JB's Place

Some Days It Feels Like You Wake Up In The Twilight Zone

Today, one of the first things brought to my attention are various articles about how HIPPA does not prevent a business from asking about your Covid vaccination.
The first thing that I thought about that was “Well, duh, HIPAA is mostly law about how hospitals and medical places have to handle your medical data.” In other words,
if you transfer medical information around, how are places that get that data to handle the info? The legislation says “Very carefully!”. So no, a business asking about
your vaccination status has nothing to do with a HIPAA violation, because you would be voluntarily giving them the info. They do not all ready have access to said info
from your healthcare provider. On the other hand, we can imagine a situation where it is a violation…hang on to your hats!

Excuse me, M’am, I Was Wondering If You Had An Abortion?

WHAT? HOLY SHIT! GET THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER! BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES! CALL IN THE NATIONAL GUARD AND TEN ATTORNEYS! HEADS WILL ROLL! HOW DARE YOU! 9th and 14th Amendments!

See what I did there? I simply changed the situation a little to discuss ABORTION–you know–killing the unborn because it is inconvenient in some way or another and with instant
clarity you know your rights. Hell, you even get a slogan “My Body, My Rights!” Really? So like, I don’t HAVE to get the shot? Do you HAVE to get an abortion?

But That’s NOT the Same!

Sure, you say that your decision not to murder your child is your choice and it does not affect anyone else, right? What about all the people the kid could have interacted with,
or societal things they might have done? You might just have deprived humanity of a Nobel prize winner, or a future politician who can help mend broken things. So, your abortion
and your choice does, in point of fact, have a consequence to me. Let us not mention the whole “murder, guilty feeling” you are going to have that will form the nexus of the rest
of your life experiences. In the same way, getting or not getting the vaccine affects others potentially. Why is that? Well, for certain abortion affects life in a way that you
cannot undo it. The vaccine, though we cannot get firm science saying it works, most affects whether or not YOU personally get COVID. Why just you? Because at a certain point, as
any doctor can tell you, herd immunity kicks in. If it does not kick in, something else is going on. So, at a certain saturation point of people with immunity which can came from
getting the vaccine or not–whether you get the vaccine or not matters only to your life. Your body, your choice! Don’t like that fact? Too bad. My body, my choice! Right?

A Little Education On the Amendments

The 14th Amendment disallows discrimination to classes of people in addition to outlawing slavery. We fought a whole war over it. You should look it up sometime. The Ninth Amendment
concerns protection of rights not otherwise written into the Bill of Rights. In other words, just because we could not think of every right does not therefore mean there are other
rights which the document does not protect. When you put these things together you get fun legal precedent such as “A woman (gender class 14th amendment) has the right (9th amendment)
to choose what she does with her body. (murdering the unborn). By the same magic we can say “People who do not want the vaccine (14th amendment) have the right (9th amendment) to
refuse it. But it affects other people who might die? Tough shit! Give me back the Nobel Prize winner who would have come up with the vaccine to this within the first week that you
aborted! Can’t do it? Well then, maybe this whole thing is more like a cultural kind of retribution from a power much greater than anyone here discussing things. Might oughta have
a chat with /him/her/it and see what /he/she/it thinks. I did not capitalize those pronouns you noticed, because for all I know you may pray to a shoe.

As An Aside

Usually plagues have a certain curve to them. They do not keep “changing form relentlessly” especially when the news cycle shifts into a story that might be more interesting than the plague.
If you are not yet smelling something rotten in Denmark, my guess is it is only because you all ready could not breathe.

Those That Build

Before I even begin writing this post, there is necessary background. It comes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Yes, the classics.

With this deep viewing follows a necessary axiom: Your users will never want nor be satisfied with what you build. Ever.
Here is the next one: You are going to rebuild a tower over and over and over and each time you are going to convince yourself the software or solution is better.
It isn’t.

What Do I Mean?

Recently, I was thinking about the internet and social interaction. Historically, I was thinking about how pubs were the places that people would go in order to interact with others.
When you were physically at the pub, it was understood that if you started talking in a manner that you should not, some guy might just beat the shit out of you. If he did not do that,
he might challenge you to a duel. Either way, what you spoke was potentially going to have consequences.

A 24hr Pub

The internet, I am afraid, has turned into a 24 hour pub. The problem with that is that not everyone knows they are on a pub or that they might have had too much to drink. Likewise,
they do not understand that what they are doing in the pub does not go away when you “leave the pub” for the simple reason that you can never leave the pub. Since you cannot see
your fellow pub patron, you do not necessarily know when you might have spoken in a way you should not have. Worse, it could be the case that because you cannot see the pub patron,
you do not really care how they react to anything you do or say. This could create some situations, clearly, that would have resulted in the old pub backdrop in getting your face
punched or your guts shot. In other words, there was some very established norms of behavior and solutions for those problems.

