Snow signals the end of times

Yesterday there was snow in my area, and we don't normally get much snow on a regular basis, so the commute was terrible in the morning as folks struggled to keep their cars from sliding off the highway or into each other. I myself was somewhat less prepared than I could have been, but I have decent tires and am not a bad driver, but upon reflection of today's commute, it's just a sign of the times that we are in.

Namely, that on the day when snow was falling, less people should have been trying to brave it, because neither their skills or vehicles were suitable to be out in such weather, and this phenomenon isn't restricted to a specific category of vehicle either.

There were pickups, jeeps, and other 4WD/AWD vehicles who were slipping around considerably more than they should have. It became easy to guess which vehicles had automatic transmissions, because the purpose of a torque converter is to act as a torque multiplier at low RPM, so they with even the smallest amount of depressing the accelerator generated wheelspin and sliding.

Folks were also trying to change lanes as if getting to work a minute or two faster made any difference, making steering and throttle inputs much too crude to make such a movement safely and carefully.

The contrast is that today, since we had no new snow, and the temperatures got above freezing yesterday afternoon, the roads were mostly clear. But the damage was done, and many folks in FWD commuter cars were still so frightened by the prior day's experience that they could barely get within 10 miles an hour of the posted speed limits, which means that even more traffic is in store for the area as folks who are driving too slow try to merge.

This phenomenon is an example of what I've lazily categorized under "volatility" in my conversations. It's not that there are accidents all the time per se, there were many of those, but that the odds of an accident happening are much higher than people realize. The variation in outcomes when things are left to fate is wild, with some folks getting by without a scratch, and others apparently not able to catch any breaks at all, and there doesn't appear to be any real difference between their circumstances other than one had "bad luck" and the other didn't.

The problem with this mentality is that luck is made in the same way that dental hygiene is sustained. No one act makes or breaks your future, but it is the aggregate of the smaller choices and habits you make over time that determine your "luck", and a lot of folks have presumed that because they've not run out of luck so far, that they may never at this rate.

What folks like that don't realize is that odds can shift without you being prepared. While I can't do much to avert the consequences of an asteroid strike on the planet, if I were to end up like Flint, without potable water for years, there are steps I can take to ensure that, should the circumstances go bad, I've not got "good luck" by random chance, but because I planned ahead.

The struggle with planning ahead is that means short-term sacrifices in fun and entertainment. Instead of an ultra-performance summer tire, for example, I chose an ultra-performance all-season tire, which sacrifices dry and wet weather traction at high speeds for the ability to retain traction in snow and ice. I also ordered a set of chains instead of putting money towards something fun or exciting, just so that when such a snow does fall again, I am even better prepared.

But that's a roll of the dice as well. I have increased my odds of success contingent on there being snow again.

This is the heart of the struggle with preparation, and given that most folks haven't even started to try and address it in their own lives, what we see is "volatility". Accidents which weren't necessary, damage and chaos which could have been avoided, all simply because people didn't want to make the necessary sacrifices now in order to facilitate a higher chance of success later. There is no growth, no maturing, no learning, only experiencing.

So what happens if the snow doesn't melt away in a day, or for a week? What happens if the tap water is contaminated? Your grocery store shelves are empty because the trucks that restock them aren't on the roads? Have you made a choice not to prepare for events that are probable?

OR do you just leave it up to chance, tempting fate to "do its worst", certain that you'll accept any outcome that is thrown your way?

Choose better now, because folks who have made such sacrifices won't have pity, remorse, or resources to share with folks who neglected the warning signs when times were good.

Fence sitters get shot first

Sit in the middle of a topic, be a moderate, and when someone on one "side" starts taking shots at the other, physically or philosophically, you're going to be in the way.

"Lead, follow, or get out of the way" is a warning to those who don't do one of those three, because if you can't, you're likely an enemy, and enemies must be removed from having any power or influence in the material world for there to be peace.

Trying to play peacemaker means you get shot anytime peace is not brokered, but even worse, nobody cares, because you're neither for or against either "side". You're a slimy and manipulative sort, trying to have your cake and eat it too, hoping that nobody picks up on your opportunism before you've gotten your pound of flesh and can move on.

The reason that folks do this is because they're trying to emulate Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ bridged the gap between humanity and God by taking all the shots that God ever would need to make against sin, and then asking us in turn to place our faith in Him instead of trying to rush past him to take some shots of our own. That is the arrogance exposed by a works-based salvation, it places an emphasis on remedying the price of sin by your own efforts, instead of accepting the gift that Jesus Christ offers freely.

