, for the level of analysis I intend to offer, it is enough to make some general observations. With these essential assumptions and limitations being made, I will move on to the charts.

Ben Browder’s Chart

Browder has a very “left-oriented chart”. This usually means the personal will and matters of Aries/Mars are going to be more prominent than typical. The Seventh house, the house of Justice and relationships has a wound in Pisces via Chiron, with a Jupiter sitting next to it. This indicates some proclivity toward spiritual injury and injustice and being put in some position to do something about it. The North Node of the chart sits in the 11th house in Cancer, and away from the 5th house in Capricorn, and suggests a more emotional existence among whatever Ben Browder’s “tribe” is as he moves along his soul journey. The 6th house pops with a Saturn in Aquarius, which says something about how those emotions might come up, and in this case it has to do with groups and karma. All of this chart is relative to Browder’s birth,in Memphis, Tennessee which is, of course, named after the town in Egypt.

Claudia Black’s chart has Libra all over it. It appears to be situated in the bottom half of the circle, which usually makes a person more private. On the other hand, the wound appears in Aries at the top in the Ninth house, and all the contacts from that go straight to Libra. The implication is that information and justice/communication are bound up in relationships in massive ways. The North node here is in Capricorn in the sixth, and away from Cancer, which is the opposite of Browder’s chart. If you take into consideration all the Libra stuff going on in Black’s chart, and see it as a kind of mirror to all the Aries contacts of Browder’s chart, the two are somewhat like mirrors of one another from an astrological perspective. Black is born in Sydney, Australia, which is in the “upside down” hemisphere relative to Browder. Australia has a lot of history, but a big chunk of it concerns England using it as a prison for people for some time.

Take Um Together

If you take both Browder’s and Black’s charts together, you get a kind of spiritual headwound conversation with Chiron in Pisces and Chiron and Aries. You can actually see this dynamic in action by their responses to the trauma of 9-11:

In 2016 I asked Ben if he wanted to share his thoughts looking back :

Angie,

My most enduring moments from 9/11 are ones of compassion and hope. Horrible things happen and we are witness to the great wrongs that people can commit. In the aftermath, there was so much good and caring.

I saw the buildings come down, staring down the avenues of New York.

I watched people stream North out of the city,rubble and dust covered, their eyes glazed in shock.

I walked through an eerie and silent Times Square the evening of 9/11.

But what sticks in my soul was watching strangers and acquaintances caring for their fellows.

For every terror there is a balm in beauty.

Peace

Ben

More from the post from 2016 :
Special thanks to Dani from Farscape.world who found the post!!!!!!!!!! I think I knew the coffee from Ben’s email to me—-

Ben, Claudia, David, and company safe in NYC
by Mary Wood – Wednesday, September 12th 2001

Category: Old News

Claudia Black just posted to the scifi.com bulletin board:

The purpose of this message is two-fold.
Firstly, thank you for a successful and very enjoyable convention tour.
Secondly we would like to send out our best wishes to everyone in New York. We walked into town and lit a >candle on the steps of a closed church last night. What else is there to do but try and give blood and pray >for everyone.

We are here in town until the planes start running and are being taken care of by a large and caring group >of collegues from the Henson Group. So lucky to have members of our work family with us at this time.

As much as I have wondered how Aeryn would be dealing with this the very human me has been a little teary, >a lot scared and very grateful to be alive.

Ben has plying me with chocolate and has firmly established himself as a real life hero.

Chick with gun and black tee signing out for now somewhere in nyc…..

Original source: http://benbrowder.net/bb/news/11-september-2021/

Notice what sticks for Browder in his soul, people caring for one another in a compassionate way–Chiron in Pisces. Black is donating blood. Chiron in Aries.

For Browder, his birth comes slightly before the JFK assassination, another kind of head wound. For Black, her birth overlaps the presidency of Nixon, which one could argue is another kind of head wound–a type of war over who had leadership of the United States.

It seems both their existence, and the show Farscape, are all caught up in trying to deal with some kind of injustice (via Black) around beliefs/children/travel (via Browder’s Sag. Sun). In doing the show, they happened to be at a spot where another kind of grave head wound was inflicted. Both of them would later jump to the Sci-Fi (I hate that rebrand to Syfy–what even is that?) series Stargate which is another discussion entirely, but then, since you have seen their Natal charts now, you somewhat know the hows and whys of that transformation.

The final piece of analysis that might be important is that both John and Aeryn, Biblically speaking, appertain to the voice which is prophetic which emits ultimately from God. A head wound is, if nothing else, a way of shutting someone up–the idea being if your head is missing you probably won’t be doing a lot of speaking. Maybe John Crichton was a weird way of trying to “Make the way straight” in a collective conscious manner. If so, his main convert would surely have been Aeryn, who goes from a creature of war to one understanding love and its place in the universe…

Radio Message

While I was driving the car on my way to town, I had the radio tuned to a more conservative station. While I wasn’t listening to the station carefully, I did hear a snippet that stood out. The speaker was explaining how people get angry when God does not change. I was not sure which way the speaker was going to take this topic, but then he began to discuss God’s specific values and civilization. Civilization, he was saying, gets mad because its values change and they call it progress and then they become perturbed with God because He won’t change His values to condone whatever the civilization decides is good. The examples he used were actions like adultery, and homosexuality. God, he said, is not going to rubber stamp these issues with approval, because He has all ready said they are not approved actions.