Enter the Indie Web

So something that seemed like it might solve some of these concerns are the ideas behind the Indie Web. The problem though, is I was all ready on the Indie Web in 2004. We had tracebacks,
callbacks, webmentions or whatever you want to call them. We also all had blogs. Then, smart phones came onto the scene, and the attention span shrank to the size of the flea. Blogs
basically dried up, along with all the blogrolls and so on that were present. The idea behind the Indie Web movement though, is that you have a definite identity that is yours. If you
start talking smack, I can hunt you down and see who or what you are talking to. You have skin in the social interaction game. That seems positive, right? Well of course it is. The problem,
though, as I mentioned, is that in 2004 we all ready went through all this. We built a tower, and it fell into the swamp. Before that, Geocities had us building a tower, and then that too
fell into the swamp. Then we started giving away all of our personal info to be social and that model is in the process of falling into the swamp.

I Do Not Want the Indie Web on This Blog

On this particular blog, I do not want the Indie Web. Why? Because it is not inherently social. If anything, it would be selectively social for comments I felt like advanced the conversation
of the material present. That, however, puts the onus on me to regulate those comments. I have enough to do in my life all ready. Figuring out whether some comment is genuine or from
a bonafide douche bag is down on my list of things I enjoy undertaking. yet, all this underscores something about the nature of this blog. This blog is more like a platform where someone
has a microphone. It is my identity, and you get to listen/read my speeches. I do not want nor care to hear what you have to say back in most cases unless you write me an email. Even then,
if it is not on the topic of the matters I am discussing, I do not care to receive your email.This is a marked difference to the Indie web idea of “Let’s all be in a community and read one
another’s stuff.” And yet, there are some things that are only germinated by such an interaction–like the American Revolution.

The Solution?

The internet began as a kind of academic web. The identity of the user base was pretty easy to understand. Nowadays, we are trying to have too many identities in too many different ways
that do not really an identity make. If you own a domain on a server, that is a unique identity. You have a website. Yet, with that identity, you might not want to be a part of the model
of interaction that has been promulgated. The only thing left at that juncture is to fragment your identity across different solutions–hence all the different social networks we have.

The Actual Solution?

We still have not totally integrated technology into our lives in a reasonable way. We use it in our careers and for social reasons, but we are simply not made to be in a pub that
is open 24 hours–let alone one with a perfect memory and no immediate accountability to quickly, and ironically, kick our asses or shoot our guts out. It gives us the illusion that
our words have no consequence. After all, if you get rid of some social contact that lives across the country, do you really miss them all that much? Not as much as if you saw them
each day. That, at its core, is why the internet is a weird thing to try to exist upon, and why the tower will always be rebuilt and fall into the swamp. The problem is in the wetware,
not the software.

A Podcast On A Previous Domain

In about 2015/2016, my wife and I conceived of an idea to have an online podcast show. We decided to call it Nearly Sacred. As I mentioned on another post on this site, that website was attacked and then the domain was stolen. Keep in mind, this happened before Trump and de-platforming had become a common occurrence.

The podcast discussed sacred matters such as things hidden and plain sight as well as the daily news and speculated on whether something may or may not be a conspiracy theory. Answer: A group of people did conspire to take down the podcast and to steal the domain. As the company who wound up with the domain’s founder says–he was just a greedy guy who liked money. So, evidently, somehow, someway, our podcast must have been threatening someone’s idea of money–or else they were trying to keep us from monetizing our content.

Later, Our Store Also Faced This

Later on our brick and mortar store also faced the same process. Local police and law enforcement along with government were useless. Actual threats were made. What is your recourse when the legal avenues that are supposed to work for enforcement are lackadaisical? Same thing with government institutions.

Society Sometimes Goes Crazy For Awhile

History is replete with examples of society periodically losing its mind. So, the natural thing to do is to get another website and start over. The problem is, though, if something is rotten at the level of the Domain, you cannot start over since censorship inevitably comes through another means. The web is supposed to enable everyone to speak, but what about when it does not, where do you go?

Well, You Can Go Decentralized, Sorta

So this site along with many of my other sites is decentralized. It is easy to push and pull the code and the only expense I have for it is strictly the domain name itself. If the domain name goes down for some reason, I just link it on up to some other form of domain name. The problem with this is that many places that help serve decentralized sites may not be so decentralized. Github, for instance, is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft is not known for its support of freedom. The bigger issue even before all that is you need a connection and some place that provides internet service.

The Web Was Supposed to be About Freedom of Information

The web was supposed to be about freedom of information and FREEDOM from tyranny. The same thing was true with the Declaration of Independence. Other documents that have something like that in mind might be the Covenant in the Bible. This new world we are inhabiting is allowing the technology to “wag the dog”. There are places like IPFS out there, but “normal” people cannot use those places. There are cryptocurrencies out there, but “normal” people struggle to understand the vocabulary.

I Finally Built A New Domain

After all of the above trouble, I was able to eventually build a new website domain. The trouble with getting there though, was immense. First I tried Heroku, and it promised a free domain but it proved very difficult to point any other domain at it without paying additional fees. Then, it seemed it would work if I had the latest “Flat DNS Alias” record, but then it did not after changing name registrars. In essence, there was a lot of “being run around” for something very straight forward. Keep in mind, my degree is in IT and if I am having trouble, you better bet your ass someone else who does not have a degree in IT would have serious difficulty.

Ultimately…

Ultimately I went with a hosted platform that I installed things to, but even there there were several glitches. I really just wanted to host my stuff on my own webserver at home, but the ISP I use made that impossible by their agreements and crippling the router used.