A messianic complex causes people to run into the line of fire, sacrificing themselves to try and broker peace between two parties, and superficially we laud such behavior because it is usually only motivated by a deep love and care for the two parties involved. Again, this is going to be Christianity minus the Christ thing because we live in a society that has steeped in Christian principles for so long that folks have forgotten where they came from.

So folks are rushing to be moderates, to try and negotiate, to try and stop conflicts from occurring, because Jesus Christ was exalted as a reward for his sacrifices. While he humbled himself to a mortal life, in his resurrection he has been elevated above all others as the perfect demonstration of love and sacrifice.

People want some of that for themselves, the recognition and glory for having done something difficult.

But, much like the priests who pray on street corners, to be heard by men, such rewards are equally temporal, short-lived, because nobody has a perspective that appropriately includes how their actions will ripple across existence and on into eternity. We see what appears to be a path of action which would benefit us in our goals, but we don't really know for certain. Nobody can really predict the future, though many have killed themselves trying to manifest a particular version of one.

Such suicidal instincts are not laudable, are not worthy of praise, because it's ignoring that this story isn't ours to tell.

We aren't the focus of creation, the reason it was created.

We aren't even the reason that Jesus Christ came to save us in the first place, evidenced by scripture indicating that such an act was known and planned for before even "In the beginning..."

The reality is that we exist in is God's story, and we just play a role in that story.

Look at the interactions between David and Saul. How many times could David have made a different choice in whether to allow Saul to remain alive? How much easier would David's life have been were Saul removed from the picture at his first opportunity to do so?

Yet David would not put his hand against God's anointed for Israel, because despite God having told Israel how terrible the idea of a King was to begin with, Saul needed to demonstrate fully waht God had described before Israel could understand that, even when chosen by God to do great things, humans who get a taste for power will abandon God and, in their hubris, presume that God chose them for who they were and what they could do for God, as if their own internal judgment is enough, as if God looked over their life to that point and declared "Good job, keep doing what you were doing, but now with my support!"

The reality is that God is inviting us to walk with God in what God is already shaping before us in this world. God already has designs, reasons, and while we may come to know some, ignorance is not an excuse for disobedience, let alone outright rebellion, against God.

What Jesus Christ did in being a moderator between humanity and God was unique and miraculous, and to honor what Jesus Christ did we should not blindly repeat his actions, but also pay heed to his words and understand that "becoming more like Christ" does not necessarily include one's death needing to be on a cross for having pissed off Jewish autocrats.

Anyone else? They'll just get shot, and folks will be too busy trying to reload and take another that they won't have time to lament the unfortunate death of one who was crushed in trying to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Babies and their bath water

Conspiracy theorists aren't necessarily wrong about the fact that there are conspiracies, but a trend I've noticed of late is that a lot of folks don't understand maintenance and system interdependence. I am certain that, if these folks really thought about things, this would be a "no duh" realization, but many of the knee-jerk reactions do not reflect a genuine understanding of how little scheming it takes to cause significant problems.

For example, cars are more complicated than they've ever been. There is a lot of effort placed in reducing or eliminating maintenance on cars with superior technology, and there are things we don't have to do today that car owners did 50 years ago, but this comes with a reliance on technological developments and those things are complicated.

Instead of a carburetor, we have fuel injection with electronic pumps that can vary the amount of fuel delivered to the cylinders to get the best air-to-duel ratio given the temperature of incoming air, the position reported by the throttle sensor, the current RPM, and so on. All of this work didn't get invented, it got automated, as prior to the computer controlled systems, these jobs all were still required to run the engine, but they were often mechanical, and mechanical control systems simply wear out faster than electrical ones.

Maintenance of the mechanical control systems required user understanding of the systems, womb to tomb, because failures could happen at any time, and help wasn't easily available in the many decades before cell phones. Electrical systems, because they automate, hide these activities away from the user. They are still happening, but "out of sight, out of mind." Small corrections are made on the fly, diagnostics can be run, and until the "check engine" light, or some other error reporting prompts the user to seek service, drivers are largely ignorant as to what the state of their car is.

Gone are the days of being able to "feel" when a system is not operating as well as it should, because between the user and the device are layers of electronics that can only simulate feedback, they do not transmit it the way that a mechanical system does.

So, how does this apply to conspiracy theories?