Gamergate Stuff

A little later, I was sailing about on the internet, and came across some fairly recent controversy concerning James Rolfe–better known as the Angry Video Game Nerd. I was well acquainted with his work as I’d seen it around when it first hit the web. I generally found it amusing along with Red vs Blue and all the other stuff that came out during that time that hit a similar nerve. Apparently, though, Rolfe took some payout for reviewing some game that he didn’t review recently, and this has caused a kind of Gamergate re-emergence accusation to emerge in no small part because Rolfe is probably the personification of a white guy. I’m not sure that Rolfe in 2025 reviewing games is still as good of an idea as it was in 2008 and before. There is something a little sad about someone still reviewing games when you are pushing 50–especially when those games were made mostly in the 80’s and 90’s. (I think he does more modern games now as well) What was weird, though, were how the people skewering Rolfe on several boards were coming at it from “Rolfe is part of the old web, and probably doesn’t even know trans people exist.” The critical, key parts that stand out here is that Rolfe is now, dated, which arguably has a basis as I mentioned playing and reviewing games in your 40’s as a lifestyle is definitely a little weirder than your 20’s and 30’s. It isn’t because he is playing the games though, but because he hasn’t updated himself concerning the trans agenda that seems to be trying to assert itself as some kind of “new thing”

Trans And God

Thing is, trans stuff is old—like Giants falling out of heaven old. God dealt with it then, and He did not deal with it in an approving way. This was because the Giants, which were the offspring of angels that fell out of heaven due to a desire to have sex with mortal, human women, had abandoned their posts and taught humanity a slew of things that were sorcery. Likewise, since they were not made to inhabit the Earth, their appetites could not be sated, and so they became cannibals and physically deformed. The key thing to remember is that the Giants fell due to DESIRE FOR SEX. It was not LOVE that caused them to fall, but lust. Their relationships were not authorized. Likewise, neither are same sex relationships authorized in the Heavenly Kingdom.

Modern and Hip is Old and Sin

With respect to James Rolfe, and the internet at large, what is being said is that he’s not cool because he doesn’t have the new thing with trans stuff down, which is actually an old thing that got the giants killed and ultimately condemned to Hell. Generations tend to go through these kinds of periodic revolts where they think they have something figured out that God hasn’t solved and then they expect that God is gonna change because they are so progressive and right about their interpretation of what is good and just. (like the radio program was saying) Of course, to determine that, one has to have their spiritual eyes fully open, and if we have learned anything over the past 2,000 years, it is that most people do not have their spiritual eyes open nor can they discern good from evil in a meaningful sense on a given day. The Holocaust which, in hindsight, now everyone regards as evil, was regarded as “maybe kinda a good idea” during the time it happened. Do you know how you know that was the case? Because it happened. Now, all sides want to try to claim the Holocaust as their rallying call, except the Holocaust was, primarily, against the Jewish people first and foremost. Do you know why that was? Because Jewish people have been hated in many places they have lived for a long, long time, in part because they serve as a reminder to civilizations that want to rubber stamp something that God doesn’t approve of that they exist and will not bend their knees to a given King or dictator. While it is true some will assimilate, the ones that are problems are always the ones who keep following God apart from the civilization they happen to be surrounded by in terms of “progressive agendas”.

Being Color Blind

At the same time, while everyone screams equality, they certainly keep alive certain narratives–and in the case of the Holocaust often one they have appropriated–that point out the differences perceived as opposed to the common causes shared. Jewish people can’t talk about the Holocaust in reference to their story, because well, nobody likes Jews, don’t you know? It’s a real Catch-22. A people are heavily discriminated against because of what they believe about God to the point they are tortured and killed, but they cannot freely talk about how that experience plays into being Jewish and the greater story of Israel because everyone else hates Israel and Jewish people too much and wants to hold them accountable for smaller versions of the greater sins they themselves are committing.

What No One Says

The thing everyone forgets, though, is God allowed the Holocaust to happen. For many Jewish people, that was a deal breaker. On the other hand, because God allows a thing to happen to His people, He will contend and correct them on His own, and THEN He will contend and correct the ones who thought they could issue the correction as being holier in some way than His chosen people. One can imagine the second correction is much more likely to be harsher than the first.

Which Brings Us To Progress and the Web

So finally, all these folks shouting Nazi and white privilege must believe, on some level, that they are more just than the people they are shouting down. This implies they have their spiritual eyes open, which means they must be serving God correctly, right? If that isn’t right, it means their spiritual eyes are closed, and they are not serving God but are in fact serving the adversary and dressing it up like it is progress, hip, cool, and whatever other word you want to use. (I’ll borrow a more recent one that fits, they think it is ‘fire’–yep) Going to Hell doesn’t make you more progressive, just, or cool, but it does make you potentially a great deal hotter. If a person wants to explore why the internet has degraded in quality and interaction, a good place might be this event with Rolfe and Gamergate, and what it portends.