We Have A Serious Free Speech Problem…

I have always been told that we are free to disagree with people, but the weight of the arguments should help us decide the truth. What we are not supposed to do is “silence people” even those with whom we disagree. If we are going to start doing that, then where do we stop silencing people? What a boring world that would be–where everyone agrees with you or is abducted from their home in the middle of the night because they do not. That is not a way to build consensus. It is not even American. Maybe Soviet. Not American. The people who do this are traitors and should be treated as so and deported from the United States to some other regime that their actions might gain them favor. If we do not do this, how is anybody ever supposed to build anything to have a life? If I can come in and knock down everything you do and then “shut you up” by censoring all of your means of communication and then further not having any law enforcement do anything about any of it, then what good are rights? Answer: They are useless. I do not care what rights you fought for. If this fundamental right is gone, none of the rest matter.

Learning IT

My suggestion is to learn a basic form of guerrilla IT. What would you do if you were in a Third World Shit Hole where some dictator is coming in targeting the local population? How would your infrastructure work then? You can use the established channels, but have these other means of broadcast in mind. You never know when your life could suddenly be ruined because you have run afoul of the thought-police. Of course, they also never known when their time is up…

Open Source Astrology Software

I have, in studying the realms of astrology, come across different programs or had cause to use one more so than another. I have always felt since the universe gives you your chart
for free, the basic information ought to be available for free. Analysis, of course, requires expertise and experience. Such a thing is something that does not come for free since such a
skill set is acquired at the expense of time.

Time Is Money

Astrology is quite literally a reckoning of time. The orbit of the planets dance in predictable way. These dances form cycles and patterns that in turn can be helpful in understanding the nature of the life
of the person who has the chart in question. Many people read these patterns with various success and multi-faceted intent. My specialty appertains more to soul evolution. It is something I have developed
in the over fifteen years I have read charts.

Tools I Use

Fist of all, I do not tend to use windows for much of anything. I have, in the past, used Solar Fire on Windows XP/7. Certainly, it is a great capable software, but it also comes at quite a high price tag. Since I rely more on Linux types of OS’s,
I am interested in software that comes for free with the open source movement. For that, it narrows the field to Openastro. Openastro does not build on current Ubuntu distros well as of this writing. On the other hand, Arch Linux distros run
Openastro quite well out of the AUR user repos. The issue I ran into that apparently someone resolved in the AUR concerned library versions in the tarball source files when I tried to run the software on Ubuntu. If you are on Arch, install an AUR helper like yay. You
do that by typing pacman -S yay or something close to it. After you get yay installed, then simply run yay -S openastro and you are off to the races. The nice thing about yay is that it takes care of all of the package dependencies of Openastro. No downloading of
Ephemerides and so on for you! That’s for Schmucks!

How I Use Openastro

I use Openastro mainly for Natal charts although there are many other options present. Certainly there are not as many options as SolarFire, but what do you expect for free? If you have 90% of the functionality and zero the cost, that sounds like a pretty good deal
to me.

The Other Thing I Use

Now we move on to the other thing I use. Most of the rest of the Linux tools out there for astrology have not stuck with me. However, using wine as an emulator for Astrolog I can get any other functionality I might need. Astrolog has
many fixed stars that it will display. It is not a Linux native application, though, which ideologically somewhat diminishes it. Still, for free, this thing can do some pretty amazing things some of which is not necessarily in commercial level software. With these two
basic tools and an Arch linux distro, I can get by and get the majority of anything I might want to get done for free.

Free Ain’t Free

Of course, I all ready said time is money. Hence, people working on this software are investing time. If you want them to continue to do that, you should give them something to show you value that time–and not “less” because it is free. Do you want a world
where people only pay more because everyone demands at least $400 for their skill set? Why not simply get into a Mexican standoff and point gun at each other and have an auction for who will get to fire their bullet? Right. So value the free stuff! Help the labor of loves out!

The Web In The Beforetime

In the later 90’s, the web was a place where people created things. There were no firm rules or search engine rankings or Twitter identities to incorporate. Rather, there were people making and creating and writing about matters they loved. There was no expectation for any of those creations to “do anything” and yet the result was that much of what was created was a remarkable well of knowledge from which one could find all manner of facts and inspiration. Nobody was especially concerned about monetizing their website since monetizing a website did not really exist.

Corporations

Then, paradise was rudely interrupted by corporations. Most of these corporations were concerned with how to monetize the internet to make money as corporations tend to do. Gradually, the hobbyist type sites were eliminated because they were no longer profitable to host. All of this was akin to a flower garden being destroyed so that a new parking lot could be put in its place. Passionate people making things and exploring and compiling were becoming rarer. One blockage to that process concerned that one gradually needed to be not only able to create in the sense of writing, but also one needed to understand something about coding and web standards. Gradually, the idea that one should code if they wanted to say anything at all became the new paradigm. Of course, this misses the point of technology serving human beings and instead makes human beings serve technology. An antecedent was established perhaps in the industrial revolution. As opposed to making factories to serve people, people were turned more into machines to serve factories.

But Wait, It Gets Worse And There Is More

More recently, we have not only decided people need to be able to code, but they also better be especially politically aware of the climate at all times. In particular, it is not a good idea to be straight, white, male, or Christian or have some other specific spiritual faith that is “conservative”. If you happen to have an off day and your tweet can be used for social justice, get ready for a wild ride. Now the internet has become a tool of “gotchas”. If you do not have a social media profile, maybe you have something to hide so you should not be hired. By the way, have you thought about money in the past three seconds? You better answer your email and make sure you field all calls because you no longer have an excuse of having been away from a phone.