It takes a lot less effort to sabotage than people think, and because people don't understand how things are made or operate, fault is assigned to the devices as a whole, instead of properly understanding what the role of the device was in the nefarious scheme.

To continue with cars as an example, let's say there is a conspiracy to murder, and in order to do this, you sabotage someone else's car. They then operate their vehicle as if all is fine, presuming there is nothing wrong with the vehicle, and then expect it to do something it no longer can because of the sabotage, and find out only too late that their car is not functioning correctly, and get in an accident or something like that.

If our hypothetical murderer cut the break lines, then it'd likely be an accident due to the vehicle not slowing down fast enough, and the driver losing control.

In that scenario, what's really at "fault" for the accident? Is it the design of the car? Is it the purpose of a car? Or was it how the car was used?

If you aren't sure how this is confusing, look at the evidence of the connection between vaccines and autism. How frequently is "well they weren't autistic before, and now they are, and the only thing that changed was they got a vaccine" the jist of the data provided? So what actually caused the autism? Is it the design of the vaccine? Is it the purpose of the vaccine? Was it how the vaccine was used, how it was made?

Most folks aren't trying to figure out, because if such a tangible connection existed, it would not be so ethereally difficult to find. We know that 100% of vaccinations don't result in autism, but we can also know that it's not 0% either, because for some reason, after having a vaccine, there are children who develop autism. Ignore how many there are, because it's likely statistically insignificant if you compared to all vaccinations, but what's important is that there are side effects of vaccines, and how they interact with people does vary.

If we sorted out what that connection really was, then before we gave anyone a vaccine, we could ensure that the vaccine would do only what it was designed to do. Or, to return to the car example, if we know that leaking fluid under a car is a sign of trouble, then we'd know to dig further and determine the true state of the car before we drove it. A smaller example of this might be checking the air pressure in the tires, seeing if any "check engine" lights come on, etc.

GMOs are another example of a technological creation that has ominous connotations, and the "evil" is often prescribed holistically, ignoring the details of what is really happening, and throwing out the entire technology because of how it was used by someone to do something "evil". What folks are doing, perhaps unintentionally, is assigning inherent "good" or "bad" vales, ignoring that "good" or " bad" requires context to remain coherent.

If someone was murdered via their car being sabotaged, does that mean we should ban cars? That nobody should ride or drive in a car?

Are cars inherently "evil" because someone can use them to manifest "bad" consequences?

It's the same thing with guns and gun control. Is it the gun, or how guns are used, that people really have a problem with?

It's easy to be blinded by cognitive bias on topics which are emotionally charged, but if we can't remain intellectually consistent, then we can be manipulated and controlled by folks who simply figure out our buttons faster than we can figure out theirs.

Modern technologies rely on, as I have said in other posts, layers of automation, and users are not aware of all these layers, let alone how they interact. These complications increase the opportunities for problems to arise, because each layer is dependent on each one below it, and so the whole system must be working well.

Now, not only are there opportunities to interfere at each level, but if components that serve each level are manufactured to the same "depends on everything else working" mentality, then product quality could be terrible and you wouldn't know until you started to run into systemic failures, and that presumes people even report them.

How reliable are modern electronic devices? To what degree do we expect them to work all the time?

If we live in a society where things break or malfunction regularly, where quality is a memory, and folks rarely grasp the way these systems all really interact, then to manifest a plot, you'd only need to know a single weak link in the whole system, and then apply a very small amount of pressure to it, and then rely on the automated systems getting people beyond what they can deal with to do the rest.

Where once you may have had to hide your trails, fate can be blamed when low quality goods produced lazily by the lowest bidder result in disaster. Don't need fancy secretive technology to make that happen, though it wouldn't hurt. Even better, nobody would immediately suspect malevolence because everything can be explained simply and rationally from the data at hand.

It's fun to think that there is fancy cutting-edge stuff, to imagine the James Bond style workings behind the scenes, but the reality is probably a lot simpler, a lot more boring, and a lot more simplistic in nature, and we'll miss it if we're expecting something more. We'll not actually root out the real problems because we're convinced it has to be something more complex, more convoluted, more arranged. Don't be tempted to go down that path.

Reality checks

We like to compare ourselves to others. We like to contrast what we are capable of with what others are capable of. We like to understand where we are at in a proverbial hierarchy. We then like to act based on where we think we are versus where we think we should be.