On Some Level, We Have All Consented to this Dystopian World

Deep inside all of us, we somehow think this is right or normal human behavior. Actually no, no we do not. However, we are willing to put up with it and then wonder why we feel lifeless. So here is a confession–I am one of the few people in technology who can say I liked Macromedia Flash. No, I am not talking about the plugin and I am certainly not talking about the security features. What I am talking about is the ability for someone with some artistic ability to come into some software and make something. Flash was especially good for this. Indeed, there was programming language to be had behind its interface, but one did not necessarily have to delve deeply into that unless one wished to. Instead, one could “play around” with Flash and then see if learning the language was something that added to that play or not. Now that Flash is dead, everyone seems to think that we have progressed in security and the web. From the standpoint of code, sure. From the standpoint of human beings using tools to be creative, no. Rather, it is a step backwards.

Fancy Metaphors

I have been around the computer scene long enough to see all kinds of buzz words come and go. The bottom line, though, is that the concrete metaphors tend to stick and the abstract ones tend to go by the wayside. There are exceptions to this rule. Hypercard, for instance, was a technology that allowed common people to understand how to put together presentations and basic software. It got axed, though, ultimately because a select group of people thought that it was too messy from a programming standpoint. So, why could not people who want to use these technologies be given some VM area of the machine to use them if they are security risks where there are basically built-in firewalls or firejails? The code might not need to be fixed in the sense that the interface is enjoyable to use. Maybe instead we need to think about how to make a walled garden around “messy apps” so people who are creative can use tools they understand.

All Of This Pertains to Starting New things

Why? Well, because when you start new things, you often ask yourself questions like how it will make money. The funny thing about starting new things is that questions like that tend to kill them process before it begins. You do not make things to make money necessarily. You make things because on some level you enjoy the process of creating things. You hold a job that hopefully allows you some in between of doing a skill that you are good at and also supports you financially. If your creation suddenly takes off, that is always a bonus. Odds are, though, if you find it fun and valuable, somebody else somewhere does as well. Whether or not they will reward you with actually units of exchange or whether they simply want to share in the pleasure of the thing, though, is a different matter with societal scope beyond the all ready long piece.

Back To Stuff That Is Sorta fun

So, I am going to personally go back to the Hypercards and Flashes and Visual Basics of the world. I do not care if is sloppy or encourages bad programming habits. I do not care of some arbitrary code aesthetic is violated either. What I do care about are the simple joys that some of these interfaces bring. After all, a thing does not have to be perfect in order to be a fun creation. Computers somewhere along the way have become about endless work and money. Of course, that was not at all about how they started, so how do we account for winding up in this digital wasteland?

Is It Flattery When People Steal Your Stuff?

More than a few times in my life, I have been stolen from. The usual remedy for when people steal from you is to take them to court. Of course, that assumes you want to pay money for attorneys and court
fees. It likewise assumes you believe the court is or will be just. I stopped making that assumption long ago in the case of courts sanctioned by men. The reason is fairly simple. The incentive to lie is
high for many involved. Why? Because money tends to follow lies. It often does not follow truth.

Some time in 2014, my wife and I conceived of the idea of having a podcast. The domain we requisitioned for this podcast was nearlysacred.com. You probably guessed that was the name on the basis of the
large screen capture provided. Here is a wayback link from 2016. The place I purchased the domain from was Hostgator.

Website Gets Hosed

Sometime around 2017 or the end of 2016, our website which at the time used Wordpress, was Denial of Service attacked. This was the tip of the spear concerning other attacks both digital and otherwise
later. The attack also took the time to inject some unwanted code into the website with the idea of leaving some trojans behind. I simply deleted the site. No biggie. It was backed up anyway. I decided
after changing my email and other accounts around as a precaution that I needed to change web hosting providers as well. The only complication there was the domain and that should be easy enough.

Old Email

Problem was, my old email was listed as the contact, and the purchasing card for the website domain was entangled with an old account whose card credentials did not belong to me. No biggie there either. I
ought to be able to prove I am who I say I am, since this is the digital age. We all have digital footprints the size of entire states. Hostgator, though, refused to accept any specific proof of who I said
I was. After trying with tech support over the time of probably around three months, I decided since it was close to renewal time on the domain that I would simply have to settle for renewing the domain
and then putting in my updated credentials. Hostgator had, apparently, stringent security which should be a good thing. I could not fault them for that entirely, although it seemed a tad unreasonable
given all the documents I had provided proving that I was who I said I was.

Domain Is Gone

When renewal rolls around, the option to renew the domain through re-upping it does not appear. In fact, the domain would not be available until 2020 and if I wanted it before then it had an asking price
of about 2,000 bucks. Since I purchased the domain for around 15, I was somewhat flattered that it was that valuable, but also annoyed that someone had taken something that belonged to me and was now
essentially ransoming my property. I strongly suspected that Hostgator had not allowed me to prove who I said I was because they had some agreement with agencies such as these. Think about it, you are
a company and you invest a lot of time on your web presence and suddenly you cannot get your domain due to changes that are company based–a fairly common occurrence. If you refuse to accept any proof
of someone’s identity, then you have a real interesting scenario open to you where you can then ditch the domain to shady Gus and then ask for thousands of dollars. Maybe Gus greases your palm in return.

To Today

As you can see from my screen capture, the domain is still owned by someone else, but the interesting thing is that this domain registrar claims to have owned it since 2015. Really? I think they are
trying to re-write history. The company that bought the domain has an illustrative quote from the owner of the company:

“I’m just really greedy,” said Mann, a man no one would describe as modest. “I want to own the world.”

I guess at least the guy is honest? Here is a link to an article discussing him.
And here is a link to the company he founded.

So I guess the business model is to lie and manipulate and steal things other people build into something valuable and use Hostgator as a sort of “fence”. The only way I can see this situation being
other than this is if Hostgator uses this company for their domain registration, but if they do, why oh why would they want to? Are they in some domain name mafia together?

In the end, I suppose it does not really matter in the sense that I have a new domain for our podcast. It is just interesting to see how business is done. The new domain, if you are interested, is at
nearlysacred.us.

Flashback to Twelve Years Ago Or So…

Picture this, if you will. A man sits in a basement surrounded by decently nice computer equipment. In his monitor he begins to type on his blog, which in 2008 is a “fairly big deal”. The lines he pecks out read “I believe America could be made Great Again.”. Indeed, such a man would perhaps be caught in the machinations of fate unwittingly. The slogan is self-evident and not especially novel, but no one is saying it. The comments he gets on his article ask a question in earnest–when was America “great”. Indeed, these people list the grievances they have of all the inequalities in the country not at all addressing those actions which have been implemented to help correct them. Such a man, in the final years of acquiring his degree for Telecom, such a man would probably not have imagined that in twelve short years the level of instability that would take place as a great plague would be unleashed upon the nation in the form of an alleged bio-weapon. Indeed, such a man who would be writing at that point would definitely not anticipate the shortness of the attention spans that would be parsing such key information and since twitter had not yet begun its meteoric ascent, microblogging would not seem to be a natural extension of life. No, such a man would understand older tomes with their lengthy descriptions of things and demand that one must sit and read them carefully over a period of weeks. One was once called “classically educated” for doing this. Now, no one can agree on what a book or an author is or who owns one.

If You Hadn’t Figured It Out…

That guy from twelve years ago was me. Even then, however, I had been of the opinion that our reality was changing in ways that were not sustainable. Even then, I was not entirely fond of what passed for a “liberal education”. Indeed, it seemed to me much sleight-of-hand was at work. I settled on IT because IT work had distinct, unarguable (mostly) answers. I had a job of sorts then as well as acquaintances. Most of these acquaintances, in hindsight, were mere associations of convenience. In truth, there was nothing lasting in those associations because nothing lasted. Instead, we were merely sojourners on a similar journey sharing the roadway for a time. Perhaps if I had known that then, my choices would have been different–or perhaps the world has changed. Indeed, something has changed because whereas once we could basically agree on the rudiments of reality, it is clear we no longer can manage to do so.

My Revolutionary Book

I did, shortly before this current Covid crisis, release a book on meditation that I said was Revolutionary. The time for change was upon us, and has been quite in earnest since 2017. Those who encountered me previous to this time know well what my message was, though they seem to have a form of collective amnesia. I wonder, does Covid erase your memory? Or, is it rather, that if someone foresees such a problem and warns you of it, it is better that they not exist in your conception of the world since that would mean something quite scary concerning the nature and status of the country?

How I Have Spent the Time

I have spent the time in the interim watching people attempt to escape restrictions that they, on one level or another, disagree with. This year I mowed a large amount of acreage approximately twenty-five times during quite changing conditions. I likewise surveyed out, engineered and developed a networking solution for these refugees who would all be attempting to live some semblance of life as usual. In both of these matters, I achieved that which was challenging considering the chaos–a relative stability. The grass mostly stayed short. The network, by and large, worked. Oh, there were issues with those who used software like Zoom, but then, that was the fault of the software. Everyone was clamoring to get something done somehow, and for each of them it was urgent.

Except, in most cases it was not. I think about all those who were supposed to be assisting in some way to stem the spread of Covid. Here we are now, approximately nine months later, and the infections according to the insane news media are still spiking. With all those Zoom meetings did no one have the inspiration to fix the epidemic? I am not even sure AIDS as a serious disease lasted so long at the forefront of the minds of the people.

Which Brings Me To Peter…

Also during this challenging time period, I came across some Lebanese friends who were Maronite believers of the Catholic Church. They came through the domain I occupied relatively early in the unfolding of the events that have happened. They were quite hospitable with their food as they loved to cook and regaled my wife and I with tales of being in Lebanon and having the hell blown out of their city. Each night, we learned, they had to sleep with an AK-47 under their bed. They no longer visited Lebanon because Hamas had taken the place over. I had asked if Hamas was gone if they would have gone back, and the answer was yes! Then the conversation turned to various language versions of the Lord’s prayer, and it was then my wife began to mention the sins of Peter and specifically of his Denial and if people would simply repent for that, especially those of such a church, it could change perhaps much. But what did this cigar-wielding Peter do? Did he see the truth of the situation, or do you suppose he did what Peter typically does? He became stubborn and denied such a thing was necessary. Indeed, while enjoying the fruits of the Church of Peter, he still denied.