A video shared by Vox Day in a recent post was this type of video. It is supposed to be an erudite discussion related to a book that Vox Day recently published, but it rather quickly turned into a petty competition between the speakers as to who was "better" than Vox Day.

This is a great example of what not to do, because even the "winner" of such a lame competition is still a loser, and that's before we account for the feminine passive-aggressive methods they use to try and "win" in the first place.

If you watch the video, it's much easier to suffer through it if you pretend that everyone speaking is a woman, and they're all upset because a man had the audacity to call their whore friend a whore, and since they're also whores, they're now defending their whore friend to prevent anyone from calling them a whore as well.

If that doesn't work for you, also realize those folks are all going to hell, and you can tell this because of how they argue. It's revealed by what they think really matters, and in their belief that sacrificing truth, let alone cogency and brevity, that they believe they will somehow dazzle God the same way they can run circles around people who aren't as smart as they are. That they'll find a loophole and get the upper hand on God, because their own judgment is really that good. That if they just keep talking, just like their false prophets, that they'll accidentally stumble upon the magic words that will save them from their sins. Because they keep talking for almost three hours.

Their plan won't work, and Christians "playing along" only reinforce their delusion that the game is going "their way", so the best thing to do is not play along at all. To point out lies and deceit and to shun unrepentant sinners, and to properly foreshadow how conditional God's grace and mercy ultimately are.

At this point in time, the only way folks like these have a chance of becoming aware of just how many false gods they worship is if every one of those gods is utterly destroyed. That'll happen at the end of time, but we'd be doing them a favor if we crushed the false gods sooner than later.

When not destroying their idols, you can also pray for them and people like them, who are still on the outside looking in, convinced that they'll remedy their fallen state by their own power. Pray that God can break their stubbornness well before they meet God face-to-face on judgment day.

Think like this first, then action will flow

In darkness, I shall be light.
In times of doubt, I shall keep the faith.
In throes of rage, I shall hone my craft.
In vengeance, I shall have no mercy.
In the midst of battle, I shall have no fear.
In the face of death, I shall have no remorse.

Or, perhaps you want something from a more respected literary source, but still wish to remain secular?

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

Or, perhaps all this secular talk has you concerned, and you require a more explicitly biblical references?

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. - Matthew 10:28 (NKJV)

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. - Philippians 4:6-7 (NKJV)

I sought the Lord, and He heard me,
And delivered me from all my fears.
They looked to Him and were radiant,
And their faces were not ashamed.
This poor man cried out, and the Lord heard him,
And saved him out of all his troubles.
The angel of the Lord encamps all around those who fear Him,
And delivers them. - Psalm 34:4-7 (NKJV)

Be merciful to me, O God, for man would swallow me up;
Fighting all day he oppresses me.
My enemies would hound me all day,
For there are many who fight against me, O Most High.

Whenever I am afraid,
I will trust in You.
In God (I will praise His word),
In God I have put my trust;
I will not fear.
What can flesh do to me?

All day they twist my words;
All their thoughts are against me for evil.
They gather together,
They hide, they mark my steps,
When they lie in wait for my life.
Shall they escape by iniquity?
In anger cast down the peoples, O God!

You number my wanderings;
Put my tears into Your bottle;
Are they not in Your book?
When I cry out to You,
Then my enemies will turn back;
This I know, because God is for me.
In God (I will praise His word),
In the Lord (I will praise His word),
In God I have put my trust;
I will not be afraid.
What can man do to me?

Vows made to You are binding upon me, O God;
I will render praises to You,
For You have delivered my soul from death.
Have You not kept my feet from falling,
That I may walk before God
In the light of the living? - Psalm 56 (NKJV)

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. - Deuteronomy 6:5 (NKJV)

God the Father, the God of Abraham, Issaac, and Jacob, does not commend those who follow him to be meek and ineffectual creatures. God does not want impotent pawns uttering empty praise.

God wants those who align themselves with God to reflect ALL of Gods traits.

God is love, but also wrath.

God is grace and mercy, but also justice.

God is gentle, but also strong.

If you fixate on any one facet of God, isolate it from its balance and the chorus of other traits, you pervert what God is, what God can be, what God expects of those who endeavor to be obedient to what God commands.

Ponder on how we can stare at darkness, but are quickly blinded by the light.

We seek to diminish what God is, to filter the light, and then pretend that we have seen the entire glory of God. We delude ourselves with ignorance.

Every knee will bow when the full glory of God is on display.

Reconcile with God, and you will never have reason to fear again.