Everyone Is In Denial

There is not going to be “any life as usual” after this sequence. The two-hundred years previous to this point were relatively peaceful because that was the time we were afforded to have relative peace. Even then, there were interruptions with various wars most notably here the Civil War which was fought on this soil. What has come to pass is such that the infrastructure as we know it cannot stand. The population of the planet is double what it was in the 1980’s. We are not utilizing the resources of this planet in such a way that that number of people will be accommodated. Perhaps if we had fewer concrete jungles we might have the ability to do something different with regard to that number in a humane way. All the while, a man in his basement approximately 12 years ago coined the slogan of a surprise election. Eight years ago, the same man began to warn of impending nastiness–plague and the medical system beginning to collapse. Seven years ago during the transit of Venus, he warned of the Mayan Long count being up, and the end of things not necessarily always being obvious. Then, after a series of blood moons and solar eclipses, he warned of more impending doom and gloom much to the delight of those around him who instead wanted him to be positive. Those warnings were not heeded though they were interpreted and their concomitant issues have come to pass. What then of the man who prognosticated them? He lives among people in denial, and so he mows grass and fixes a computer network while the world continues to teeter on the brink of disaster. He lives among a nation of Peters, who all are hoping that this is “just a really bad year”. Somewhere in the distance, though, the rooster crows three times.

The Contributor Covenant

Programmers have a history of having what are often vitrolic exchanges–especially in coding communities. Not that long ago, there was an exchange of what amounted to verbal fisticuffs which resulted in a virtual Emily Post for programmers in open source.

So what’s the big deal with that? Well, mainly that many open source projects snatched it up as part of their platform for contribution which means if you want to contribute to their platform, you have to adopt this quasi-metaphysical-pseudo-religious code of conduct along with your contribution. I have problems with that.

There Was Already A Covenant

For one thing, my own spiritual beliefs are not very pleased with the co-opting of the word Covenant. If that were not enough, however, the fact that the “woman” who suggested this code of conduct is actually a man is more than enough to rile me. That’s right, the originator of this idea who is using the word Covenant which is clearly a religious word first and foremost, happens to have gender bent and wants to be identified as a woman which of course runs completely counter to the original meaning of the word Covenant. It is ALMOST a mocking of both religion and spiritual traditions that hold that the Covenant with Israel from YHVH is a sacred thing. It may well be such a mocking.

Why I Am Bent Out of Shape

More and more, there seems to be some weird overlap between programming politics and an almost quasi spiritual belief. A mechanic does not need to have a particular belief in order to fix a car or to use the tools required to fix what is broken. He or she can be an Atheist or a Buddhist. He also is not required to be holding a certain ethic to pick up the wrench. We may reasonably expect, however, that when he picks up the wrench as a member of the human race he might hold to some basic conduct that is pro-social. However, and this part is very important, he is under no such obligation to be so. If you do not like his attitude, you find another mechanic.

Everybody Has to Adopt The Old Testament Covenant, Right Now!

The next thing I find silly about all this is that we know how well it would go over if we stated that everyone had to adopt the Ten Commandments before contributing to an open source project. We could say, however, that those commandments are perhaps the most PRO-Social conduct to adopt. If suddenly everyone were to adopt those Ten Commandments in the open source world, I would still have some issues–specifically that the forcing of the acceptance of that set of rules was automatically foisted on anyone who wanted to join that community as a most assuredly spiritual belief. There is simply no reason that someone should have to adopt YHSVH as a Messiah or Buddha as an Avatar to start working on an open source project. In this situation, it is sillier yet to suggest that they need all these rules to be “nice to each other”. It has already been done–it requires one rule, and the simple expression is “Do unto others as you would have done unto you”. If you want to adopt a code of conduct, just adopt that.

But My Biggest Issue

My biggest beef, though, is that it seems to me this new gay-trans-furry-fangled-strap-it-on, saw-it-off, glue-it- together attitude is getting itself closer and closer to a secular humanism. If you want to do that out in a gay club with many gay friends and crazy trans folks, great. Go do it. Do it hard. However, when you start bringing it into the programming world and requiring what amounts to a spiritual sort of adoption of a belief in order so that people are “nice to you”, well, that’s a problem. Here is a helpful page from the FAQ for this crap:

Isn’t this just a way for progressive/left-wing people to push their agenda?

“Everthing is politics”, but the code of conduct is not about an advance of progressive/left-wing politics. It’s about establishing a minimal level of civil and professional collaboration. Civil, non-discriminatory, and professional behavior should be a baseline and shared value held by people of all ideologies, regardless of political affiliation (with the obvious exception of hate groups).

So, basically, the answer is “yes and also no”. It’s really making sure people are “nice” unless they happen to be “hate groups”. Well, this has already been done with the Covenant of Israel and it was a way of separating Godly people from “Pagan, ungodly groups”. Israel had to elect to agree to the premises however, and all of them said that the precepts were “good for them to do”.

Programming Is Not Voting

When I go to use a programming tool, I am not electing to agree to anything beyond doing some programming with that tool. My use of Python is not a tacit agreement with any specific spiritual belief or metaphysical requirement. When I ask a question in the community, I am not anticipating that anyone is necessarily going to be “nice” to me let alone if they are not “nice” that they are a “hate group”. Some folks are just jerks and they do not fly under any other banner than jerkdom. If they spread that attitude in a non-discriminatory way, then at the very least, they are not a hate group.

If we wave all that aside, however, this is a pretty clear cut example of cultural appropriation spun about by someone with an obvious agenda that the open source community was foolish enough to adopt because programmers tend toward secular humanism anyway.

To any of them or those that think that this idea has any merit, I say congratulations to. Why? Because by reading my article you just agreed to the Messianic Covenant. Welcome to the Age of Aquarius. Now stop your sinning immediately, or prepare to burn for your transgressions. Have a nice day.

DRM (Digital Rights Management) Sucks

As an author I like to make money. I do not like to make money for the sake of making money, but because making money allows me to address other needs in my life that ultimately allow me to then come back and write more. The money is the lubrication by which my life flows more smoothly such that writing can be a natural fruit.

Troublingly, however, we live in an age where the fruit seems to be constantly taken–especially when it comes to writing. The digital age has had the consequence of making what were normal boundary issues in ownership of a thing nebulous. Whereas knowledge was before bound in a physical book, now it is bound in zeros and ones. Whereas before there was a shelf life of a work that when enough people became aware of said work and enough time had elapsed that sooner or later it became common knowledge and in the public domain, now we cannot take anything for granted and must very carefully try to understand when a thing that is in the public domain may not be still in the public domain.

Not surprisingly, the first action taken when the future is unknown by creators is to “lock the fruit down” so only people with keys may access the fruit. Really, I am not so sure this is what creators tend to do, so much as it is what people who make money from creators do. DRM seems to be an issue for movie studios, for instance, more than for budding authors.

This is all well and good, except that built-in to this attempt to control who and what can read or see a work is the channel lock-in of the device reading it. What works on a Amazon Kindle may not work on a Barnes and Noble reader. Worse even that that, you might be locked out of a work you actually purchased due to DRM confusion within its own code.

All of this is to say simply that DRM sucks. What’s an author to do?

Thought Experiment Number One

Imagine a world in which money is not a factor. What would you do? I think you will find that more than likely, in such a world you will find a group of people with whom you will form some type of survival bond. Each of you will bring a talent to the group. You will do the talent for the group so that the group functions. This, we recognize as a very loose definition of tribalism. Do you worry about someone stealing your work in such a group? Probably not, since each of you knows what the skill set of the person in question is. If something goes missing that ties directly to that person’s skill set, it will not make any sense or give an advantage to the thief. Take the best hunter’s bow, and you are going to get a little hungrier for the act. The right tool goes to the right person for the right job, and collectively the group thrives because of this.

So Why Does Money Not Work Like This?

The easy, somewhat deceptively simple answer is this: because it is an abstraction. People have plenty of money who have done nothing whatsoever to benefit the existence of a group. In fact,many have plenty of money on the grounds of stealing or exploiting a group in such a way in many cases that it led to the group in question becoming extinct. Money has allowed us to remove the moral dimension and look instead to see who has a pile of cash instead. Hence, whe morality and the “right way to live” is not rewarded financially, no one values those values in the sense of cash-flow. Rather, this is an abstract system of “honor” in the outlined scenario that happens to be coincident or not with having a pile of cash.

My Solution

All of the funds of any of my bought books go to my church or synagogue. For those of you who get hung up on whether I can it a church or a synagogue, wonder for a moment why it makes you any difference? To that end, I have also elected to use zero digital rights management and offer an epub and a pdf as deliverables. Personally, I prefer the epub format because it is truly an “open format” whereas pdf is the format that is used because Adobe standardized it into being, but I realize that sometimes pdf simply renders better on some devices than an epub and vice-versa. My rationalization is simple: If you buy something like a book, you should be able to put it any damn place you want on any device you want. You should not have to buy the same book twenty times for twenty devices. One standard should run on all platforms and if that platform does not support that platform, you should burn it or run over it with a van. Anything else less than this is basically extortion that you are learning to put up with in your life.

But, Pirates!

Yep, pirates exist. Some steal because they can, some because they have no other choice. In either case, if you are stealing a meditation book, you are probably going to find more than you bargained for in the act of thieving. But even if it were not the case this were so–assume I had published a programming book instead–I would still make the same decision. Anytime you learn something, you will be expected at some point to give back or contribute to whatever it is you learned. If you could afford my book, and you chose to steal it, then you are ultimately depriving me of my ability to support myself to write more books. Perhaps one of those books I would have written might have changed the world. Since you did not support that value, you now get the job of trying to write said book or serving the purpose it would have served in some manner. In the meantime, it is not unlikely that you will discover that your own means of supporting yourself evaporates. Karma. She is a force.

Bottom Line

You get the book for five bucks that took me around 7 years and many thousands of hours of study and experience without any digital rights management on it so you can purchase one copy and read it on whatever device on which you wish to read. This is the way the world should work and the way in which it will work if it is to work at all for creators and readers in the future. If you get this book in a pirated form, then consider donating to it so that more books can be written. Creating more complicated locks and devices will not solve the issues authors face. Rather, when writing and information is valued and attribution and respect and acknowledgement is given where it belongs, the value will naturally flow because humanity is made to strive for something higher than its base needs. But should you think it is not, do not be surprised to find yourself walking the plank, matey.[^1]

[^1]: Don’t be a scalawag.

Introduction To How To Do Nothing Well

Meditation is a discipline that has remained fairly consistent over time. The image of a guru with his fingertips touching or the palms of his hands overlapped is a widely recognized icon.

Yet, most meditation centers on focusing on the breathing, and not much else. This is certainly a beneficial meditation, but it is not a meditation that most people will be able to do much with, other than notice their breath, which is important.

A more active meditation, where a person does self-maintenance, seems paramount. In a busy world, although it might be helpful to notice one’s breathing for awhile, it is not sufficient to kick in the higher consciousness in such a way as to operate from that higher mind in most situations. People simply think of it as relaxing, and nothing more.

On the other hand, if there were a way to view meditation as interrogating different components of one’s soul, one could use such a method to bring themselves into spiritual alignment. By seeing each area and what that area does or does not do, one can begin to make changes to themselves by paying attention to the data streams within their own personal energy systems.

Usually, people tend to do this through sleep. Sleep allows certain energies to bubble up that are otherwise unnoticed, and for these images to be processed to varying levels. It is far better if a person can process these images in waking life, and learn to interrogate themselves and become conversant in their own “soul language” so they can understand themselves and when they are on track, or off track.

Instead of meditation being a simple relaxation, it becomes more like taking one’s car to the mechanic to be sure that the parts and pieces are still functioning as they should. By being able to do this, a person can prevent health trouble before it arises, and keep their own mind more peacefully centered. By taking each component bit by bit, and putting it in the place it should occupy, the spiritual self starts to flourish and many unexpected changes can take place inside. Likewise, by being familiar with one’s own energy systems, one can then take this knowledge and apply it to others such that they can help to heal both themselves and others.

This, it shall be noted, is a bit different than meditations in the past. The goal of this form of meditation is no less than complete self-knowledge. It takes time and practice, and one must learn a new way of thinking that is more symbolic in most cases than literal. However, if one takes the time to develop this, then the possibilities really begin to open up as a person steps into the fullness of their being.

The Energy Systems of the Body

The energy systems of the body are an old art. It is hard to say when they were first traced out, or by whom. The only thing that can be said is that many cultures across time separated by distance seem to arrive at their own version of the energy systems which share certain commonalities. They all map out the currents and areas that energy flows, or does not flow, and encourage it to move by various methods.

Yet, just what are these energy systems? Most mysticism falters with the language to describe them, much as it is difficult to describe any fundamental concept. If one tries to explain what an atom is to a non-scientist, one quickly discovers how concepts one takes for granted to build upon prove problematic to explain to others.

The easiest way to describe these systems is by analogy. There are “circuits” in the body, that conduct energy, much like electricity. The human body acts much like a crystal and conducts these currents in various ways. The ability for the body to conduct this electricity says something for the health of it, for where this circuitry jams is where disease or dysfunction is likely to manifest.

Where does this energy come from? God, the universe. Whatever. What matters is that it is there, and needs to be maintained. What mediates it is consciousness, although often the consciousness has fallen into the subconscious which is where meditation arrives to raise awareness of this situation and facilitate release.

Just how did these cultures map out these paths? Well, evidently at one point, people were better able to see them visually. However, even if one cannot see them, one can feel them. The easiest way to conceive of this is to think of how it feels when someone steps into the room when you are otherwise occupied. That feeling that someone is in the room is somewhat similar to sensing energy flows. You might not be able to describe exactly how you know what you know, but you know it nonetheless because you feel it.

A more immediate experiment concerns rubbing your hands together palms facing one another roughly an inch or so apart. Naturally, you will feel heat, but you will also feel a sort of tingling or “heat above the hotness” on the palms of both hands. This is chi, or energy, or whatever word you want to use to describe the sensation is. If you do not feel much of this in your hands, it is likely that you are blocked. Most people are blocked in one way or another, but some people because of the natural resilience of their energy systems, might still feel more energy here anyway.

I will now issue a blanket statement that should be the centerpiece of anyone doing healing work–all healing takes place within this energy system–whether it be through some method like meditation, Reiki, or surgery. How might surgery achieve this? Well, certainly, by the time one has reached the necessity of surgery, the energy system has been stagnant for awhile to the point it has manifested as physical disease. By intervening at the physical level, the solution sought is to “bust this stagnation” at the spiritual level. It is simply a “level down” from the origin of the problem–like remedying an issue with a blueprint of a home by first building it in physical reality and then altering the blueprint retroactively as rooms are added or knocked down. It makes more sense to make such changes at the blueprint as opposed to wasting time at the “slower level” of physical reality.

So, we can see and understand that the body is, in essence, energy. A big distributor of the energy through the various meridians are the chakras. Chakras are major points along the spine that spin in a wheel like fashion. They act much like cogs inside a machine. Their job is to take in energy from the outside, and distribute it inside, as much as possible through the meridians. (The Indian word for the energy channels is “nadis”.) The problem, as previously discussed, is that these meridians can become blocked from our consciousness. However, it is not always the case that our consciousness remembers why such blockages are there, because some blockages do not originate from the current life, but from some other life, somewhere else.

Buy the book here.